r."

"Was that servant who spoke to me in the porch, as I came in this
evening, yours?"

"Yes." This I said more boldly, as I suspected he was coming to the
question Francois had opened.

"He mentioned to me," said he, slowly, and puffing his cigar at easy
intervals, "that you desire your servant should sleep in the same
room with you. I am always happy to meet the wishes of courteous
fellow-travellers, and so I have ordered my servant to give you _his_
bed; he will sleep upstairs in what was intended for _you_. Good-night."
And with an insolent nod he lounged out of the room and left me.

CHAPTER XXIV. MY CANDOR AS AN AUTOBIOGRAPHER.

My reader is sufficiently acquainted with me by this time to know that
there is one quality in me on which he can always count with safety,--my
candor! There may be braver men and more ingenious men; there may be, I
will not dispute it, persons more gifted with oratorical powers, better
linguists, better mathematicians, and with higher acquirements in art;
but I take my stand upon candor, and say, there never lived the man,
ancient or modern, who presented a more open and undisguised section of
himself than I have done, am doing, and hope to do to the end. And
what, I would ask you, is the reason why we have hitherto made so little
progress in that greatest of all sciences,--the knowledge of human
nature? Is it not because we are always engaged in speculating on what
goes on in the hearts of others, guessing, as it were, what people are
doing next door, instead of honestly recording what takes place in their
own house?

You think this same candor is a small quality. Well, show me one
thoroughly honest autobiography. Of all the men who have written their
own memoirs, it is fair to presume that some may have lacked personal
courage, some been deficient in truthfulness, some forgetful of early
friendships, and so on. Yet where will you find me one, I only ask
one, who declares, "I was a coward, I never could speak truth, I was by
nature ungrateful"?

Now, it would be exactly through such confessions as these our knowledge
of humanity would be advanced. The ship that makes her voyage without
the loss of a spar or a rope, teaches little; but there is a whole world
of information in the log of the vessel with a great hole in her, all
her masts carried away, the captain invariably drunk, and the crew
mutinous; then we hear of energy and daring and ready-wittedness,
marvellous reso