Keep your tongue between your teeth, fool, and let me pass!" said a
deep, gruff voice, which Robin partly remembered. "Let me pass, or I'll
strike you to the earth!"

"No, no, neighbor!" cried Robin, flourishing his cudgel, and then
thrusting its larger end close to the man's muffled face. "No, no, I'm
not the fool you take me for, nor do you pass till I have an answer to
my question. Whereabouts is the dwelling of my kinsman, Major
Molineux?" The stranger, instead of attempting to force his passage,
stepped back into the moonlight, unmuffled his face, and stared full
into that of Robin.

"Watch here an hour, and Major Molineux will pass by," said he.

Robin gazed with dismay and astonishment on the unprecedented
physiognomy of the speaker. The forehead with its double prominence the
broad hooked nose, the shaggy eyebrows, and fiery eyes were those which
he had noticed at the inn, but the man's complexion had undergone a
singular, or, more properly, a twofold change. One side of the face
blazed an intense red, while the other was black as midnight, the
division line being in the broad bridge of the nose; and a mouth which
seemed to extend from ear to ear was black or red, in contrast to the
color of the cheek. The effect was as if two individual devils, a fiend
of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united themselves to form this
infernal visage. The stranger grinned in Robin's face, muffled his
party-colored features, and was out of sight in a moment.

"Strange things we travellers see!" ejaculated Robin.

He seated himself, however, upon the steps of the church-door,
resolving to wait the appointed time for his kinsman. A few moments
were consumed in philosophical speculations upon the species of man who
had just left him; but having settled this point shrewdly, rationally,
and satisfactorily, he was compelled to look elsewhere for his
amusement. And first he threw his eyes along the street. It was of more
respectable appearance than most of those into which he had wandered,
and the moon, creating, like the imaginative power, a beautiful
strangeness in familiar objects, gave something of romance to a scene
that might not have possessed it in the light of day. The irregular and
often quaint architecture of the houses, some of whose roofs were
broken into numerous little peaks, while others ascended, steep and
narrow, into a single point, and others again were square; the pure
snow-white of some of their complexions,