We accordingly went, and found him sitting at a small table, and apparently exhausted with the labour of composition, and the ardour of intense thought.  He was a small man, of quick, abrupt manners, occasionally very abstracted, but more frequently voluble, earnest, and disputatious.  He frankly told us he was sorry to see us, as he was then putting the last finish to a great and useful work he was about to publish:  that we had thus unseasonably broken the current of his thoughts, and he might not be able to revive it for some days.  Upon my rising to take my leave, he assured me that it would be adding to the injury already done, if we then quitted him.  He said he wished to learn the particulars of our voyage; and that he, in turn, should certainly render us service, by disclosing some of the results of his own reflections.  He further remarked, that he expected six or eight friends—­that is, (correcting himself,) “enlightened and congenial minds,” to supper, on the rising of a constellation he named, which time, he remarked, would soon arrive.  Finding his frankness to be thus seasoned with hospitality, we resumed our seats.  It soon appeared that he was more disposed to communicate information than to seek it; and I became a patient listener.  If the boldness and strangeness of his opinions occasionally startled me, I could not but admire the clearness with which he stated his propositions, the fervour of his elocution, and the plausibility of his arguments.

The expected guests at length arrived; and various questions of morals and legislation were started, in which the disputants seemed sometimes as if they would have laid aside the character of philosophers, but for the seasonable interposition of the Brahmin.  Wigurd, our host, often laboured with his accustomed zeal, to prove that every one who opposed him, was either a fool, or biassed by some petty interest, or the dupe of blind prejudice.

After about two hours of warm, and, as it seemed to me, unprofitable discussion, we were summoned to our repast in the adjoining room.  But before we rose from our seats, our host requested to know of each of us if we were hungry; and, whether it were from modesty, perverseness, or really because they had no appetite, I know not, but a majority of the company, in which I was included, voted that their hour of eating was not yet come:  upon which Wigurd remarked that his own vote, as being at home, and the Brahmin’s, as being at once a philosopher and a stranger, should each count for two; and by this mode of reckoning there was a casting vote in favour of going to supper.