ity would have been
aroused. The first thing you would have noticed was that everything
about him, from his gray traveling hat to the gold monogram on his
portmanteau, was brilliantly and conspicuously new. Accompanied by a
lady, it would have suggested matrimony and the grand tour. But
there was nothing else to distract you from him. He let himself be
looked at; he sat there in his corner seat, superbly, opulently
still. And somehow it dawned on you that, in spite of some
Americanisms he let fall, he was not, and never could have been, a
Yankee. He had evidently forged ahead at a tremendous speed, but it
was weight, not steam, that did it. He belonged to the race that
bundles out on the uphill grade and puts its shoulders to the wheel,
and on the down grade tucks its feet in, sits tight, and lets the
thing fly, trusting twenty stone to multiply the velocity.

Then it would occur to you that he must have been sitting still for
a considerable period. He was not stout--you might even have called
him slender; but the muscles about his cheeks and chin hung a little
loose from the bony framework, and his figure, shapely enough when
he stood upright, yielded in a sitting posture to the pressure of
the railway cushions. That indicated muscular tissue, once developed
by outdoor exercise, and subsequently deteriorated by sedentary
pursuits. The lines on his forehead suggested that he was now a
brain-worker of sorts.

Other lines showed plainly that, though his accessories were new,
the man, unlike his portmanteau, had knocked about the world, and
had got a good deal damaged in the process. The index and middle
fingers of the left hand were wanting. You argued, then, that he had
changed his trade more than once; while from the presence of two
vertical creases on either side of a large and rather fleshy mouth,
worn as it were by the pull of a bit, you further inferred that the
energy he must have displayed somewhere was a thing of will rather
than of temperament. He was a paradox, a rolling stone that had
unaccountably contrived to gather moss.

And then you fell to wondering how so magnificently mossy a person
came to be traveling third-class in his native country.

To all these problems, which did actually perplex the clergyman, his
fellow-passenger, he himself provided the answer.

He had taken out his gold watch with a critical air, and timed the
run from Liverpool to Crewe.

"Better service of trains than they used to