his former life, we shall find that he once owned printing works,
and previous to this, in his own words, he "just lived! And
lived well too, Devil take it, and like one who knew how!"

He was a tall, broad-shouldered man of fifty, with a rawlooking
face, swollen with drunkenness, and with a dirty yellowish beard.
His eyes were large and grey, with an insolent expression of
happiness. He spoke in a bass voice and with a sort of grumbling
sound in his throat, and he almost always held between his teeth
a German china pipe with a long bowl. When he was angry the
nostrils of his big crooked red nose swelled, and his lips
trembled, exposing to view two rows of large and wolf-like yellow
teeth. He had long arms, was lame, and always dressed in an old
officer's uniform, with a dirty, greasy cap with a red band, a
hat without a brim, and ragged felt boots which reached almost to
his knees. In the morning, as a rule, he had a heavy drunken
headache, and in the evening he caroused. However much he drank,
he was never drunk, and so was always merry.

In the evenings he received lodgers, sitting on his brickmade
bench with his pipe in his mouth.

"Whom have we here?" he would ask the ragged and tattered object
approaching him, who had probably been chucked out of the town
for drunkenness, or perhaps for some other reason not quite so
simple. And after the man had answered him, he would say, "Let
me see legal papers in confirmation of your lies." And if there
were such papers they were shown. The Captain would then put
them in his bosom, seldom taking any interest in them, and would
say: