"I want you to help me with a bit of Homer, if you please, Mr
Cupples-�I'm not up to Homer yet."
"Do ye think I hae naething ither to do than to grin' the grandur o' an auld haythen into spunemate for a young sinner like you?"
"Ye dinna ken what I'm like, Mr Cupples," returned Alec, remembering his landlady's injunction not to be afraid of him.
"Come athort the reek, and lat's luik at ye."
Alec obeyed, and found the speaker seated by the side of a little fire, in an old easy-chair covered with horsehair; and while undergoing his scrutiny, took his revenge in kind. Mr Cupples was a man who might have been of almost any age from five-and-twenty to fifty—at least, Alec's experience was insufficient for the task of determining to what decade of human years he belonged. He was a little man, in a long black tail-coat much too large, and dirty gray trousers. He had no shirt-collar visible, although a loose rusty stock revealed the whole of his brown neck. His hair, long, thin, fair, and yet a good deal mingled with grey, straggled about over an uncommonly high forehead, which had somehow the neglected and ruinous look of an old bare tower no ivy had beautified. His ears stood far out from his great head. His nose refuses to be described. His lips were plentiful and loose; his chin was not worth mentioning; his eyes were rather large, beautifully formed, bright, and blue. His hand, small, delicately shaped, and dirty, grasped, all the time he was examining Alec, a tumbler of steaming toddy; while his feet, in list slippers of different colours, balanced themselves upon the fender[.]
"You've been fighting, you young rascal!" said Mr Cupples, in a tone of authority, the moment he had satisfied himself about Alec's countenance. "That won't do. It's not respectable."
And he gave the queerest unintelligible grin.
Alec found himself strangely attracted to him, and impelled—a feeling not unfrequent with him—to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
"The world itself isn't the most respectable planet in the system, Mr Cupples," said he; "and no honest inhabitant of it can be always respectable either."
Mr Cupples chuckled and laughed groggily, muttering somewhere in his chest—