me
unexpectedly into the presence of the father and daughter when they were
conversing in a tongue which I was sure I had never heard. The Doctor
had no companions. He was at home, or at school, or else on the way from
the one to the other. No visitor ever showed himself when I was at the
cottage. Lydia attended the convent school. I understood from remarks
dropped incidentally, as well as from seeing the books she had, that her
studies were the languages in the main, and I had strong evidence that,
young as she was, her proficiency in French and German far exceeded my
own acquirements.

By degrees I learned that the Doctor was deeply interested in what we
would call speculative philosophy. I say by degrees, for the experience
I am now writing down embraces the winters of five or six years. Most of
the books that composed his library were abstruse treatises on
metaphysics, philosophy, and religion. I believe that in his collection
could have been found the Bible of every religious faith. Sometimes he
would read aloud a passage in the Bhagavadgita, of which he had a
manuscript copy interleaved with annotations in his own delicate
handwriting.

He seldom spoke of the past, but he seemed strangely interested in the
political condition of every civilized nation. The future of the human
race was a subject to which he undoubtedly gave much thought. I have
heard him more than once declare, with emphasis, that the outlook for
the advancement of America was not auspicious. In regard to the
sectional discord in the United States, he showed a strange unconcern. I
knew that he believed it a matter of indifference whether secession, of
which we were beginning again to hear some mutterings, was a
constitutional right; but on the question of slavery his interest was
intense. He believed that slavery could not endure, let secession be
attempted or abandoned, let secession fail or succeed.

In my vacations I spoke to my father of the profound man who had
interested himself in my mental welfare; my father approved the
intimacy. He did not know Dr. Khayme personally, but he had much reason
to believe him a worthy man. I had never said anything to my father
about the note he had written to the Doctor; for a long time, in fact,
the thought of doing so did not come to me, and when it did come I
decided that, since my father had not mentioned the matter, it was not
for me to do so; it was a peculiar note.

My father gave me to know that