n the turnkey announced his Excellency
(every official is Excellency if too low for Highness), Mynheer van
Hoagendrius, and a very short and immensely fat personage, dressed in
a kind of black-and-white plaid jacket and trousers, entered. He looked
like a huge chess-board set on legs. A grunt, a snort, a thick sound
like a struggle between choking and gurgling, ensued, which I concluded
to be something in Dutch, and he seated himself opposite me.

I made my compliments to him, polyglot-wise, in French, English,
Spanish, and at last German,--the last evidently striking a spark out of
the embers of his cold intelligence, for he fixed his dull eyes upon
me, and seemed as though he would soon wake up. Animated by this hope,
I proceeded in my very best "Deutsch" to expound my sorrows to him.
Fortunately for me, my German had been acquired in the low companionship
of "skippers" and sailors, and consequently bore a nearer resemblance
to its half-brother of Holland than the more cultivated tongues of
professors and philosophers.

I cannot, to this hour, say whether it arose from any interest in the
narrative, or whether proceeding from the laudable desire to come at the
truth in a question of much difficulty, but the Mynheer now came to me
each morning, and usually stayed two hours, during which I talked and
he smoked incessantly. Often, when he left me, have I asked myself "what
progress I had made in his good opinion? how far had I made him master
of my case?" but the question remained without an answer; for if
occasionally a stray flash of intelligence would light up his dull
features, on following the direction of his eyes I could perceive that
the animation arose from the sight of some fishing-boat returning loaded
with turbot, or that the savory odor of salt cod had saluted him
from the shore. I felt at length as though I were sailing without
a log-line,--nothing to mark my progress or say in what latitude I
cruised.

My Dutch friend had now been visiting me for above six weeks, during
which, if he had not supplied himself with every detail of my calamity,
he had at least smoked all the choice tobacco which, as a favor from
the Governor, I was permitted to land for my own use; and as yet he had
given no signs of life other than the act of fumigation aforesaid. I was
half angry, half amused, at the little act of dexterity with which he
emptied the last remnant of my pure Havannah into his pipe, and heard,
with a kind of