Mrs. Bilkins swept across the hall, and opened the door with a jerk.  The suddenness of the movement was apparently not anticipated by the person outside, who, with one arm stretched feebly towards the receding knocker, tilted gently forward, and rested both hands on the threshold in an attitude which was probably common enough with our ancestors of the Simian period, but could never have been considered graceful.  By an effort that testified to the excellent condition of his muscles, the person instantly righted himself, and stood swaying unsteadily on his toes and heels, and smiling rather vaguely on Mrs. Bilkins.

It was a slightly-built but well-knitted young fellow, in the not unpicturesque garb of our marine service.  His woollen cap, pitched forward at an acute angle with his nose, showed the back part of a head thatched with short yellow hair, which had broken into innumerable curls of painful tightness.  On his ruddy cheeks a sparse, sandy beard was making a timid debut.  Add to this a weak, good-natured mouth, a pair of devil-may-care blue eyes, and the fact that the man was very drunk, and you have a pre-Raphaelite portrait—­we may as well say at once—­of Mr. Larry O’Rourke of Mullingar, County Westmeath, and late of the United States sloop-of-war Santee.

The man was a total stranger to Mrs. Bilkins but the instant she caught sight of the double white anchors embroidered on the lapels of his jacket, she unhesitatingly threw back the door, which with great presence of mind she had partly closed.

A drunken sailor standing on the step of the Bilkins mansion was no novelty.  The street, as we have stated, led down to the wharves, and sailors were constantly passing.  The house abutted directly on the street; the granite door-step was almost flush with the sidewalk, and the huge, old-fashioned brass knocker—­seemingly a brazen hand that had been cut off at the wrist, and nailed against the oak as a warning to malefactors—­extended itself in a kind of grim appeal to everybody.  It seemed to possess strange fascinations for all seafaring folk; and when there was a man-of-war in port the rat-tat-tat of that knocker would frequently startle the quiet neighborhood long after midnight.  There appeared to be an occult understanding between it and the blue-jackets.  Years ago there was a young Bilkins, one Pendexter Bilkins—­a sad losel, we fear—­who ran away to try his fortunes before the mast, and fell overboard in a gale off Hatteras.  “Lost at sea,” says the chubby marble slab in the Old South Burying-Ground, “aetat. 18.”  Perhaps that is why no blue-jacket, sober or drunk, was ever repulsed from the door of the Bilkins mansion.

Of course Mrs. Bilkins had her taste in the matter, and preferred them sober.  But as this could not always be, she tempered her wind, so to speak, to the shorn lamb.  The flushed, prematurely-old face that now looked up at her moved the good lady’s pity.