escried an old
gentleman approaching up the winding street. As he drew nearer he
presented rather a shabby, or, at least, rusty appearance. His felt hat
was not so black as it had been; his coat was creased and soiled; his
boots needed a blacking. He swung a cane as he stumped along, and there
was a sort of faded smartness in his bearing and a knowingness in
his grim old visage, indicating some incongruous familiarity with the
manners of the great world. He came to a halt in front of the house,
and, after quizzing it for a moment, went up the steps and beat a
fashionable tattoo with the knocker.

Summoned in-doors soon afterwards, we found this questionable personage
sitting in the drawing-room. His voice was husky, but modulated to the
inflections of polite breeding; he used a good many small gestures, and
grinned often, revealing the yellow remains of his ancient teeth; he
laughed, too, with a hoarse sound in his throat. There was about him
an air of determined cheerfulness and affability, though between the
efforts the light died down in his wrinkled old eyes and the lines of
his face sagged and deepened. He offered to kiss my sisters, but they
drew back; he took my hand in his own large, dry one with its ragged
nails and swollen joints. At length he inveigled my younger sister to
his knee, where she sat gazing unflinchingly and solemnly into him with
that persistence which characterizes little girls of four or five who
are not quite sure of their ground. Her smooth, pink-and-white cheeks
and unwinking eyes contrasted vividly with his seamed yellowness and
blinking grin; for a long time he coquetted at her, and played peep-bo,
without disturbing her gravity, making humorous side comments to the
on-lookers meanwhile. There was a ragged and disorderly mop of gray
hair on his head, which showed very dingy beside the clear auburn of
the child's. One felt a repulsion from him, and yet, as he chatted and
smirked and acted, there was a sort of fascination in him, too. Some
original force and fire of nature still glowed and flickered in his
old carcass; something human stirred dimly under the crust of
self-consciousness and artificiality. Rose's adamantine seriousness
finally relaxed in a faint smile, upon which he threw up his hands,
emitted a hoarse cackle of triumph, and exclaimed, "There--there it is!
I knew I'd get it; she loves me--she loves me!" He then permitted her to
slip down from his knee and withdraw to her moth