pediment, why was this gentleman to
be received by me in secret? The more I reflected, the more convinced I
grew that I was dealing with a case of cerebral disease; and though I
dismissed my servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver that I might be
found in some posture of self-defence.

Twelve o'clock had scarce rung out over London, ere the knocker sounded
very gently on the door. I went myself at the summons, and found a small
man crouching against the pillars of the portico.

"Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?" I asked.

He told me "yes" by a constrained gesture; and when I had bidden him
enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward glance into the
darkness of the square. There was a policeman not far off, advancing
with his bull's-eye open; and at the sight I thought my visitor started
and made greater haste.

These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and as I followed
him into the bright light of the consulting-room, I kept my hand ready
on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I had
never set eyes on him before, so much was certain. He was small, as I
have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his
face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and
great apparent debility of constitution, and--last but not least--with
the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore
some resemblance to incipient rigor, and was accompanied by a marked
sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic,
personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms;
but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in
the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle
of hatred.

This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance, struck
in me what I can only describe as a disgustful curiosity) was dressed in
a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable: his
clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric,
were enormously too large for him in every measurement--the trousers
hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the
waist of the coat below his haunches and the collar sprawling wide upon
his shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far
from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and
misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now fac