self as he tied a new tie, "is to
have a look round. That'll be no long job."

For he had already seen as he approached the town, and as he drove from
the station to the "Yellow Dragon" Hotel, that Market Milcaster was a
very small place. It chiefly consisted of one long, wide
thoroughfare--the High Street--with smaller streets leading from it on
either side. In the High Street seemed to be everything that the town
could show--the ancient parish church, the town hall, the market cross,
the principal houses and shops, the bridge, beneath which ran the river
whereon ships had once come up to the town before its mouth, four miles
away, became impassably silted up. It was a bright, clean, little town,
but there were few signs of trade in it, and Spargo had been quick to
notice that in the "Yellow Dragon," a big, rambling old hostelry,
reminiscent of the old coaching days, there seemed to be little doing.
He had eaten a bit of lunch in the coffee-room immediately on his
arrival; the coffee-room was big enough to accommodate a hundred and
fifty people, but beyond himself, an old gentleman and his daughter,
evidently tourists, two young men talking golf, a man who looked like
an artist, and an unmistakable honeymooning couple, there was no one in
it. There was little traffic in the wide street beneath Spargo's
windows; little passage of people to and fro on the sidewalks; here a
countryman drove a lazy cow as lazily along; there a farmer in his
light cart sat idly chatting with an aproned tradesman, who had come
out of his shop to talk to him. Over everything lay the quiet of the
sunlight of the summer afternoon, and through the open windows stole a
faint, sweet scent of the new-mown hay lying in the meadows outside the
old houses.

"A veritable Sleepy Hollow," mused Spargo. "Let's go down and see if
there's anybody to talk to. Great Scott!--to think that I was in the
poisonous atmosphere of the Octoneumenoi only sixteen hours ago!"

Spargo, after losing himself in various corridors and passages, finally
landed in the wide, stone-paved hall of the old hotel, and with a sure
instinct turned into the bar-parlour which he had noticed when he
entered the place. This was a roomy, comfortable, bow-windowed
apartment, looking out upon the High Street, and was furnished and
ornamented with the usual appurtenances of country-town hotels. There
were old chairs and tables and sideboards and cupboards, which had
certainly been made a c