mpton. Sir Joshua died, 1792: and you say he was your dear friend?"

As I spoke I chanced to look at Mr. Pinto; and then it suddenly struck
me: Gracious powers? Perhaps you ARE a hundred years old, now I think of
it. You look more than a hundred. Yes, you may be a thousand years old
for what I know. Your teeth are false. One eye is evidently false. Can I
say that the other is not? If a man's age may be calculated by the rings
round his eyes, this man may be as old as Methuselah. He has no beard.
He wears a large curly glossy brown wig, and his eyebrows are painted
a deep olive-green. It was odd to hear this man, this walking mummy,
talking sentiment, in these queer old chambers in Shepherd's Inn.

Pinto passed a yellow bandanna handkerchief over his awful white teeth,
and kept his glass eye steadily fixed on me. "Sir Joshua's friend?" said
he (you perceive, eluding my direct question). "Is not every one that
knows his pictures Reynolds's friend? Suppose I tell you that I have
been in his painting room scores of times, and that his sister The has
made me tea, and his sister Toffy has made coffee for me? You will only
say I am an old ombog." (Mr. Pinto, I remarked, spoke all languages
with an accent equally foreign.) "Suppose I tell you that I knew Mr. Sam
Johnson, and did not like him? that I was at that very ball at Madame
Cornelis', which you have mentioned in one of your little--what do you
call them?--bah! my memory begins to fail me--in one of your little
Whirligig Papers? Suppose I tell you that Sir Joshua has been here, in
this very room?"

"Have you, then, had these apartments for--more--than--seventy years?" I
asked.

"They look as if they had not been swept for that time--don't they? Hey?
I did not say that I had them for seventy years, but that Sir Joshua has
visited me here."

"When?" I asked, eying the man sternly, for I began to think he was an
impostor.

He answered me with a glance still more stern: "Sir Joshua Reynolds
was here this very morning, with Angelica Kaufmann and Mr. Oliver
Goldschmidt. He is still very much attached to Angelica, who still does
not care for him. Because he is dead (and I was in the fourth mourning
coach at his funeral) is that any reason why he should not come back to
earth again? My good sir, you are laughing at me. He has sat many a time
on that very chair which you are occupying. There are several spirits in
the room now, whom you cannot see. Excuse me." Here he turned