an exception, of course. He has a stack of press-cuttings every day.
You will see him gloating over them in a minute. Ah! the old judge has
got his _Sportsman_; he reads nothing else except the _Sporting Times_,
and he's going back for the Leger. Do you see the man with the blue
spectacles and the peeled nose? He was last Vice Chancellor but one at
Cambridge. No, that's not a Bishop, it's an Archdeacon. All we want is a
Cabinet Minister now; every evening there is a rumour that the Colonial
Secretary is on his way, and most mornings you will hear that he has
actually arrived under cloud of night."

The facetious Quinby did not confine his more or less caustic commentary
to the well-known folk of whom there seemed no dearth; in the ten or
twenty minutes that we sat together he further revealed himself as a
copious gossip, with a wide net alike for the big fish and for the
smallest fry. There was a sheepish gentleman with a twitching face, and
a shaven cleric in close attendance; the former a rich brand plucked
from burning by the latter, whose temporal reward was the present trip,
so Quinby assured me during the time it took them to pass before our
eyes through the now emptying hall. A delightfully boyish young American
came inquiring waggishly for his "best girl"; next moment I was given to
understand that he meant his bride, who was ten times too good for him,
with further trivialities to which the dressing-bell put a timely
period. There was no sign of my Etonian when I went upstairs.

As I dressed in my small low room, with its sloping ceiling of varnished
wood, at the top of the house, I felt that after all I had learnt
nothing really new respecting that disturbing young gentleman. Quinby
had already proved himself such an arrant gossip as to discount every
word that he had said before I placed him in his proper type: it is one
which I have encountered elsewhere, that of the middle-aged bachelor who