Sometimes, in the gloaming, Geoffrey beheld the bald head of an elderly gentleman above the brass curtain-rod, and a pair of elderly eyes gazing gravely across the empty street, not as if they expected to see anything. The brass-plate on the door would inform him of the elderly gentleman’s profession—whether he was family solicitor or family surgeon, architect or banker; and then Mr. Hossack would lose himself in a labyrinth of wonder, marvelling how this old man had borne the burden of his days in that atmosphere of monotonous respectability, always looking out of the same shining window, above the same brazen bar. He would go back to his hotel, after this small study of human life, a wiser and a happier man, thanking Providence for that agreeable combination of youth, health, and independent fortune which gave him, in a manner, the key of the universe. Stillmington, in Warwickshire, was a place considerably in advance of the dull old market towns where one could hear the butcher’s morning salutation to his neighbour from one end of the street to the other, where, indeed, the buzzing of a lively bluebottle made an agreeable interruption of the universal silence. Stillmington lay in the bosom of a fine hunting country, and, as long as foxes were in season, was gay with the cheery clatter of horses’ hoofs on its well-kept roads, the musical clink of spurs on its spotless pavements. Stillmington boasted an aristocratic hotel, none of your modern limited-liability palaces, but a family hotel of the fine old English expensive and exclusive school, where people ate and drank in the splendid solitude of their private apartments, and stared at one another superciliously when they met in the corridors or on the staircase, instead of herding together at stated intervals to gorge themselves in the eye of their fellow man, like the passengers on board a Cunard steamer. Stillmington possessed also a wholesome spring, whose health-restoring waters were, however, somewhat out of vogue, and a public garden, through whose leafy groves meandered that silvern but weedy stream the river Still; a garden whose beauties were somewhat neglected by the upper five hundred of Stillmington, except on the occasion of an archery meeting or a croquet tournament.