"Of a surety!" quoth I; "you seem to me to hold a middle rank between a
half-pay captain and the king of the gipsies."

"You have hit it, Sir," rejoined my companion, with a slight laugh. He
was now by my side, and as we walked on, I had leisure more minutely to
examine him. He was a middle-sized, and rather athletic man, apparently
about the age of thirty-eight. He was attired in a dark blue frock coat,
which was neither shabby nor new, but ill made, and much too large and
long for its present possessor; beneath this was a faded velvet
waistcoat, that had formerly, like the Persian ambassador's tunic,
"blushed with crimson, and blazed with gold;" but which might now have
been advantageously exchanged in Monmouth-street for the lawful sum of
two shillings and nine-pence; under this was an inner vest of the
cashmere shawl pattern, which seemed much too new for the rest of the
dress. Though his shirt was of a very unwashed hue, I remarked, with some
suspicion, that it was of a very respectable fineness; and a pin, which
might be paste, or could be diamond, peeped below a tattered and dingy
black kid stock, like a gipsey's eye beneath her hair.

His trowsers were of a light grey, and Providence, or the tailor, avenged
itself upon them, for the prodigal length bestowed upon their ill-sorted
companion, the coat; for they were much too tight for the muscular limbs
they concealed, and rising far above the ankle, exhibited the whole of a
thick Wellington boot, which was the very picture of Italy upon the map.

The face of the man was common-place and ordinary; one sees a hundred
such, every day, in Fleet-street or the 'Change; the features were small,
irregular, and somewhat flat: yet, when you looked twice upon the
countenance, there was something marked and singular in the expression,