For he had already seen as he approached the town, and as he drove from the station to the “Yellow Dragon” Hotel, that Market Milcaster was a very small place.  It chiefly consisted of one long, wide thoroughfare—­the High Street—­with smaller streets leading from it on either side.  In the High Street seemed to be everything that the town could show—­the ancient parish church, the town hall, the market cross, the principal houses and shops, the bridge, beneath which ran the river whereon ships had once come up to the town before its mouth, four miles away, became impassably silted up.  It was a bright, clean, little town, but there were few signs of trade in it, and Spargo had been quick to notice that in the “Yellow Dragon,” a big, rambling old hostelry, reminiscent of the old coaching days, there seemed to be little doing.  He had eaten a bit of lunch in the coffee-room immediately on his arrival; the coffee-room was big enough to accommodate a hundred and fifty people, but beyond himself, an old gentleman and his daughter, evidently tourists, two young men talking golf, a man who looked like an artist, and an unmistakable honeymooning couple, there was no one in it.  There was little traffic in the wide street beneath Spargo’s windows; little passage of people to and fro on the sidewalks; here a countryman drove a lazy cow as lazily along; there a farmer in his light cart sat idly chatting with an aproned tradesman, who had come out of his shop to talk to him.  Over everything lay the quiet of the sunlight of the summer afternoon, and through the open windows stole a faint, sweet scent of the new-mown hay lying in the meadows outside the old houses.

“A veritable Sleepy Hollow,” mused Spargo.  “Let’s go down and see if there’s anybody to talk to.  Great Scott!—­to think that I was in the poisonous atmosphere of the Octoneumenoi only sixteen hours ago!”

Spargo, after losing himself in various corridors and passages, finally landed in the wide, stone-paved hall of the old hotel, and with a sure instinct turned into the bar-parlour which he had noticed when he entered the place.  This was a roomy, comfortable, bow-windowed apartment, looking out upon the High Street, and was furnished and ornamented with the usual appurtenances of country-town hotels.  There were old chairs and tables and sideboards and cupboards, which had certainly been made a century before, and seemed likely to endure for a century or two longer; there were old prints of the road and the chase, and an old oil-painting or two of red-faced gentlemen in pink coats; there were foxes’ masks on the wall, and a monster pike in a glass case on a side-table; there were ancient candlesticks on the mantelpiece and an antique snuff-box set between them.  Also there was a small, old-fashioned bar in a corner of the room, and a new-fashioned young woman seated behind it, who was yawning over a piece of fancy needlework, and looked at Spargo when he entered as Andromeda may have looked at Perseus when he made arrival at her rock.  And Spargo, treating himself to a suitable drink and choosing a cigar to accompany it, noted the look, and dropped into the nearest chair.