“He really was one of the handsomest, easiest-spoken gentlemen I ever met with, and he seemed to take away one’s breath almost; he had such a dashing kind of way with him that, if you’d have shut your eyes, you’d almost have fancied him on horseback, galloping away for dear life. He seemed all upon the prance, as it were, if I may use the observation. ‘Now I dare say you’ll want references,’ he said, ‘and if so I can’t jive you any without putting myself to more trouble than I care about. But you can have some rent in advance if that’ll do; and I’ve no end of luggage, if that’ll do.’ And then he flung himself into one of the arm-chairs, and burst out laughing when it creaked and groaned, as it were, under him; for lodgers have no more feeling for an unprotected female’s furniture than if they was so many Ojibbeway Indians--and I can’t deny that the parlour chairs were uncertain. But I didn’t mind the strange gentleman making game of them, somehow, for he had such a pleasant way with him, and showed his white teeth, and looked so handsome, that he seemed quite to brighten up the place. “‘Well,’ he said presently, ‘can you guess why I came to Coltonslough in the month of November?’ And of course I told him no, I couldn’t, not having the pleasure of being acquainted with him. Upon which he burst out laughing, again. ‘I came here,’ he said, ‘because I was told Coltonslough was about the dullest place upon the surface of the earth; and I mean to stay here till after Christmas. So you may tell the man outside to bring in my luggage, and look sharp about it.’ Upon which the flyman brought in a couple of big portmanteaus, and a gun-case, and a hat-box, and two of the heaviest trunks that ever came into my passage. ‘Books, ma’am, books, every one of them, and all as heavy as lead,’ said the young gentleman, as the corners of the boxes went scratching and bumping upon the paper,--and the way lodgers’ boxes do scratch and bump an unprotected female’s paper is something awful. But for all that I wasn’t sorry to see plenty of luggage, though the books might have been brickbats neatly packed in hay, as has been known to happen in this very terrace. ‘Well, ma’am,’ says the gentleman, when his luggage had all been brought in and the flyman paid, ‘now I can settle down comfortably. Do I look as if I’d been plucked, do you think, ma’am?’ he asked, looking at me very hard, and sticking his hands deep down in his pockets, which was one of those ways of his that I venture to call prancing. I didn’t quite catch his meaning, but I thought he alluded to something unpleasant; so I said, ‘No, indeed, I should think not.’ ‘But I have, ma’am,’ he answered, looking at me in a measuring sort of way, as if I’d been a five-barred gate, and he was just going to fly clean over me; and that measuring look of his was another of his galloping ways. ‘But I _have_ been plucked, ma’am,’ he said, ‘as clean as any fowl that they ever send you home from the poulterer’s.