ve artists as models
for Moses. His lips were so thin and colorless that it needed a close
inspection to find the lines of his mouth at all in the pallid face. His
great wrinkled brow and hollow bloodless cheeks, the inexorably stern
expression of his small green eyes that no longer possessed eyebrows
or lashes, might have convinced the stranger that Gerard Dow's "Money
Changer" had come down from his frame. The craftiness of an inquisitor,
revealed in those curving wrinkles and creases that wound about his
temples, indicated a profound knowledge of life. There was no deceiving
this man, who seemed to possess a power of detecting the secrets of the
wariest heart.

The wisdom and the moral codes of every people seemed gathered up in his
passive face, just as all the productions of the globe had been heaped
up in his dusty showrooms. He seemed to possess the tranquil luminous
vision of some god before whom all things are open, or the haughty power
of a man who knows all things.

With two strokes of the brush a painter could have so altered the
expression of this face, that what had been a serene representation
of the Eternal Father should change to the sneering mask of a
Mephistopheles; for though sovereign power was revealed by the forehead,
mocking folds lurked about the mouth. He must have sacrificed all the
joys of earth, as he had crushed all human sorrows beneath his potent
will. The man at the brink of death shivered at the thought of the life
led by this spirit, so solitary and remote from our world; joyless,
since he had no one illusion left; painless, because pleasure had ceased
to exist for him. There he stood, motionless and serene as a star in a
bright mist. His lamp lit up the obscure closet, just as his green eyes,
with their quiet malevolence, seemed to shed a light on the moral world.

This was the strange spectacle that startled the young man's returning
sight, as he shook off the dreamy fancies and thoughts of death that
had lulled him. An instant of dismay, a momentary return to belief
in nursery tales, may be forgiven him, seeing that his senses were
obscured. Much thought had wearied his mind, and his nerves were
exhausted with the strain of the tremendous drama within him, and by the
scenes that had heaped on him all the horrid pleasures that a piece of
opium can produce.

But this apparition had appeared in Paris, on the Quai Voltaire, and in
the nineteenth century; the time and place made sorc