Then it would occur to you that he must have been sitting still for a considerable period. He was not stout—you might even have called him slender; but the muscles about his cheeks and chin hung a little loose from the bony framework, and his figure, shapely enough when he stood upright, yielded in a sitting posture to the pressure of the railway cushions. That indicated muscular tissue, once developed by outdoor exercise, and subsequently deteriorated by sedentary pursuits. The lines on his forehead suggested that he was now a brain-worker of sorts.
Other lines showed plainly that, though his accessories were new, the man, unlike his portmanteau, had knocked about the world, and had got a good deal damaged in the process. The index and middle fingers of the left hand were wanting. You argued, then, that he had changed his trade more than once; while from the presence of two vertical creases on either side of a large and rather fleshy mouth, worn as it were by the pull of a bit, you further inferred that the energy he must have displayed somewhere was a thing of will rather than of temperament. He was a paradox, a rolling stone that had unaccountably contrived to gather moss.
And then you fell to wondering how so magnificently mossy a person came to be traveling third-class in his native country.
To all these problems, which did actually perplex the clergyman, his fellow-passenger, he himself provided the answer.
He had taken out his gold watch with a critical air, and timed the run from Liverpool to Crewe.
"Better service of trains than they used to have," he observed. "Same old snorer of an engine, though."
"You seem to know the line."
"It's not the first time I've ridden by it; nor yet the first time I've crossed the herring-pond."
"Are you making any stay in this country?"
"I am, sir."