He was a man with mean brown eyes. Brown eyes may be clear and limpid as a mountain pool, or they may have the fine black flash of anger and the jovial gleam, or they may be mean things--little and sly and oily. Gibson's had the depth of cunning, not the depth of character, and they glistened like the eyes of a lustful animal. He was a reddish man, with a fringe of sandy beard, and a perpetual grin which showed his yellow teeth, with green deposit round their roots. It was more than a grin--it was a _rictus_, semicircular from cheek to cheek; and the beady eyes, ever on the watch up above it, belied its false benevolence. He was not florid, yet that grin of his seemed to intensify his reddishness (perhaps because it brought out and made prominent his sandy valance and the ruddy round of his cheeks), so that the baker christened him long ago "the man with the sandy smile." "Cunning Johnny" was his other nickname. Wilson had recognized a match in him the moment he came to Barbie, and had resolved to act with him if he could, but never to act against him. They had made advances to each other--birds of a feather, in short. The grocer came in hurriedly, white-waistcoated to-day, and a perceptibly bigger bulge in his belly than when we first saw him in Barbie, four years ago now. "Good-morning, Mr. Gibson," he panted. "Is it private that ye wanted to see me on?" "Verra private," said the sandy smiler. "We'll go through to the house, then," said Wilson, and ushered his guest through the back premises. But the voice of his wife recalled him. "James!" she cried. "Here for a minute just," and he turned to her, leaving Gibson in the yard. "Be careful what you're doing," she whispered in his ear. "It wasna for nothing they christened Gibson 'Cunning Johnny.' Keep the dirt out your een." "There's no fear of that," he assured her pompously. It was a grand thing to have a wife like that, but her advice nettled him now just a little, because it seemed to imply a doubt of his efficiency--and that was quite onnecessar. He knew what he was doing. They would need to rise very early that got the better o' a man like him! "You'll take a dram?" said Wilson, when they reached a pokey little room where the most conspicuous and dreary object was a large bare flowerpot of red earthenware, on a green woollen mat, in the middle of a round table. Out of the flowerpot rose gauntly a three-sticked frame, up which two lonely stalks of a climbing plant tried to scramble, but failed miserably to reach the top. The round little rickety table with the family album on one corner (placed at what Mrs. Wilson considered a beautiful artistic angle to the window), the tawdry cloth, the green mat, the shiny horsehair sofa, and the stuffy atmosphere, were all in perfect harmony of ugliness. A sampler on the wall informed the world that there was no place like home. Wilson pushed the flowerpot to one side, and "You'll take a dram?" he said blithely.