mself in its perusal.

"I wonder what can make him so cantankerous?" reflected the nephew. "I
don't like the look of it at all." And he dubiously scratched his nose.

The train travelled forth into the world, bearing along with it the
customary freight of obliterated voyagers, and along with these old
Joseph, affecting immersion in his paper, and John slumbering over the
columns of the _Pink Un_, and Morris revolving in his mind a dozen
grudges, and suspicions, and alarms. It passed Christ Church by the sea,
Herne with its pinewoods, Ringwood on its mazy river. A little behind
time, but not much for the South-Western, it drew up at the platform of
a station, in the midst of the New Forest, the real name of which (in
case the railway company "might have the law of me") I shall veil under
the _alias_ of Browndean.

Many passengers put their heads to the window, and among the rest an old
gentleman on whom I willingly dwell, for I am nearly done with him now,
and (in the whole course of the present narrative) I am not in the least
likely to meet another character so decent. His name is immaterial, not
so his habits. He had passed his life wandering in a tweed suit on the
continent of Europe; and years of _Galignani's Messenger_ having at
length undermined his eyesight, he suddenly remembered the rivers of
Assyria and came to London to consult an oculist. From the oculist to
the dentist, and from both to the physician, the step appears
inevitable; presently he was in the hands of Sir Faraday, robed in
ventilating cloth and sent to Bournemouth; and to that domineering
baronet (who was his only friend upon his native soil) he was now
returning to report. The case of these tweed-suited wanderers is unique.
We have all seen them entering the table d'hote (at Spezzia, or Graetz,
or Venice) with a genteel melancholy and a faint appearance of having
been to India and not succeeded. In the offices of many hundred hotels
they are known by name; and yet, if the whole of this wandering cohort
were to disappear tomorrow, their absence would be wholly unremarked.
How much more, if only one--say this one in the ventilating
cloth--should vanish! He had paid his bills at Bournemouth; his worldly
effects were all in the van in two portmanteaux, and these after the
proper interval would be sold as unclaimed baggage to a Jew; Sir
Faraday's butler would be a half-crown poorer at the year's end, and the
hotel-keepers of Europe about the same d