near the hob, he had, with an oriental grandeur of self-indulgence,
removed the dividing wall between the front and the back parlours and
substituted a glass partition: so that he could simultaneously warm the
fire and keep an eye on the street. The town said that no one but
Meshach could have hit on such a scheme, or would have carried it out
with such an object: it crowned his reputation.

John Stanway's maternal uncle was one of those individuals whose
character, at once strong, egotistic, and peculiar, so forcibly
impresses the community that by contrast ordinary persons seem to be
without character; such men are therefore called, distinctively,
'characters'; and it is a matter of common experience that, whether
through the unconscious prescience of parents or through that felicitous
sense of propriety which often guides the hazards of destiny, they
usually bear names to match their qualities. Meshach Myatt! Meshach
Myatt! What piquant curious syllables to roll glibly off the tongue, and
to repeat for the pleasure of repetition! And what a vision of Meshach
their utterance conjured up! At sixty-four, stereotyped by age, fixed
and confirmed in singularity, Meshach's figure answered better than ever
to his name. He was slight of bone and spare in flesh, with a hardly
perceptible stoop. He had a red, seamed face. Under the small, pale blue
eyes, genial and yet frigid, there showed a thick, raw, red selvedge of
skin, and below that the skin was loose and baggy; the wrinkled eyelids,
instead of being shaped to the pupil, came down flat and perpendicular.
His nose and chin were witch-like, the nostrils large and elastic; the
lips, drawn tight together, curved downwards, indifferently captious; a
short white beard grew sparsely on the chin; the skin of the narrow neck
was fantastically drawn and creased. His limbs were thin, the knees and
elbows sharpened to a fine point; the hands very long, with blue, corded
veins. As a rule his clothes were a distressing combination of black and