He had hardly time to become aware of this observation of his
person when the gate itself was opened, and there appeared before
him, in the moonlight, the bent and crooked figure of an aged
negress. She was clad in a calamanco raiment, and was further
adorned with a variety of gaudily colored trimmings, vastly
suggestive of the tropical world of which she was an inhabitant.
Her woolly head was enveloped, after the fashion of her people,
in the folds of a gigantic and flaming red turban constructed of
an entire pocket-handkerchief. Her face was pock-pitted to an
incredible degree, so that what with this deformity, emphasized
by the pouting of her prodigious and shapeless lips, and the
rolling of a pair of eyes as yellow as saffron, Jonathan Rugg
thought that he had never beheld a figure at once so
extraordinary and so repulsive.

It occurred to our hero that here, maybe, was to overtake him
such an adventure as that which he had just a moment before been
desiring so ardently. Nor was he mistaken; for the negress, first
looking this way and then that, with an extremely wary and
cunning expression, and apparently having satisfied herself that
the street, for the moment, was pretty empty of passers, beckoned
to him to draw nearer. When he had approached close enough to her
she caught him by the sleeve, and, instantly drawing him into the
garden beyond, shut and bolted the gate with a quickness and a
silence suggestive of the most extravagant secrecy.

At the same moment a huge negro suddenly appeared from the shadow
of the gatepost, and so placed himself between Jonathan and the
gate that any attempt to escape would inevitably have entailed a