It was coated with whitewash, the glimmer of which showed me the queer shape of the building even in the darkness.  It consisted of two stories, both round as pepper-pots.  Above the first ran a narrow circular thatch, serving as a mat (so to say) for the second and smaller pepper-pot.  I could not discern how this upper story was roofed, but the roof had a hole in it, from which poured a stray ray of light.  Light shone too, but through a blind, from a small window close under the eaves.  The lower story showed none at all.

I rapped on the door.  There came no response, though I waited and listened for a full minute.  I rapped again and shouted; and was about to challenge for the third time, when the threshold showed a chink of light.  Muffled footsteps came down the passage, and with much creaking the bolts were undrawn.

‘Who knocks?’ demanded a man’s voice, somewhat shrill and querulous.  ‘Cannot a poor scholar rest in peace, and at this time o’ night?’

‘In the name of Charity!’ I urged.

He flung the door open and stood with a hand-lamp held high, surveying me:  a little old man, thin as a rat, in skullcap, furred gown, and list slippers.  The lamp shone down on his silvered hair and on a pair of spectacles he had pushed up to the edge of his cap; and showed me a face mildly meditative from the brow down to the chin, which by contrast was extremely resolute.

‘More soldiers!’ he observed testily.  ’The plague take it that they and the meteors must choose the same night to drop from heaven!  How many of you, this time?’

I answered that I was alone, and would have added a word on my plight; but this, beneath the lamp-light, he could not miss perceiving, for my face and the left shoulder of my buff coat were a mask of blood.

’H’m!’—­he cut me short.  ’It may sound to you unfeeling:  but if Heaven persists in sending me soldiers I had rather physic than feed them:’  and with that he stood aside as inviting me to enter.  Be sure I obeyed him gladly, and, stepping inside, rested my hand for a moment against the jamb of a door that stood open to the right.  The ray of his lamp, as he held it near to examine me, gave me a glimpse of the room within—­of a table with cloth awry, of overturned flagons lying as they had spilt their wine-stains, of chairs and furniture pushed this way and that.

‘So your predecessors have left me,’ said the old gentleman, catching the direction of my gaze and nodding.  ’Whether or no they have left me enough for the morning’s breakfast is a matter my servant must discover when he comes over from Holibourne at daylight.’

‘They were Malignants, sir, as I guess:  the Earl of Crawford’s men.’

’Devil a groat care I what you call them, or they call themselves!  I study the heavens and take no heed of your sublunary divisions.  But they have eaten and drunk me out of house and home; at that hour, too, when the most meteors were predicted:  and what is worse they invaded my garret in their clumsy jack-boots, and have thrown my Orchestra Coeli out of gear.  I was mending it when you knocked.  By the way,’ he added more kindly, ’I can go on mending it while you wash your wound, which will appear less horrid when cleansed of all this blood.  I have a fire upstairs, and hot water.  Come.’