I was very young, "I am an American, and
heir to Carvel Hall in Maryland."

"Lord, lord, I might have known," exclaimed he. "Once I had the honour
of dining with your Dr. Franklin, from Pennsylvania. He dresses for all
the world like you, only worse, and wears a hat I would not be caught
under at Bagnigge Wells, were I so imprudent as to go there."

"Dr. Franklin has weightier matters than hats to occupy him, sir," I
retorted. For I was determined to hold my own.

He made a French gesture, a shrug of his thin shoulders, which caused me
to suspect he was not always so good-natured.

"Dr. Franklin would better have stuck to his newspaper, my young friend,"
said he. "But I like your appearance too well to quarrel with you, and
we'll have no politics before eating. Come, gentlemen, come! Let us see
what Goble has left after his shaking."

He struck off with something of a painful gait, which he explained was
from the gout. And presently we arrived at his parlour, where supper was
set out for us. I had not tasted its equal since I left Maryland. We
sat down to a capon stuffed with eggs, and dainty sausages, and hot
rolls, such as we had at home; and a wine which had cobwebbed and
mellowed under the Castle Inn for better than twenty years. The
personage did not drink wine. He sent his servant to quarrel with Goble
because he had not been given iced water. While he was tapping on the
table I took occasion to observe him. His was a physiognomy to strike
the stranger, not by reason of its nobility, but because of its oddity.
He had a prodigious length of face, the nose long in proportion, but not
prominent. The eyes were dark, very bright, and wide apart, with little
eyebrows dabbed over them at a slanting angle. The thin-lipped mouth
rather pursed up, which made his smile the contradiction it was. In
short, my dears, while I do not lay claim to the reading of character,
it required no great astuteness to perceive the scholar, the man of the
world, and the ascetic--and all affected. His conversation bore out the
summary. It astonished us. It encircled the earth, embraced history and
letters since the world began. And added to all this, he had a thousand
anecdotes on his tongue's tip. His words he chose with too great a
nicety; his sentences were of a foreign formation, twisted around; and
his stories were illustrated with French gesticulations. He threw in
quotations galore, in Latin, and French, and English, until the capt