a dark felt hat. The collar of the coat seemed to have been made
carefully larger than usual, in order to increase the apparent width
of his chest. His hair was brown and curly, but close cut. His
features were regular, perhaps handsome. His complexion was
bright,--fair almost,--rosy in hue, and his eyes were brown.

He shook hands with Sinfi as he passed us, and gave me a glance of
that rapid and all-comprehending kind which seems to take in, at
once, a picture in its every detail.

'What do you think of him?' said Sinfi to me, as he passed on and we
two sat down on the grass by the side of the stream.

'I am puzzled,' I replied, 'to know whether he is a young man who
looks like a middle-aged one, or a middle-aged man who looks like a
young one. How's his hair under the hat?'

'Thinnish atop,' said Sinfi laconically. 'And I'm puzzled,' I added,
still looking at him as he walked over the grass, 'as to whether he's
a little man who looks middle-sized, or a middle-sized man who looks
little.'

'He's a little big 'un,' said Sinfi; 'about the height o' Rhona
Bozzell's Tarno Rye.'

'Altogether he puzzles me, Sinfi!'

'He puzzled me same way at fust.'

What was it that made me take an interest so strange, strong, and
sudden in this man? Without a hint of hair upon his face, while
juvenile curls clustered thick and short beneath his wide-awake, he
had at first struck me as being not much more than a lad, till, as he
gave me that rapid, searching glance in passing, I perceived the
little crow's-feet round his eyes, and he then struck me immediately
as being probably on the verge of thirty-five. His figure was slim
and thin, his waist almost girlish in its fall. I should have
considered him small had not the unusually deep, loud, manly, and
sonorous voice with which he had accosted Sinfi conveyed an
impression of size and weight such as even big men do not often
produce. This deep voice, coupled with that gaunt kind of cheek which
we associate with the most demure people, produced an effect of
sedateness such as I should have expected to find (and did not find)
in the other man--the man of the shaven cheek and Quaker costume;
but, in the one glance I had got from those watchful, sagacious,
twinkling eyes, there was an expression quite peculiar to them,
quite inscrutable, quite indescribable.

II

'Can you reckon him up, brother?' said Sinfi, taking my meerschaum
from my lips to refill it for me, as she was fond