which ordinarily issued from the direction of
the scullery we're unheard that forenoon.

The town clock was striking eleven, and the antiquated time-piece on the
staircase (which never spoke but it dropped pearls and crystals, like
the fairy in the story) was lisping the hour, when there came three
tremendous knocks at the street door. Mrs. Bilkins, who was dusting the
brass-mounted chronometer in the hall, stood transfixed, with arm
uplifted. The admirable old lady had for years been carrying on a
guerilla warfare with itinerant venders of furniture polish, and
pain-killer, and crockery cement and the like. The effrontery of the
triple knock convinced her the enemy was at her gates--possibly that
dissolute creature with twenty-four sheets of note-paper and twenty-four
envelopes for fifteen cents.

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 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 t