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It was a sung, small, wainscoated room; fishing-rods were neatly arranged against the wall, which was also decorated by a portrait of the landlord himself, two old Dutch pictures of fruit and game, a long, quaint-fashioned fowling-piece, and, opposite the fireplace, a noble stag's head and antlers.
It was a droll procession, and everybody turned to look at it: the two ragged men carrying the quaint-fashioned old clock, from which the dust shook off at every jolt, revealing the carved scrolls and figures upon it: following them, Mercy, with her expressive face full of mirth and excitement; and the old man, now ahead, now lagging behind, now talking in an eager and animated manner with Mercy, now breaking off to admonish or chastise the bearers of the clock.
With an eagerness akin to that of a schoolboy at Christmas, gazing on the green curtain of a theatre, the moment it is rising to disclose its wondrous entertainments, did I, travelling headlong in memory from childhood to manhood and stumbling over a batch of ancient feelings, stand looking, with strained eyes, on the white-washed, quaint-fashioned Bergen, balancing the vicissitudes of life and conjecturing what the chances might be, I should not, by some agency as unaccountable as that which had brought me hither, be looking in three months' time on the Golden shore of the Bight of Biaffir.
It was a little old man in a big topcoat with a quaint-fashioned wide-awake hat on his head. In ill weather all distinctions are swept away. The stranger might have been a statesman or a tramp. "It is a pleasure to see you, Doctor," and the young man grasped a mittened hand and looked into his companion's face. There was something both kindly and mirthful in his grey eyes.
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