He was clad in a fine but old-fashioned suit with knee-breeches; its colour was that shade between blue, violet and grey which can be seen in certain shadows of the woodland.

His hair was whitish grey, and at the first glance, taken along with his knee-breeches, looked as if it was powdered.

His advance was very quiet; but for the silver frost upon his head, he might have been one to the shadows of the wood.
"Gentlemen," he said, "my master has a carriage waiting for you in the road just by." "Who is your master ?" asked Syme, standing quite still.
"I was told you knew his name," said the man respectfully.
There was a silence, and then the Secretary said-- "Where is this carriage ?" "It has been waiting only a few moments," said the stranger.

"My master has only just come home." Syme looked left and right upon the patch of green field in which he found himself.

The hedges were ordinary hedges, the trees seemed ordinary trees; yet he felt like a man entrapped in fairyland.
He looked the mysterious ambassador up and down, but he could discover nothing except that the man's coat was the exact colour of the purple shadows, and that the man's face was the exact colour of the red and brown and golden sky.
"Show us the place," Syme said briefly, and without a word the man in the violet coat turned his back and walked towards a gap in the hedge, which let in suddenly the light of a white road.
As the six wanderers broke out upon this thoroughfare, they saw the white road blocked by what looked like a long row of carriages, such a row of carriages as might close the approach to some house in Park Lane.
Along the side of these carriages stood a rank of splendid servants, all dressed in the grey-blue uniform, and all having a certain quality of stateliness and freedom which would not commonly belong to the servants of a gentleman, but rather to the officials and ambassadors of a great king.