Hill. His landlady, a pleasant, dirty young woman with soft-brown eyes,
brought down his message for me to come up; and up I went. The room
presented itself as ample and interesting in detail and shabby with a
quite commendable shabbiness. I had an impression of brown walls--they
were papered with brown paper--of a long shelf along one side of the
room, with dusty plaster casts and a small cheap lay figure of a horse,
of a table and something of grey wax partially covered with a cloth,
and of scattered drawings. There was a gas stove in one corner, and some
enameled ware that had been used for overnight cooking. The oilcloth on
the floor was streaked with a peculiar white dust. Ewart himself was not
in the first instance visible, but only a fourfold canvas screen at the
end of the room from which shouts proceeded of "Come on!" then his wiry
black hair, very much rumpled, and a staring red-brown eye and his stump
of a nose came round the edge of this at a height of about three feet
from the ground "It's old Ponderevo!" he said, "the Early bird! And he's
caught the worm! By Jove, but it's cold this morning! Come round here
and sit on the bed!"

I walked round, wrung his hand, and we surveyed one another.

He was lying on a small wooden fold-up bed, the scanty covering of which
was supplemented by an overcoat and an elderly but still cheerful pair
of check trousers, and he was wearing pajamas of a virulent pink and
green. His neck seemed longer and more stringy than it had been even in
our schooldays, and his upper lip had a wiry black moustache. The rest
of his ruddy, knobby countenance, his erratic hair and his general hairy
leanness had not even--to my perceptions grown.

"By Jove!" he said, "you've got quite decent-looking, Ponderevo! What do
you think of me?"