It was like the ebb of a broken wave to those who had heard the sea.

Turning about, as the candles on the table blinked, the young man lazily dashed the rain and sleet from his beard and breast, and lay down again on the settle, with something between a shiver and a yawn.
"Cruel night, this," he muttered, and so saying, he returned to his normal condition of somnolence.
The opening and the closing of the door, together with the draught of cold air, had awakened a little man who occupied that corner of the chimney nook which faced old Matthew.

Coiled up with his legs under him on the warm stone seat, his head resting against one of the two walls that bolstered him up on either hand, beneath a great flitch of bacon that hung there to dry, he had lain asleep throughout the preceding conversation, only punctuating its periods at intervals with somewhat too audible indications of slumber.

In an instant he was on his feet.

He was a diminutive creature, with something infinitely amusing in his curious physical proportions.