I sat up. The door
shot open, there was a moment's pause, a series of grunting remarks
uttered by two rather terrible voices; then in came four _nouveaux_ of a
decidedly interesting appearance. They entered in two ranks of two each.
The front rank was made up of an immensely broad shouldered hipless and
consequently triangular man in blue trousers belted with a piece of
ordinary rope, plus a thick-set ruffianly personage the most prominent
part of whose accoutrements were a pair of hideous whiskers. I leaped to
my feet and made for the door, thrilled in spite of myself. By the, in
this case, shifty blue eyes, the pallid hair, the well-knit form of the
rope's owner I knew instantly a Hollander. By the coarse brutal features
half-hidden in the piratical whiskers, as well as by the heavy mean
wandering eyes. I recognised with equal speed a Belgian. Upon his
shoulders the front rank bore a large box, blackish, well-made, obviously
very weighty, which box it set down with a grunt of relief hard by the
cabinet. The rear rank marched behind in a somewhat asymmetrical manner:
a young, stupid-looking, clear-complexioned fellow (obviously a farmer,
and having expensive black puttees and a handsome cap with a shiny black
leather visor) slightly preceded a tall, gliding, thinnish, unjudgeable
personage who peeped at everyone quietly and solemnly from beneath the
visor of a somewhat large slovenly cloth cap showing portions of a lean,
long, incognisable face upon which sat, or rather drooped, a pair of
mustachios identical in character with those which are sometimes
pictorially attributed to a Chinese dignitary--in other words, the
mustachios were exquisitely narrow, homogeneously downward, and made of
something like black corn-silk.
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