him, as you shall see presently.

"Once, after I knew the Major (he were Captain then), I was a-brushin'
his coat, and he stood a long while before the glass. Then he twisted
upon me, with a smile on his mouth, and says he,--

"'The dog was right, Johnson: this isn't the face of a poet. I was a
presumtious ass, and born to cast up figgers with a pen behind my ear.'

"'Captain,' I says, 'if you was skinned, you'd look like any other man
without his. The quality of a soul isn't expressed by a coat.'

"'Well,' he answers, 'my soul's pretty clean-swept, I think, save for one
Bluebeard chamber in it that's been kep' locked ever so many years.
It's nice and dirty by this time, I expect,' he says. Then the grin comes
on his mouth again. 'I'll open it some day,' he says, 'and look. There's
something in it about comparing me to a dancing dervish, with the wind in
my petticuts. Perhaps I'll get the chance to set somebody else dancing
by-and-by.'

"He did, and took it, and the Bluebeard chamber come to be opened in this
very jail.

"It was when the system was lying fallow, so to speak, and the prison was
deserted. Nobody was there but him and me and the echoes from the empty
courts. The contract for restoration hadn't been signed, and for months,
and more than a year, we lay idle, nothing bein' done.

"Near the beginnin' of this period, one day comes, for the third time of
the Major's seein' him, the grey-faced man. 'Let bygones be bygones,'
he says. 'I was a good friend to you, though you didn't know it; and now,
I expect, you're in the way to thank me.'

"'I am,' says the Major.

"'Of course,' he answers. 'Where would be your fame and reputation as one
of the leadin' prison reformers of the day if you had kep' on in that
riming nonsense?'

"'Have you come for my thanks?' says the Governor.

"'I've come,' says the grey-faced man, 'to examine and report upon your
system.'

"'For your paper?'

"'Possibly; but to satisfy myself of its efficacy, in the first
instance.'

"'You aren't commissioned, then?'

"'No; I come on my own responsibility.'

"'Without consultation with any one?'

"'Absolutely without. I haven't even a wife to advise me,' he says, with
a yellow grin. What once passed for cholera had set the bile on his skin
like paint, and he had caught a manner of coughing behind his hand like a
toast-master.

"'I know,' says the Major, looking him steady in the face, 'that what you
say about me and my affa