The first of the passengers to alight after him saw the stranger take the porter, a famously insolent individual, firmly by the shoulder blade.
No sooner had they heard the coachman's Whoa-up than he had the door open and was out into the night without having said a single word. His eyes were dark, inquiring, and yet there was a bruised, even belligerent quality which had kept his fellow passengers at theirĭistance all through that long journey up from Dover.
His nose was large, hawkish, and high-bridged. His brows pushed down hard upon the eyes, and his cheeks shone as if life had scrubbed at him and rubbed until the veryīones beneath his flesh had been burnished in the process. His face did not deny the possibility of any of these occupations indeed he would have been a singular example of any one of them. Imagined him a book-maker, another a gentleman farmer and a third, seeing the excellent quality of his waistcoat, imagined him an upper servant wearing his master's cast-off clothing. He was a tall man in his forties, so big in the chest and broad in the shoulder that his fellows on the bench seat had felt the strain of his presence, but what his occupation was, or what he planned to do in London, they had not the least idea. The Rocket (as his coach was aptly named) rattled in through the archway to the inn's yard and the passengers, who had hitherto found the stranger so taciturn, now noted the silver-capped cane which had begun to tap the floor at Westminster Bridge-commence It was, to be precise, six of the clock on the fifteenth of April in the year of 1837 that those hooded eyes looked out the window of the Dover coach and beheld, in the brightĪura of gas light, a golden bull and an overgrown mouth opening to devour him-the sign of his inn, the Golden Ox. It was a Saturday night when the man with the red waistcoat arrived in London.
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