his encounter with me was to him
like a spring in a thirsty land.

"Solitude," he continued, "is perhaps the final need of the human soul.
After a while, when we have run the gamut of all our ardours and our
dreams, solitude comes to seem the one excellent thing, the _summum
bonum._"

I murmured that he certainly seemed to have come to the right place for
it.

"Very true, indeed," he assented, with a courtly inclination of his
head, as though I had said something profound; "very true, indeed, and
yet, wasn't it the great Bacon who said: 'Whoever is delighted with
solitude is either a beast or a god'?--and this particular solitude, I
confess, sometimes seems to me a little too much like that enforced
solitude of the Pontic marshes of which Ovid wailed and whimpered in the
deaf ears of Augustus."

I could not help noticing at last as he talked on with this fantastic
magnificence, the odd contrast between his speech and the almost
equally fantastic poverty of his clothing. The suit he wore, though
still preserving a certain elegance of cut, was so worn and patched and
stained that a negro would hardly have accepted it as a gift; and his
almost painful emaciation gave him generally the appearance of an
animated framework of rags and bones, startlingly embodying the voice
and the manners of a prince. Yet the shabby tie about his neck was bound
by a ring, in which was set a turquoise of great size and beauty.
Evidently he was a being of droll contrasts, and I prepared myself to be
surprised at nothing concerning him.

Presently, as we loitered on through the palms, we came upon two negroes
chopping away with their machetes, trimming up the debris of broken and
decaying palm fans. They were both sturdy, ferocious-looking fellows,
but one of them was a veritable giant.

"Behold my bodyguard!" said my magnificent friend, with the usual
possessive wave of his hand; "my Switzers, my Janissaries, so to say."

The negroes stopped working, touched their great straw hats, and flashed
their splendid teeth in a delighted smile. Evidently they were used to
their master's way of talking, and were devoted to him.

"This chap here is Erebus," said my host, and the appropriateness of the
name was apparent, for he was certainly the blackest negro I had ever
seen, as superbly black as some women are superbly white.

"And this is Samson. Let's have a look at your muscles, Samson--there's
a good boy!"

And, with grins of pleasure,