--Upper?"

"Yes, it be," answered the pot-boy, with a sleepy air, caught in that
sleepy atmosphere; and chiming his pewter against an area rail with a
dull clang, he chanted forth "Pots oho!" with a note as dirge-like as
that which in the City of the Plague chanted "Out with the dead!"

Meanwhile the two wayfarers exchanged bows and parted; the sprucer
wayfarer whether from the indulgence of a reflective mood, or from an
habitual indifference to things and persons not concerning him, ceased to
notice his fellow-solitary, and rather busied himself in sundry little
coquetries appertaining to his own person. He passed his hand through
his hair, re-arranged the cock of his hat, looked complacently at his
boots, which still retained the gloss of the morning's varnish, drew down
his wristbands, and, in a word, gave sign of a man who desires to make an
effect, and feels that he ought to do it. So occupied was he in this
self-commune that when he stopped at length at one of the small doors in
the small street and lifted his hand to the knocker, he started to see
that Wayfarer the Second was by his side. The two men now examined each
other briefly but deliberately. Wayfarer the First was still young,--
certainly handsome, but with an indescribable look about the eye and lip,
from which the other recoiled with an instinctive awe,--a hard look, a
cynical look,--a sidelong, quiet, defying, remorseless look. His clothes
were so new of gloss that they seemed put on for the first time, were
shaped to the prevailing fashion, and of a taste for colours less subdued
than is usual with Englishmen, yet still such as a person of good mien
could wear without incurring the charge of vulgarity, though liable to
that of self-conceit. If you doubted that the man were a gentleman, you
would have been puzzled to guess what else he could be. Were it not for
the look we have mentioned, and which was perhaps not habitual, his