His name was
Carr, and his chief peculiarity, that he was so regular
in his irregularities that he could always tell the time
of day by the state of befuddlement that he was in. He
would cock his head, think over his own symptoms,
and then give you the hour fairly correctly. An unusual
drink would disarrange him, however; and if you forced
the pace in the morning, he would undress and go to bed
about tea-time, with a full conviction that all the
clocks had gone mad. These two strange waifs were among
the craft to whom old Whitehall had in his own words,
"thrown a rope"; and long after I had gone to bed I could
hear the clink of their glasses, and the tapping of their
pipes against the fender in the room below.
Well, when I had finished my empty-house-and-doctor
chart, I found that there was one villa to let, which
undoubtedly was far the most suitable for my purpose. In
the first place it was fairly cheap-forty pounds, or
fifty with taxes. The front looked well. It had no
garden. It stood with the well-to-do quarter upon the
one side, and the poorer upon the other. Finally, it was
almost at the intersection of four roads, one of which
was a main artery of the town. Altogether, if I had
ordered a house for my purpose I could hardly have got
anything better, and I was thrilled with apprehension
lest some one should get before me to the agent. I
hurried round and burst into the office with a
precipitancy which rather startled the demure clerk
inside.
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