outhern side of the house.

The habits that I had contracted, among my student friends in Germany,
made tobacco and beer necessary accompaniments to the process of
thinking. I had nearly exhausted my cigar, my jug, and my thoughts, when
I saw two men approaching me from the end of the terrace.

As they came nearer, I recognized in one of the men my fat domestic in
black. He stopped the person who was accompanying him and came on to me
by himself.

"Will you see that man, sir, waiting behind me?"

"Who is he?"

"I don't know, sir. He says he has got a letter to give you, and he must
put it in your own hands. I think myself he's a beggar. He's excessively
insolent--he insists on seeing you. Shall I tell him to go?"

The servant evidently expected me to say Yes. He was disappointed; my
curiosity was roused; I said I would see the insolent stranger.

As he approached me, the man certainly did not look like a beggar. Poor
he might be, judging by his dress. The upper part of him was clothed in
an old shooting jacket of velveteen; his legs presented a pair of
trousers, once black, now turning brown with age. Both garments were too
long for him, and both were kept scrupulously clean. He was a short man,
thickly and strongly made. Impenetrable composure appeared on his ugly
face. His eyes were sunk deep in his head; his nose had evidently been
broken and not successfully mended; his grey hair, when he took off his
hat on addressing me, was cut short, and showed his low forehead and his
bull neck. An Englishman of the last generation would, as I have since
been informed, have set him down as a retired prize-fighter. Thanks to my
ignorance of the pugilistic glories of my native country, I was totally
at a loss what to make of him.

"Have I the honor of speaking to Mr. Roylake?" he asked. His quiet steady
manner prepossessed me in his favour; it showed no servile reverence for
the accident of birth, on the one hand, and no insolent assertion of
independence, on the other. When I had told him that my name was Roylake,
he searched one of the large pockets of his shooting jacket, produced a
letter, and silently offered it to me.

Before I took the letter--seeing that he was a stranger, and that he
mentioned no name known to me--I thought it desirable to make some
inquiry.

"Is it a letter of your own writing?" I asked.

"No, sir."

"Who sends you with it?"

He was apparently a man of few words. "My master," was the gua