If H—— was elevated, Nimmo was tipsy; if H—— was tipsy, Nimmo was _fou_; if H—— was _fou_, Nimmo was dead-drunk; and if H—— persevered and got dead-drunk also, Nimmo was sure still to be beyond him, and was perhaps packed up and laid to sleep underneath his principal’s chair. Nimmo, as it were, cleared the way for H——’s progress towards destruction—was his pioneer, his vidette, his harbinger, his avant-courier—the aurora of his rising, the twilight of his decline. Nimmo naturally, and to speak of him without relation to the person of whom he was part and parcel, was altogether so inarticulate, so empty, so meagre, so inane a being, that he could scarcely be reckoned more than a mere thread of the vesture of humanity—a whisper of Nature’s voice. Nobody knew where he lived at night: he seemed then to disappear from the face of the earth, just as other shadows disappear on the abstraction of the light which casts them. He was quite a casual being—appeared by chance, spoke by chance, seemed even to exist only by chance, as a mere occasional exhalation of chaos, and at last evaporated from the world to sleep with the shadows of death,—all by chance. To have seen him, one would have thought it by no means impossible for him to dissolve himself and go into a phial, like Asmodeus in the laboratory at Madrid. His figure was in fact a libel on the human form divine. It was perfectly unimaginable what he would have been like _in puris naturalibus_, had the wind suddenly blown him out of his clothes some day—an accident of which he seemed in constant danger. It is related of him, that he was once mistaken, when found dead-drunk in a gutter, on the morning after a king’s birth-day, for the defunct corpse of _Johnnie Wilkes_,[14] which had been so loyally kicked about the streets by the mob on the preceding evening; but, on a scavenger proceeding to sweep him down the channel, he presently sunk from the exalted character imputed to him, by rousing himself, and calling lustily, “Another bottle—just another bottle, and then we’ll go!” upon which the deceived officer of police left him to the management of the stream.