“Do you know this Miggles?” asked the Judge of Yuba Bill.

“No, nor, don’t want to,” said Bill, shortly, who felt the Pioneer Stage Company insulted in his person by the contumacious Miggles.

“But, my dear sir,” expostulated the Judge as he thought of the barred gate.

“Lookee here,” said Yuba Bill, with fine irony, “hadn’t you better go back and sit in the coach till yer introduced?  I’m going in,” and he pushed open the door of the building.

A long room lighted only by the embers of a fire that was dying on the large hearth at its farther extremity; the walls curiously papered, and the flickering firelight bringing out its grotesque pattern; somebody sitting in a large armchair by the fireplace.  All this we saw as we crowded together into the room, after the driver and expressman.

“Hello, be you Miggles?” said Yuba Bill to the solitary occupant.

The figure neither spoke nor stirred.  Yuba Bill walked wrathfully toward it, and turned the eye of his coach lantern upon its face.  It was a man’s face, prematurely old and wrinkled, with very large eyes, in which there was that expression of perfectly gratuitous solemnity which I had sometimes seen in an owl’s.  The large eyes wandered from Bill’s face to the lantern, and finally fixed their gaze on that luminous object, without further recognition.

Bill restrained himself with an effort.

“Miggles!  Be you deaf?  You ain’t dumb anyhow, you know”; and Yuba Bill shook the insensate figure by the shoulder.

To our great dismay, as Bill removed his hand, the venerable stranger apparently collapsed—­sinking into half his size and an undistinguishable heap of clothing.

“Well, dern my skin,” said Bill, looking appealingly at us, and hopelessly retiring from the contest.

The Judge now stepped forward, and we lifted the mysterious invertebrate back into his original position.  Bill was dismissed with the lantern to reconnoiter outside, for it was evident that from the helplessness of this solitary man there must be attendants near at hand, and we all drew around the fire.  The Judge, who had regained his authority, and had never lost his conversational amiability—­standing before us with his back to the hearth—­charged us, as an imaginary jury, as follows: 

“It is evident that either our distinguished friend here has reached that condition described by Shakespeare as ‘the sere and yellow leaf,’ or has suffered some premature abatement of his mental and physical faculties.  Whether he is really the Miggles—­”

Here he was interrupted by “Miggles!  O Miggles!  Migglesy!  Mig!” and, in fact, the whole chorus of Miggles in very much the same key as it had once before been delivered unto us.