ed odds and ends that collect in a deserted house--a ladder, a
stiff, rusted bridle, a coil of frayed rope, a kettle, a dozen sheets of
the Gazette, empty bottles, dusty crockery and broken chairs. He
surveyed them all with a bland, uncritical glance. From his manner he
might have been surrounded by brilliant company. From his conversation
he might have been in a pot house.

I noticed at once what many had been at pains to mention to me
before--that my father was not a temperate man. Nor did our cellar seem
wholly bleak. He pressed wine upon me, and soon had finished a bottle
himself, only to gesture Brutus to uncork a second. And all the while he
regaled me with anecdotes of the gaming table and the vices of a dozen
seaports. With hardly a pause he described a lurid succession of
drinking bouts and gallant adventures. He finished a second bottle of
wine, and was half way through a third. Yet all the while his voice
never lost its pleasant modulation. Never a flush or an increase of
animation came to change him. Politely detached, he discoursed of love
and murder, gambling and chicanery, drawing on the seemingly exhaustless
background of his own experience for illustration. He seemed to have
known the worst men from all the ends of the earth, to have shared in
their business and their pleasures. He seemed to have been in every
discreditable undertaking that came beneath his notice. In retrospect
they pleased him--all and every one.

What he saw when he glanced at me appeared to please him also. At any
rate, it gave him the encouragement that one usually receives from an
attentive listener.

"Brutus, again a bottle. It is at the fourth bottle," he explained, "that
I am at my best. It is the fourth bottle, or perhaps the fifth, that
seems to free me from the restraints that old habits and early education
have wound about me. _In vino veritas_, my son, but the truth must be
measured in quarts for each individual. Some men I know might be drowned
in wine and still be hypocrites, so solidly are their heads placed upon
their shoulders. But my demands are modest, my son, just as modest as I
am a modest sinner."

He called to Brutus to toss more wood upon the fire, leaned back for a
while, holding his glass to the light of the flames, and turned to me
again with his cool, perfunctory smile.

"Strange, is it not, that men through all the ages have sought fools and
charlatans to tell their fortunes, when a little wine is cle