with an expression in them, partly sullen, and partly irascible;
his complexion was indescribable; the little hair which he had,
which was almost entirely on the sides and the back part of his
head, was of an iron-grey hue. He wore a leather hat on ordinary
days, low at the crown, and with the side eaves turned up. A dirty
pepper and salt coat, a waistcoat which had once been red, but
which had lost its pristine colour, and looked brown; dirty yellow
leather breeches, grey worsted stockings, and high-lows. Surely I
was right when I said he was a very different groom to those of the
present day, whether Welsh or English? What say you, Sir Watkin?
What say you, my Lord of Exeter? He looked after the horses, and
occasionally assisted in the house of a person who lived at the end
of an alley, in which the office of the gentleman to whom I was
articled was situated, and having to pass by the door of the office
half-a-dozen times in the day, he did not fail to attract the
notice of the clerks, who, sometimes individually, sometimes by
twos, sometimes by threes, or even more, not unfrequently stood at
the door, bareheaded - mis-spending the time which was not legally
their own. Sundry observations, none of them very flattering, did
the clerks and, amongst them, myself, make upon the groom, as he
passed and repassed, some of them direct, others somewhat oblique.
To these he made no reply save by looks, which had in them
something dangerous and menacing, and clenching without raising his
fists, which looked singularly hard and horny. At length a whisper
ran about the alley that the groom was a Welshman; this whisper
much increased the malice of my brother clerks against him, who
were now whenever he passed the door, and they happened to be there
by twos or threes, in the habit of saying something, as if by
accident, against Wales and Welshmen, and, individually or
together, were in the habit of shouting out "Taffy," when he was at