Mrs. Bilkins swept across the hall, and opened the door with a jerk. The
suddenness of the movement was apparently not anticipated by the
person outside, who, with one arm stretched feebly towards the receding
knocker, tilted gently forward, and rested both hands on the threshold
in an attitude which was probably common enough with our ancestors of
the Simian period, but could never have been considered graceful. By
an effort that testified to the excellent condition of his muscles, the
person instantly righted himself, and stood swaying unsteadily on his
toes and heels, and smiling rather vaguely on Mrs. Bilkins.

It was a slightly-built but well-knitted young fellow, in the not
unpicturesque garb of our marine service. His woollen cap, pitched
forward at an acute angle with his nose, showed the back part of a head
thatched with short yellow hair, which had broken into innumerable
curls of painful tightness. On his ruddy cheeks a sparse sandy beard was
making a timid _debut_. Add to this a weak, good-natured mouth, a pair
of devil-may-care blue eyes, and the fact that the man was very drunk,
and you have a pre-Raphaelite portrait--we may as well say it at
once--of Mr. Larry O'Rourke of Mullingar, County Westmeath, and late of
the United States sloop-of-war Santee.

The man was a total stranger to Mrs. Bilkins; but the instant she caught
sight of the double white anchors embroidered on the lapels of his
jacket, she unhesitatingly threw back the door, which with great
presence of mind she had partly closed.

A drunken sailor standing on the step of the Bilkins mansion was no
novelty. The street, as we have stated, led down to the wharves, and
sailors were constantly passing. The house abutted directly on the
street; the granite door-step was almost flush with the sidewalk, and
the huge old-fashioned brass knocker--seemingly a brazen hand that had
been cut off at the wrist, and nailed against the oak as a warning to
malefactors--extended itself in a kind of grim appeal to everybody. It
seemed to possess strange fascinations for all seafaring folk; and when
there was a man-of-war in port the rat-tat-tat of that knocker would
frequently startle the quiet neighborhood long after midnight. There
appeared to be an occult understanding between it and the blue-jackets.
Years ago there was a young Bilkins, one Pendexter Bilkins--a sad losel,
we fear--who ran away to try his fortunes before the mast, and fell
overboard in a