active as a restless boy. An absence of flesh,
however, was not the only want I felt to exist
in the personal appearance of the landlord of
the Tête Noire. There was a much more serious
defect in him than this. A want of any hint of
mercy, or conscience, or any accessible approach
to the better side (if there was a better side)
of the man's nature. When first I looked
at his eyes, as he stood behind me in the open
court, and as they rapidly glanced over the
comely points of my horse, and thence to the
packages inside my carriage and the
portmanteau strapped on in front of it—at that time,
the colour of his eyes appeared to me to be of
an almost orange tinge; but when, a minute
afterwards, we stood, together in the dark
stable, I noted that a kind of blue phosphorescence
gleamed upon their surface, veiling
their real hue, and imparting to them a
tigerish lustre. The moment when I remarked
this, by-the-by, was when the organs I have
been describing were fixed upon the very large
gold ring which I had not ceased to wear when
I adopted my adventurous life, and which you
may see upon my finger now. There were two
other things about this man that struck me.
These were, a bald red projecting lump of flesh
at the back of his head, and a deep scar, which
a scrap of frouzy whisker on his cheek wholly
declined to conceal.

"A nasty day for a journey of pleasure,"
said the landlord, looking at me with a satirical
smile.

"Perhaps it is not a journey of pleasure," I
answered, dryly.

"We have few such travellers on the road
now," said the evil-faced man. "The railroads
make the country a desert, and the roads are as
wild as they were three hundred years ago."

"They are well enough," I answered,
carelessly, "for those who are obliged to travel by
them. Nobody else, I should think, would be
likely to make use of them."

"Will you come into the house?" said the
landlord, abruptly, looking me full in the face.

I never felt a stronger repugnance than
I entertained towards the idea of entering
this man's doors. Yet what other course was
open to me. My mare was already half through
the first instalment of her oats, so there was
no more excuse for remaining in the stable.
To take a walk in the drenching rain was out
of the question, and to remain sitting in my
calèche would have been a worse indication of
suspicion and mistrust. Besides, I had had nothing
since the morning's coffee, and I wanted something
to eat and drink. There was nothing to
be done, then, but to accept my ill-looking
friend's offer. He led the way up the flight of
steps which gave access to the interior of the
building.

The room in which I found myself on passing
through the door at the top of these steps,
was one of those rooms which an excess of light
not only fails to enliven, but seems even to
invest with an additional degree of gloom. There
is sometimes this character about light, and
I have seen before now, a workhouse ward,
and a barren schoolroom, which have owed a
good share of their melancholy to an immoderate
amount of cold grey daylight. This room,
then, into which I was shown, was one of those
which, on a wet day, seemed several degrees
lighter than the open air. Of course it could
not be really lighter than the thing that lit it,
but it seemed so. It also appeared larger than
the whole out-door world; and this, certainly,
could not be either, but seemed so. Vast as it
was, there appeared through two glass-doors in
one of the walls another apartment of similar
dimensions. It was not a square room, nor an
oblong room, but was smaller at one end than
at the other: a phenomenon which, as you have
very likely observed, Gentlemen, has always an
unpleasant effect. The billiard-table, which
stood in the middle of the apartment, though
really of the usual size, looked quite a trifling
piece of furniture; and as to the other tables,
which were planted sparingly here and there
for purposes of refreshment, they were quite
lost in the immensity of space about them. A
cupboard, a rack of billiard cues, a marking-
board, and a print of the murder of the
Archbishop of Paris in a black frame, alone broke
the uniformity of wall. The ceiling, as far as
one could judge of anything at that altitude,
appeared to be traversed by an enormous beam
with rings fastened into it adapted for suicidal
purposes, and splashed with the whitewash with
which the ceiling itself and the walls had just
been decorated. Even my little terrier, whom
I had been obliged to take up in my arms on
account of the disposition she had manifested
to fly at the shins of our detested landlord,
looked round the room with a gaze of horror
as I set her down, and trembled and shivered
as if she would come out of her skin.

"And so you don't like him, Nelly, and your
little beads of eyes, that look up at me from
under that hairy penthouse, with nothing but
love in them, are all a-blaze with fury when they
are turned upon his sinister face? And how
did he get that scar, Nelly? Did he get it
when he slaughtered his last traveller? And
what do you think of his eyes, Nelly? And what
do you think of the back of his head, my dog?
What do you think he's about now, eh? What
mischief do you think he's hatching? Don't
you wish you were sitting by my side in the
calèche, and that we were out on the free road
again?"

To all these questions and remarks, my little
companion responded very intelligibly by faint
thumpings of the ground with her tail, and by
certain flutterings of her ears, which, from long
habits of intercourse, I understood very well to
mean that whatever my opinion might be, she
coincided in it.

I had ordered an omelette and some wine
when I first entered the house, and, as I now sat
waiting for it, I observed that my landlord
would every now and then leave what he was
about in the other room—where I concluded that
he was engaged preparing my meal—and would