miscellaneous articles which crowded the shop.

In the room behind, chemical apparatus of strange construction was on
one table; packets of herbs were on another; a huge tome lay opened on
the floor, and books were piled on the chairs. The apartment was a
mixture of a laboratory and lumber room. A furnace was in one corner,
retorts, test tubes, crucibles, a huge pestle and mortar, jars, bottles
were on a bench close handy.

The room was lighted by a window projecting over the Thames, and the
roar of the river rushing through the narrow arches and swirling and
dashing against the stone work never ceased, though it varied in
violence according to wind and tide. The house was a portion of the old
chapel of St. Thomas, long since converted from ecclesiastical
observances to commercial uses.

Dr. Mountchance, who at this moment was at a table in the centre
examining a silver flagon and muttering comments upon it, was a little
man about seventy, with an enormous head and a spare body and short
legs. His face was wrinkled like a piece of wet shrivelled silk and his
skin was the colour of parchment. His eyes, very small and deep-set,
were surmounted by heavy brows once black, now of an iron grey. His
mouth was of prodigious width, the lips thin and straight and his nose
long, narrow and pointed. He wore a dirty wig which was always awry, a
faded mulberry coloured coat, and a frayed velvet waistcoat reaching
halfway down his thighs. His stockings were dirty and hung in bags about
his ankles, his feet were cased in yellow slippers more than half worn
out.

Dr. Mountchance's hearing was keen. A footfall in the shop, soft as it