seem to rightly get hold of that p'int. Sometimes it might appear to me like as if he was ; and sometimes like as if he wasn't. No, it wouldn't surprise me now if you was to tell me he 'ad a bit o' whisker."
"Was the man red-faced?" I roared, dwelling on each syllable.
"I don't think you need go for to get cross about it, Mr. Anne!" said he. "I'm tellin' you every blessed thing I see! Red-faced? Well, no, not as you would remark upon."
A dreadful calm fell upon me.
"Was he anywise pale?" I asked.
"Well, it don't seem to me as though he were. But I tell you truly, I didn't take much heed to that."
"Did he look like a drinking man?"
"Well, no. If you please, sir, he looked more like an eating one."
"O, he was stout, was he?"
"No, sir. I couldn't go so far as that. No, he wasn't not to say stout. If anything, lean rather."
I need not go on with the infuriating interview. It ended as it began, except that Rowley was in tears, and that I had acquired one fact. The man was drawn for me as being of any height you like to mention, and of any degree of corpulence or leanness; clean shaved or not, as the case might be; the colour of his hair Rowley "could not take it upon himself to put a name on"; that of his eyes he thought to have been blue—nay, it was the one point on which he attained to a kind of tearful certainty. "I'll take my davy on it," he asseverated. They proved to have been as black as sloes, very little and very near together. So much for the evidence of the artless! And the fact, or rather the facts, acquired? Well, they had to do not with the person but with his clothing. The man wore knee-
