“On looking back,” he went on, watching the momentary flames in the grate, “I see a short, thick-set man of perhaps forty-five, with immense shoulders and small, slender hands.  The contrast was noticeable, for I remember thinking that such a giant frame and such slim finger bones hardly belonged together.  His head, too, was large and very long, the head of an idealist beyond all question, yet with an unusually strong development of the jaw and chin.  Here again was a singular contradiction, though I am better able now to appreciate its full meaning, with a greater experience in judging the values of physiognomy.  For this meant, of course, an enthusiastic idealism balanced and kept in check by will and judgment—­elements usually deficient in dreamers and visionaries.

“At any rate, here was a being with probably a very wide range of possibilities, a machine with a pendulum that most likely had an unusual length of swing.

“The man’s hair was exceedingly fine, and the lines about his nose and mouth were cut as with a delicate steel instrument in wax.  His eyes I have left to the last.  They were large and quite changeable, not in colour only, but in character, size, and shape.  Occasionally they seemed the eyes of someone else, if you can understand what I mean, and at the same time, in their shifting shades of blue, green, and a nameless sort of dark grey, there was a sinister light in them that lent to the whole face an aspect almost alarming.  Moreover, they were the most luminous optics I think I have ever seen in any human being.

“There, then, at the risk of a wearisome description, is Smith as I saw him for the first time that winter’s evening in my shabby student’s rooms in Edinburgh.  And yet the real part of him, of course, I have left untouched, for it is both indescribable and un-get-atable.  I have spoken already of an atmosphere of warning and aloofness he carried about with him.  It is impossible further to analyse the series of little shocks his presence always communicated to my being; but there was that about him which made me instantly on the qui vive in his presence, every nerve alert, every sense strained and on the watch.  I do not mean that he deliberately suggested danger, but rather that he brought forces in his wake which automatically warned the nervous centres of my system to be on their guard and alert.

“Since the days of my first acquaintance with this man I have lived through other experiences and have seen much I cannot pretend to explain or understand; but, so far in my life, I have only once come across a human being who suggested a disagreeable familiarity with unholy things, and who made me feel uncanny and ‘creepy’ in his presence; and that unenviable individual was Mr. Smith.

“What his occupation was during the day I never knew.  I think he slept until the sun set.  No one ever saw him on the stairs, or heard him move in his room during the day.  He was a creature of the shadows, who apparently preferred darkness to light.  Our landlady either knew nothing, or would say nothing.  At any rate she found no fault, and I have since wondered often by what magic this fellow was able to convert a common landlady of a common lodging-house into a discreet and uncommunicative person.  This alone was a sign of genius of some sort.