This is the house, 22 Little Owlet Street, Marylebone, but which were his rooms it is less easy to determine, for he was a lodger who flitted placidly from floor to floor according to the state of his finances, carrying his apparel and other belongings in one great armful, and spilling by the way.  On this particular evening he was on the second floor front, which had a fireplace in the corner, furniture all his landlady’s and mostly horsehair, little to suggest his calling save a noble saucerful of ink, and nothing to draw attention from Pym, who lolled, gross and massive, on a sofa, one leg over the back of it, the other drooping, his arms extended, and his pipe, which he could find nowhere, thrust between the buttons of his waistcoat, an agreeable pipe-rack.  He wore a yellow dressing-gown, or could scarcely be said to wear it, for such of it as was not round his neck he had converted into a cushion for his head, which is perhaps the part of him we should have turned to first It was a big round head, the plentiful gray hair in tangles, possibly because in Pym’s last flitting the comb had dropped over the banisters; the features were ugly and beyond life-size, yet the forehead had altered little except in colour since the day when he was near being made a fellow of his college; there was sensitiveness left in the thick nose, humour in the eyes, though they so often watered; the face had gone to flabbiness at last, but not without some lines and dents, as if the head had resisted the body for a space before the whole man rolled contentedly downhill.

He had no beard.  “Young man, let your beard grow.”  Those who have forgotten all else about Pym may recall him in these words.  They were his one counsel to literary aspirants, who, according as they took it, are now bearded and prosperous or shaven and on the rates.  To shave costs threepence, another threepence for loss of time—­nearly ten pounds a year, three hundred pounds since Pym’s chin first bristled.  With his beard he could have bought an annuity or a cottage in the country, he could have had a wife and children, and driven his dog-cart, and been made a church-warden.  All gone, all shaved, and for what?  When he asked this question he would move his hand across his chin with a sigh, and so, bravely to the barber’s.

Pym was at present suffering from an ailment that had spread him out on that sofa again and again—­acute disinclination to work.

Meanwhile all the world was waiting for his new tale; so the publishers, two little round men, have told him.  They have blustered, they have fawned, they have asked each other out to talk it over behind the door.

Has he any idea of what the story is to be about?

He has no idea.

Then at least, Pym—­excellent Pym—­sit down and dip, and let us see what will happen.

He declined to do even that.  While all the world waited, this was Pym’s ultimatum: 

“I shall begin the damned thing at eight o’clock.”