For myself, however, I could not forbid my gaze to wander back from time to time upon the stranger:  an indulgence touching which I felt the less compunction, in that he had (it was a fair inference) got himself up with a deliberate view to attracting just such notice.  Else why the sombrero and knickerbockers, the flowing locks and eccentric yellow cloak?  Nay, I think it may have been in part this very note of undisguised vanity in the man that made it difficult to keep one’s eyes off him:  it tickled the sense of humour, and challenged the curiosity.  What would his state of mind be, who, in the dotage of the Nineteenth Century, went laboriously out of his way to cultivate a fragmentary resemblance to—­say a spurious Vandyke?

As the heat of the room began to tell upon him, he threw aside his outer garment, and hung up his hat, thereby discovering a velvet jacket and a very low-cut shirt, with unstarched rolling collar, and sailor’s knot of pale green Liberty silk.  His long hair, of a faded, dusty brown, was brushed straight back from his forehead, and plastered down upon his scalp, in such wise as to lend him a misleading effect of baldness.  He wore a drooping brown moustache, and a lustreless brown beard, trimmed to an Elizabethan point.  His skin was sallow; his eyes were big, wide apart, of an untransparent buttony brilliancy, and in colour dully blue.  Taken for all in all, his face, deprived of the adventitious aids of long hair and Elizabethan beard, would have been peculiarly spiritless and insignificant, but from the complacency that shone like an unguent in every line of it, as well as from the studied picturesqueness of his costume, it was manifest that he posed as a unique and interesting character, a being mysterious and romantic, melancholy and rarely gifted—­like the artist in a bad play.

Artist, indeed, of some description, I told myself, he must infallibly be reckoned.  What mere professional man or merchant would have the heart to render his person thus conspicuous?  And the hypothesis that might have disposed of him as a model was excluded by the freshness of his clothes.  A poet, painter, sculptor, possibly an actor or musician—­anyhow, something to which the generic name of artist, soiled with all ignoble use, could more or less flatteringly be applied—­I made sure he was; an ornament of our own English-speaking race, moreover, proclaimed such by the light of intelligence that played upon his features as he followed our noisy conversation; and, at a guess, two or three-and-thirty years of age.

‘Anybody know the duffer with the hair?’

This question, started by Charles K. Smith, of Battle Creek, Michigan, U.S.A., and commonly called in the Latin Quarter by his sobriquet of Chalks, went our rounds in an undertone; and everybody answered, ‘No.’

’What is it?  Can it talk?  ‘Pears like it can hear and catch on,’ was Chalks’s next remark.  ‘Shall we work the growler on it?’