aightness which makes him remind you of the
spire of an English abbey. He greeted me with smiles, and stares, and
alarming blushes. He assures me that he never would have known me, and
that five years have altered me--_sehr_! I asked him if it were for the
better? He looked at me hard for a moment, with his eyes of blue, and
then, for an answer, he blushed again.

On my arrival we agreed to walk over from the village. He dismissed his
wagon with my luggage, and we went arm-in-arm through the dusk. The town
is seated at the foot of certain mountains, whose names I have yet to
learn, and at the head of a big sheet of water, which, as yet, too, I
know only as "the Lake." The road hitherward soon leaves the village and
wanders in rural loveliness by the margin of this expanse. Sometimes the
water is hidden by clumps of trees, behind which we heard it lapping and
gurgling in the darkness: sometimes it stretches out from your feet in
shining vagueness, as if it were tired of making, all day, a million
little eyes at the great stupid hills. The walk from the tavern takes
some half an hour, and in this interval Theodore made his position a
little more clear. Mr. Sloane is a rich old widower; his age is
seventy-two, and as his health is thoroughly broken, is practically even
greater; and his fortune--Theodore, characteristically, doesn't know
anything definite about that. It's probably about a million. He has
lived much in Europe, and in the "great world;" he has had adventures
and passions and all that sort of thing; and now, in the evening of his
days, like an old French diplomatist, he takes it into his head to write
his memoirs. To this end he has lured poor Theodore to his gruesome
side, to mend his pens for him. He has been a great scribbler, says
Theodore, all his days, and he proposes to incorporate a large amount of
promiscuous literary matter into these _souvenirs intimes_. Theodore's
principal function seems to be to get him to leave things out. In fact,
the poor youth seems troubled in conscience. His patron's lucubrations
have taken the turn of many other memoirs, and have ceased to address
themselves _virginibus puerisque_. On the whole, he declares they are a
very odd mixture--a medley of gold and tinsel, of bad taste and good
sense. I can readily understand it. The old man bores me, puzzles me,
and amuses me.

He was in waiting to receive me. We found him in his library--which, by
the way, is simply the most del