The third representative of forlorn humanity was a very tall, muscular man, whose jockey-cut green coat and wide-brimmed hat contrasted oddly with a pair of huge white moustaches, that would have done credit to a captain of the Old Guard. On features, originally handsome, time, poverty, and dissipation had left many a mark; but still the half-droll, half-truculent twinkle of his clear gray eyes showed him one whom no turn of fortune could thoroughly subdue, and who, even in the very hardest of his trials, could find heart to indulge his humor for Peter Dalton was an Irishman; and although many years an absentee, held the dear island and its prejudices as green in his memory as though he had left it but a week before. Such were the three, who, without one sympathy in common, without a point of contact in character, were now drawn into a chance acquaintance by the mere accident of bad weather. Their conversation if such it could be called showed how little progress could be made in intimacy by those whose roads in life lie apart. The bygone season, the company, the play-table and its adventures, were all discussed so often, that nothing remained but the weather. That topic, so inexhaustible to Englishmen, however, offered little variety now, for it had been uniformly bad for some weeks past. “Where do you propose to pass the winter, sir?” said Haggerstone to Jekyl, after a somewhat lengthy lamentation over the probable condition of all the Alpine passes. “I 've scarcely thought of it yet,” simpered out the other, with his habitual smile. “There's no saying where one ought to pitch his tent till the Carnival opens.” “And you, sir?” asked Haggerstone of his companion on the other side. “Upon my honor, I don't know then,” said Dalton; “but I would n't wonder if I stayed here, or hereabouts.” “Here! why, this is Tobolsk, sir! You surely couldn't mean to pass a winter here?” “I once knew a man who did it,” interposed Jekyl, blandly. “They cleaned him out at 'the tables;' and so he had nothing for it but to remain. He made rather a good thing of it, too; for it seems these worthy people, however conversant with the great arts of ruin, had never seen the royal game of thimble-rig; and Frank Mathews walked into them all, and contrived to keep himself in beet-root and boiled beef by his little talents.” “Was n't that the fellow who was broke at Kilmagund?” croaked Haggerstone. “Something happened to him in India; I never well knew what,” simpered Jekyl. “Some said he had caught the cholera; others, that he had got into the Company's service.” “By way of a mishap, sir, I suppose,” said the Colonel, tartly. “He would n't have minded it, in the least. For certain,” resumed the other, coolly, “he was a sharp-witted fellow; always ready to take the tone of any society.” The Colonel's cheek grew yellower, and his eyes sparkled with an angrier lustre; but he made no rejoinder.