you also notice that such words as “here,” “there,” “over,” are pronounced with a peculiar broad vowel sound at the end.  He cannot look you boldly in the face, and it is hard to catch a sight of his eyes, but you may take for granted that the eyes are bad and shifty.  The cheeks are probably a little pendulous, and the jaw hangs with a certain slackness.  The whole visage looks as if it had been cast in a tolerably good mould and had somehow run out of shape a little.  Your man is fluent and communicative; he mouths his sentences with a genteel roll in his voice, and he punctuates his talk with a stealthy, insincere laugh which hardly rises above the dignity of a snigger.

Now how does such a man come to be tramping aimlessly on a public road?  He does not know that he is going to any place in particular; he is certainly not walking for the sake of health, though he needs health rather badly.  Why is he in this plight?  You do not need to wait long for a solution, if the book of human experience has been your study.  That man is absolutely certain to begin bewailing his luck—­it is always “luck.”  Then he has a choice selection of abuse to bestow on large numbers of people who have trodden him down—­he is always down-trodden; and he proves to you that, but for the ingratitude of A, the roguery of B, the jealousy of C, the undeserved credit obtained by the despicable D, he would be in “a far different position to-day, sir.”  If he is an old officer—­and a few gentlemen who once bore Her Majesty’s commission are now to be found on the roads, or in casual wards, or lounging about low skittle-alleys and bagatelle or billiard tables—­he will allude to the gambling that went on in the regiment.  “How could a youngster keep out of the swim?” All went well with him until he took to late hours and devilled bones; “then in the mornings we were all ready for a peg; and I should like to see the man who could get ready for parade after a hard night unless he had something in the shape of a reviver.”  So he prates on.  He curses the colonel, the commander-in-chief, and the Army organization in general; he gives leering reminiscences of garrison belles—­reminiscences that make a pure minded man long to inflict some sort of chastisement on him; and thus, while he thinks he is impressing you with an overpowering sense of his bygone rank and fashion, he really unfolds the history of a feeble unworthy fellow who carries a strong tinge of rascality about him.  He is always a victim, and he illustrates the unvarying truth of the maxim that a dupe is a rogue minus cleverness.  The final crash which overwhelmed him was of course a horse-racing blunder.  He would have recovered his winter’s losses had not a gang of thieves tampered with the favourite for the City and Suburban.  “Do you think, sir, that Highflyer could not have given Stonemason three stone and a beating?” You modestly own your want of acquaintance with the powers of the famous quadrupeds, and the infatuated