In this agreeable and profitable occupation was I engaged; when the same imposing tread and heavy footstep I had heard the previous evening entered the adjoining room and approached my door. The lock turned, and the illustrious captain himself appeared. And here let me observe, that if grave censure be occasionally bestowed on persons who, by the assumption of voice, look, or costume, seek to terrorize over infant minds, a no less heavy sentence should be bestowed on all who lord it over the frail faculties of sickness by any absurdity in their personal appearance. And that I may not seem captious, let me describe my friend. The captain, who was somewhere about the forties, was a full-faced, chubby, good-looking fellow, of some five feet ten or eleven inches in height; his countenance had been intended by nature for the expression of such emotions as arise from the enjoyment of turtle, milk punch, truffled turkeys, mulled port, mullagatawny, stilton, stout, and pickled oysters; a rich, mellow-looking pair of dark-brown eyes, with large bushy eyebrows meeting above the nose, which latter feature was a little “on the snub and off the Roman;” his mouth was thick-lipped, and had that peculiar mobility which seems inseparable wherever eloquence or imagination predominate; in color, his face was of that uniform hue painters denominate as “warm, “--in fact, a rich sunset Claude-Lorrainish tint that seemed a compound, the result of high-seasoned meats, plethora, punch, and the tropics; in figure, he was like a huge pudding-bag, supported on two short little dumpy pillars, that from a sense of the superincumbent weight had wisely spread themselves out below, giving to his lower man the appearance of a stunted letter A; his arms were most preposterously short, and for the convenience of locomotion he used them somewhat after the fashion of fins. As to his costume on the morning in question, it was a singularly dirty and patched dressing-gown of antique silk, fastened about the waist by a girdle, from which depended a scymitar on one side and a meerschaum on the other; a well-worn and not over clean-looking shawl was fastened in fashion of a turban round his head; a pair of yellow buskins with faded gold tassels decorated legs which occasionally peeped from the folds of the _robe-de-chambre_ without any other covering. [Illustration: Tom Receives a Strange Visitor 132] Such was the outward man of him who suddenly stopped short at the doorway, while he held the latch in his hand, and called out,-- “Burke, Tom Burke! don't be violent, don't be outrageous; you see I'm armed! I'd cut you down without mercy if you attempt to lift a finger! Promise me this,--do you hear me?”