she said, ’like your father!  You are so like him, you resemble him so much in form and feature, in the way you sit, in everything, that you must be his son!’ ’I have no doubt I am my father’s son,’ said I, ‘and what do you know about him?’ ’I married him,’ she said.  ’For nearly a year I was his wife, and then I foolishly ran away and left him.  What became of him I know not, nor how long he lived, but he was a great deal older than I was, and must have passed away many years ago.  But thou art his image.  He had the same ruddy face, the same short white hair, the same broad shoulders, the same way of crossing his legs as he sat.  He must have married soon after I left him.  Tell me, whom did he marry?  What was thy mother’s name?’ I gave her the name of my real mother, and she shook her head.  ‘I never heard of her,’ she said.  ‘Did thy father ever speak of me, a wife who ran away from him?’ ’Yes; he has spoken of you—­that is, if you are Zalia, the daughter of an oil-merchant of Rhodes?’

[Illustration:  “‘How like!’”]

“‘I am that woman,’ she exclaimed, ’I am that woman!  And did he mourn my loss?’

“‘Not much, I think, not much.’  Then I became a little nervous, for if this old woman talked to me much longer I was afraid, in spite of the fact that I was an elderly man when she was a girl, that she would become convinced that I could not be the son of the man who had once been her husband, but must be that man himself.  So I hastily excused myself on the plea of business, and after having given her some money I left her.”

“And did thee never see her again?” his wife asked, almost with tears in her eyes.

“No, I never saw her again,” said Mr. Crowder; “I was careful not to do that:  but I did not neglect her; I caused good care to be taken of her until she died.”

There was a slight pause here, and then Mrs. Crowder said: 

“Thee has known a great deal of poverty; in nearly all thy stories thee is a poor man.”

“There is good reason for that,” said Mr. Crowder; “poor people frequently have more adventures, at least more interesting ones, than those who are in easy circumstances.  Possession of money is apt to make life smoother and more commonplace; so, in selecting the most interesting events of my career to tell you, I naturally describe periods of comparative poverty—­and there were some periods in which I was in actual want of the necessaries of life.

“But you must not suppose that I have always been poor.  I have had my periods of wealth, but, as I explained to you before, it was very difficult, on account of the frequent necessity of changing my place of residence, as well as my identity, to carry over my property from one set of conditions to another.  However, I have often been able to do this, and at one time I was in comfortable circumstances for nearly two hundred years.  But generally, when I found myself obliged to leave a place where I had been living, for fear of suspicion concerning my age, I had to leave everything behind me.