f dark brown on
the buff-coloured walls. High over the loud-resounding double door hung
one which, from some indications of a face looming out of blackness,
might, by a great synthetic effort, be pronounced a Magdalen.
Considerably lower down hung the similitude of a hat and feathers, with
portions of a ruff, stated by Mrs. Bellamy to represent Sir Francis
Bacon, who invented gunpowder, and, in her opinion, 'might ha' been
better emplyed.'

But this evening the mind is but slightly arrested by the great Verulam,
and is in the humour to think a dead philosopher less interesting than a
living gardener, who sits conspicuous in the half-circle round the
fireplace. Mr. Bates is habitually a guest in the housekeeper's room of
an evening, preferring the social pleasures there--the feast of gossip
and the flow of grog--to a bachelor's chair in his charming thatched
cottage on a little island, where every sound is remote, but the cawing
of rooks and the screaming of wild geese, poetic sounds, doubtless, but,
humanly speaking, not convivial.

Mr. Bates was by no means an average person, to be passed without special
notice. He was a sturdy Yorkshireman, approaching forty, whose face
Nature seemed to have coloured when she was in a hurry, and had no time
to attend to _nuances_, for every inch of him visible above his neckcloth
was of one impartial redness; so that when he was at some distance your
imagination was at liberty to place his lips anywhere between his nose
and chin. Seen closer, his lips were discerned to be of a peculiar cut,
and I fancy this had something to do with the peculiarity of his dialect,
which, as we shall see, was individual rather than provincial. Mr. Bates
was further distinguished from the common herd by a perpetual blinking of
the eyes; and this, together with the red-rose tint of his complexion,
and a way he had of hanging his head forward, and rolling it from side to
side as he walked, gave him the air of a Bacchus in a blue apron, who, in
the present reduced circumstances of Olympus, had taken to the management
of his own vines. Yet, as gluttons are often thin, so sober men are often
rubicund; and Mr. Bates was sober, with that manly, British,
churchman-like sobriety which can carry a few glasses of grog without any
perceptible clarification of ideas.

'Dang my boottons!' observed Mr. Bates, who, at the conclusion of Mrs.
Sharp's narrative, felt himself urged to his strongest interjection,
'it's wh