’Commander Beauchamp?  I am heartily glad to make your acquaintance, sir; I’ve been absent, at work, on the big business we have in common, I rejoice to say, and am behind my fellow townsmen in this pleasure and lucky I slept here in my room above, where I don’t often sleep, for the row of the machinery—­it ’s like a steamer that won’t go, though it’s always starting ye,’ Mr. Timothy said in a single breath, upon entering the back office of the Gazette, like unto those accomplished violinists who can hold on the bow to finger an incredible number of notes, and may be imaged as representing slow paternal Time, that rolls his capering dot-headed generation of mortals over the wheel, hundreds to the minute.  ’You’ll excuse my not shaving, sir, to come down to your summons without an extra touch to the neck-band.’

Beauchamp beheld a middle-sized round man, with loose lips and pendant indigo jowl, whose eyes twinkled watery, like pebbles under the shore-wash, and whose neck-band needed an extra touch from fingers other than his own.

‘I am sorry to have disturbed you so early,’ he replied.

’Not a bit, Commander Beauchamp, not a bit, sir.  Early or late, and ay ready—­with the Napiers; I’ll wash, I’ll wash.’

’I came to speak to you of this article of yours on me.  They tell me in the office that you are the writer.  Pray don’t “Commander” me so much.—­It’s not customary, and I object to it.’

‘Certainly, certainly,’ Timothy acquiesced.

’And for the future, Mr. Turbot, please to be good enough not to allude in print to any of my performances here and there.  Your intentions are complimentary, but it happens that I don’t like a public patting on the back.’

‘No, and that’s true,’ said Timothy.

His appreciative and sympathetic agreement with these sharp strictures on the article brought Beauchamp to a stop.

Timothy waited for him; then, smoothing his prickly cheek, remarked:  ’If I’d guessed your errand, Commander Beauchamp, I’d have called in the barber before I came down, just to make myself decent for a ’first introduction.’

Beauchamp was not insensible to the slyness of the poke at him.  ’You see, I come to the borough unknown to it, and as quietly as possible, and I want to be taken as a politician,’ he continued, for the sake of showing that he had sufficient to say to account for his hasty and peremptory summons of the writer of that article to his presence.  ’It’s excessively disagreeable to have one’s family lugged into notice in a newspaper—­especially if they are of different politics.  I feel it.’

All would, sir,’ said Timothy.

‘Then why the deuce did you do it?’