He went straight upstairs, and the stranger’s door being ajar, he pushed it open and was entering without any ceremony, being of a naturally sympathetic turn of mind.

The blind was down and the room dim.  He caught a glimpse of a most singular thing, what seemed a handless arm waving towards him, and a face of three huge indeterminate spots on white, very like the face of a pale pansy.  Then he was struck violently in the chest, hurled back, and the door slammed in his face and locked.  It was so rapid that it gave him no time to observe.  A waving of indecipherable shapes, a blow, and a concussion.  There he stood on the dark little landing, wondering what it might be that he had seen.

A couple of minutes after, he rejoined the little group that had formed outside the “Coach and Horses.”  There was Fearenside telling about it all over again for the second time; there was Mrs. Hall saying his dog didn’t have no business to bite her guests; there was Huxter, the general dealer from over the road, interrogative; and Sandy Wadgers from the forge, judicial; besides women and children, all of them saying fatuities:  “Wouldn’t let en bite me, I knows”; “’Tasn’t right have such dargs”; “Whad ’e bite ’n for, than?” and so forth.

Mr. Hall, staring at them from the steps and listening, found it incredible that he had seen anything so very remarkable happen upstairs.  Besides, his vocabulary was altogether too limited to express his impressions.

“He don’t want no help, he says,” he said in answer to his wife’s inquiry.  “We’d better be a-takin’ of his luggage in.”

“He ought to have it cauterised at once,” said Mr. Huxter; “especially if it’s at all inflamed.”

“I’d shoot en, that’s what I’d do,” said a lady in the group.

Suddenly the dog began growling again.

“Come along,” cried an angry voice in the doorway, and there stood the muffled stranger with his collar turned up, and his hat-brim bent down.  “The sooner you get those things in the better I’ll be pleased.”  It is stated by an anonymous bystander that his trousers and gloves had been changed.

“Was you hurt, sir?” said Fearenside.  “I’m rare sorry the darg—­”

“Not a bit,” said the stranger.  “Never broke the skin.  Hurry up with those things.”

He then swore to himself, so Mr. Hall asserts.

Directly the first crate was, in accordance with his directions, carried into the parlour, the stranger flung himself upon it with extraordinary eagerness, and began to unpack it, scattering the straw with an utter disregard of Mrs. Hall’s carpet.  And from it he began to produce bottles—­little fat bottles containing powders, small and slender bottles containing coloured and white fluids, fluted blue bottles labeled Poison, bottles with round bodies and slender necks, large green-glass bottles, large white-glass bottles, bottles with glass stoppers and