"It must be one of the rangers. No one
would dare to light a fire while poaching on the King's preserves. What
o'clock do you make it?"
"Half after nine." And the watch was still in the speaker's hand as he
emerged from darkness into the glowing light of the fire. My father
glanced at it, and saw that it was exactly like the one he had worn on
entering Erewhon nearly twenty years previously.
The watch, however, was a very small matter; the dress of these two men
(for there were only two) was far more disconcerting. They were not in
the Erewhonian costume. The one was dressed like an Englishman or would-
be Englishman, while the other was wearing the same kind of clothes but
turned the wrong way round, so that when his face was towards my father
his body seemed to have its back towards him, and _vice verso_. The
man's head, in fact, appeared to have been screwed right round; and yet
it was plain that if he were stripped he would be found built like other
people.
What could it all mean? The men were about fifty years old. They were
well-to-do people, well clad, well fed, and were felt instinctively by my
father to belong to the academic classes. That one of them should be
dressed like a sensible Englishman dismayed my father as much as that the
other should have a watch, and look as if he had just broken out of
Bedlam, or as King Dagobert must have looked if he had worn all his
clothes as he is said to have worn his breeches.
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