He is a man about sixty, small in figure, with grey old-fashioned whiskers cut to the shape of a pair of crumb-brushes.
He is entirely in black broadcloth--or rather, at present, black and brown, for he is bespattered with mud from his heels to the crown of his low hat.

He has no consciousness of this--no sense of anything but his purpose, his ardour for which causes his eyes to shine like those of a lynx, and gives his motions, all the elasticity of an athlete's.
'Nobody to interrupt us at this time of night!' he chuckles with fierce enjoyment.
We retreat a little way and find a sort of angle, an elevation in the sod, a suggested squareness amid the mass of irregularities around.

Here, he tells me, if anywhere, the king's house stood.

Three months of measurement and calculation have confirmed him in this conclusion.
He requests me now to open the lantern, which I do, and the light streams out upon the wet sod.

At last divining his proceedings I say that I had no idea, in keeping the tryst, that he was going to do more at such an unusual time than meet me for a meditative ramble through the stronghold.
I ask him why, having a practicable object, he should have minded interruptions and not have chosen the day?
He informs me, quietly pointing to his spade, that it was because his purpose is to dig, then signifying with a grim nod the gaunt notice-post against the sky beyond.
I inquire why, as a professed and well-known antiquary with capital letters at the tail of his name, he did not obtain the necessary authority, considering the stringent penalties for this sort of thing; and he chuckles fiercely again with suppressed delight, and says, 'Because they wouldn't have given it!' He at once begins cutting up the sod, and, as he takes the pickaxe to follow on with, assures me that, penalty or no penalty, honest men or marauders, he is sure of one thing, that we shall not be disturbed at our work till after dawn.
I remember to have heard of men who, in their enthusiasm for some special science, art, or hobby, have quite lost the moral sense which would restrain them from indulging it illegitimately; and I conjecture that here, at last, is an instance of such an one.