A stout old man with a reddening nose may be no unpleasant picture if superabundance of flesh and misplacement of carmine bear witness to jollity and good cheer; but oh lamentable spectacle if melancholy droop that ruby nose; if fat cheeks hang disconsolate! Then for every added ounce of avoirdupois is added a pound of misery. Your melancholy thin man is fitted by nature to bear his burden, but the sad fat man seems to deliquesce, to collapse—so much in his case is affliction against the obvious design of nature! From the inner pantry door Margery stood a moment and contemplated her fellow servant awhile, with an air of deeper commiseration than her usually set visage was wont to express. Then she carefully closed the door and advanced to the table. In her rolled up apron she was clasping something with both hands. “Eh,” she said, in a long drawn note, “it do go to my heart, Mister Giles, to see you so cast down!” The butler rolled his lack-lustre eye from the mug of beer to the housekeeper’s countenance; then his underlip began to tremble. “Ah,” he answered, “that stuff is killing me, Mrs. Nutmeg. The cold of it on my stomach! It’ll creep up to my heart some of these nights, it will! And that will be the end of poor old faithful Giles!” A tear twinkled on his vast cheek. He stretched out his hand for the glass, gulped a mouthful of it and replaced it on the table, drawing down the corners of his mouth into a grimace not unlike that which in an infant heralds a burst of wailing. “Cold, cruel, poisonous stuff, that lies as heavy as heavy! Half a caskful, ma’am will not stimulate a man as much as half a wineglassful of port-wine or sherry-wine. It’s murder—that’s what it is!” “Murder it is,” assented Margery. She took the glass and threw its contents into the grate: sympathy personified. Then she began to move about the room with an air of so much mystery that Giles’ attention was faintly roused in something external to himself and to the odiousness of small-ale. Mrs. Nutmeg went to the pantry door, listened a moment with stooped head, then released her right hand from the enfolded object and turned the key in the lock. Stepping to the high-set window, she next squinted east and west, as if to make sure that no watchers were about; then returned to the table, slowly unrolled her apron and displayed to the butler’s astonished gaze a black bottle, cobwebbed, dust-crusted, red-sealed—a bottle of venerable appearance and, to the initiated, of Olympian promise. With infinite precaution she tilted it into a vertical position and placed it on the table, displaying in so doing the dusty streak of whitewash which had marked the upper side of its repose these twenty years. Into old Giles’ expressionless stare leaped a light of rapturous recognition. “The Comet port, by gum! The port from the fifth bin!”