red brick and tile, with a beautiful pillared doorway and fanlight in the antique taste.  It had cost two hundred pounds, and was the monument of a life’s ambition.  Mortgaged by its hard-pressed creator, and then sold by order of the mortgagee, it had ultimately been bought again in triumph by Meshach’s father, who made thirty thousand pounds out of pots without getting too big for it, and left it unspoilt to Meshach and Hannah.  Only one alteration had ever been made in it, and that, completed on Meshach’s fiftieth birthday, admirably exemplified his temperament.  Because he liked to observe the traffic in Church Street, and liked equally to sit in the back-parlour near the hob, he had, with an oriental grandeur of self-indulgence, removed the dividing wall between the front and the back parlours and substituted a glass partition:  so that he could simultaneously warm the fire and keep an eye on the street.  The town said that no one but Meshach could have hit on such a scheme, or would have carried it out with such an object:  it crowned his reputation.

John Stanway’s maternal uncle was one of those individuals whose character, at once strong, egotistic, and peculiar, so forcibly impresses the community that by contrast ordinary persons seem to be without character; such men are therefore called, distinctively, ‘characters’; and it is a matter of common experience that, whether through the unconscious prescience of parents or through that felicitous sense of propriety which often guides the hazards of destiny, they usually bear names to match their qualities.  Meshach Myatt!  Meshach Myatt!  What piquant curious syllables to roll glibly off the tongue, and to repeat for the pleasure of repetition!  And what a vision of Meshach their utterance conjured up!  At sixty-four, stereotyped by age, fixed and confirmed in singularity, Meshach’s figure answered better than ever to his name.  He was slight of bone and spare in flesh, with a hardly perceptible stoop.  He had a red, seamed face.  Under the small, pale blue eyes, genial and yet frigid, there showed a thick, raw, red selvedge of skin, and below that the skin was loose and baggy; the wrinkled eyelids, instead of being shaped to the pupil, came down flat and perpendicular.  His nose and chin were witch-like, the nostrils large and elastic; the lips, drawn tight together, curved downwards, indifferently captious; a short white beard grew sparsely on the chin; the skin of the narrow neck was fantastically drawn and creased.  His limbs were thin, the knees and elbows sharpened to a fine point; the hands very long, with blue, corded veins.  As a rule his clothes were a distressing combination of black and dark blue; either the coat, the waistcoat, or the trousers would be black, the rest blue; the trousers had the old-fashioned flap-pockets, like a sailor’s, with a complex apparatus of buttons.  He wore loose white cuffs that were continually slipping down the wrist, a starched dickey, a collar of too lenient flexure, and a black necktie with a ‘made’ bow that was fastened by means of a button and button-hole under the chin to the right; twenty times a day Meshach had to secure this precarious cravat.  Lastly, the top and bottom buttons of his waistcoat were invariably loose.