time, but not much for the South-Western, it drew up at the platform of
a station, in the midst of the New Forest, the real name of which (in
case the railway company 'might have the law of me') I shall veil under
the alias of Browndean.

Many passengers put their heads to the window, and among the rest an old
gentleman on whom I willingly dwell, for I am nearly done with him now,
and (in the whole course of the present narrative) I am not in the least
likely to meet another character so decent. His name is immaterial, not
so his habits. He had passed his life wandering in a tweed suit on the
continent of Europe; and years of Galignani's Messenger having at length
undermined his eyesight, he suddenly remembered the rivers of Assyria
and came to London to consult an oculist. From the oculist to the
dentist, and from both to the physician, the step appears inevitable;
presently he was in the hands of Sir Faraday, robed in ventilating cloth
and sent to Bournemouth; and to that domineering baronet (who was his
only friend upon his native soil) he was now returning to report. The
case of these tweedsuited wanderers is unique. We have all seen them
entering the table d'hote (at Spezzia, or Grdtz, or Venice) with a
genteel melancholy and a faint appearance of having been to India and
not succeeded. In the offices of many hundred hotels they are known by
name; and yet, if the whole of this wandering cohort were to disappear
tomorrow, their absence would be wholly unremarked. How much more, if
only one--say this one in the ventilating cloth--should vanish! He had
paid his bills at Bournemouth; his worldly effects were all in the van
in two portmanteaux, and these after the proper interval would be
sold as unclaimed baggage to a Jew; Sir Faraday's butler would be a
half-crown poorer at the year's end, and the hotelkeepers of Europe
about the same date would be mourning a small but quite observable
decline in profits. And that would be literally all. Perhaps the old