A man with a passion for bric-a-brac is always stumbling over antique bronzes, intaglios, mosaics, and daggers of the time of Benvenuto Cellini; the bibliophile finds creamy vellum folios and rare Alduses and Elzevirs waiting for him at unsuspected bookstalls; the numismatist has but to stretch forth his palm to have priceless coins drop into it.  My own weakness is odd people, and I am constantly encountering them.  It was plain that I had unearthed a couple of very queer specimens at Bayley’s Four-Corners.  I saw that a fortnight afforded me too brief an opportunity to develop the richness of both, and I resolved to devote my spare time to Mr. Jaffrey alone, instinctively recognizing in him an unfamiliar species.  My professional work in the vicinity of Greenton left my evenings and occasionally an afternoon unoccupied; these intervals I purposed to employ in studying and classifying my fellow-boarder.  It was necessary, as a preliminary step, to learn something of his previous history, and to this end I addressed myself to Mr. Sewell that same night,

“I do not want to seem inquisitive,” I said to the landlord, as he was fastening up the bar, which, by the way, was the salle a manger and general sitting-room—­“I do not want to seem inquisitive, but your friend Mr. Jaffrey dropped a remark this morning at breakfast which—­which was not altogether clear to me.”

“About Mehetabel?” asked Mr. Sewell, uneasily.

“Yes.”

“Well, I wish he wouldn’t!”

“He was friendly enough in the course of conversation to hint to me that he had not married the young woman, and seemed to regret it.”

“No, he didn’t marry Mehetabel.”

“May I inquire why he didn’t marry Mehetabel?”

“Never asked her.  Might have married the girl forty times.  Old Elkins’s daughter, over at K——.  She’d have had him quick enough.  Seven years, off and on, he kept company with Mehetabel, and then she died.”

“And he never asked her?”

“He shilly-shallied.  Perhaps he didn’t think of it.  When she was dead and gone, then Silas was struck all of a heap—­and that’s all about it.”

Obviously Mr. Sewell did not intend to tell me anything more, and obviously there was more to tell.  The topic was plainly disagreeable to him for some reason or other, and that unknown reason of course piqued my curiosity.

As I was absent from dinner and supper that day, I did not meet Mr. Jaffrey again until the following morning at breakfast.  He had recovered his bird-like manner, and was full of a mysterious assassination that had just taken place in New York, all the thrilling details of which were at his fingers’ ends.  It was at once comical and sad to see this harmless old gentleman, with his naive, benevolent countenance, and his thin hair flaming up in a semicircle, like the footlights at a theatre, reveling in the intricacies of the unmentionable deed.