d markings
of a specimen and its perishable exquisite colours; working rapidly
while he listened to the account of its capture, and maybe pausing
now and again to pencil a note on the margin of the portrait.
They told, too, of his ways--how for a whole month he came forth from
his front door in a crouching posture, almost on all fours, so as not
to disturb the work of a diadem spider that had chosen to build its
web across the porch; of his professional skill, that "trust yourself
to th' Old Doctor, and he'd see you came to a natral end of some
sort, and in no haste, neither;" of his habit of dress, that (when
not in martial uniform) he wore a black suit with knee-breeches, silk
stockings, and silver shoe-buckles; of his kindness of heart, that in
the _Notes of Periodic Phenomena_, which he regularly kept, he always
recorded a midnight gale towards the close of August, to account for
the mysterious depletion of his apple-crop.

But the Old Doctor had gone to his fathers long ago, and the old
house, divided into two tenements--with access by one porch and front
passage--had been occupied for twenty years past by Nicky-Nan and
(for eight or nine) by the Penhaligon family. Nicky-Nan's cantle
overhung the river, and comprised a kitchen and scullery on the
ground-floor, with a fairly large bedroom above it. The old Doctor's
own bedroom it had been, and was remarkable for an open fireplace
with two large recessed cupboards let into a wall, which measured a
good four feet in depth beyond the chimney-breast. Once, in cleaning
out the cupboards, Nicky-Nan had discovered in the right-hand one
that one or two boards of the flooring were loose. Lifting them
cautiously he had peered into a sort of lazarette deep down in the
wall, and had lowered a candle, the flame of which, catching hold of
a mass of dried cobweb, had shot up and singed his eyebrows, for a
moment threatening to set the house on fire. It had given him a
scare, and he never ventured to carry his exploration further.

His curiosity was the less provoked because at least a score of the
old houses in Polpier have similar recesses, constructed (it is said)
as hiding-places from the press-gang or for smugglers hotly pursued
by the dragoons.

The Penhaligon family inhabited the side of the house that faced the
street, and their large living-room was chiefly remarkable for the
beams supporting the floor above it. They had all been sawn
lengthwise out of a single