and the owner walked in after it. Or, rather, glided softly in, shutting the door after entry as delicately as though the inmates had just fallen into a sweet sleep on which their life depended. Mr. Littimer was an old-fashioned looking man, with mutton-chop whiskers, a “stock,” tied in a large bow, a long frock-coat, and tight trousers—the whole suggesting nothing of recent or even modern date, but, say, 1850. It was an appearance of intense respectability, of super-respectability, of that 1850 respectability which was so infinitely more respectable than any respectability of our own day. Mr. Crichton stared, as well he might, and washed his hands with invisible soap. Though, in fact, now middle-aged, he felt in this man’s presence extremely young. He clean forgot that he had been a King in Babylon. Indeed, for the first time in his life he, the consummate, the magisterial, the admirable Crichton, felt almost green. “Mr. Crichton, sir,” said the visitor, with an apologetic inclination of the head, “I have ventured to take the great liberty of calling upon you, if you please, sir, and,” he added with another inclination of the head to Mrs. Crichton (who felt what she would herself have called flabbergasted), “if _you_ please, ma’am, as an old friend of your worthy father. He was butler at Mrs. Steerforth’s when I valeted poor Mr. James.” His eye fell, respectably, on Mr. Crichton’s port. “Ah!” he said, “_his_ wine was Madeira, but——” A second glass of port was thereupon placed on the table, and he sipped it respectably. Mr. Crichton could only stare, speechless. All his _aplomb_ had gone. He gazed at a ship’s bucket, his most cherished island relic, which hung from the ceiling (as a shade for the electric light—one of his little mechanical ingenuities), and wondered whether he ever _could_ have put anybody’s head in it. His philosophy was, for once, at fault. He knew, none better, that “nature” had made us all unequal, dividing us up into earls and butlers and tweenies, but now for the first time it dawned upon him that “nature” had made us unequally respectable. Here was something more respectable, vastly more respectable, than himself; respectable not in the grand but in the sublime manner.