He has talent for modelling, but this he exercises more rarely.  Usually, his figures are grotesque rather than beautiful, and he never allows them to remain longer than for a few moments, often changing them so rapidly under your eye that it seems like jugglery.  He is fondest of doing this at twilight, and loves the darkest corner of the room.  From the half-light he will suddenly thrust out before you a grinning gargoyle head, to which he will give in an instant more a pair of spider legs, and then, with one roll, stretch it out into a crocodile, whose jaws seem so near snapping that you involuntarily draw your chair further back.  Next, in a freak of ventriloquism, he startles you still more by bringing from the crocodile’s mouth a sigh, so long drawn, so human, that you really shudder, and are ready to implore him to play no more tricks.  He knows when he has reached this limit, and soothes you at once by a tender, far-off whisper, like the wind through pines, sometimes almost like an Aeolian harp; then he rouses you from your dreams by what you are sure is a tap at the door.  You turn, speak, listen; no one enters; the tap again.  Ah! it is only a little more of the ventriloquism of this wonderful creature.  You are alone with him, and there was no tap at the door.

But when there is, and the friend comes in, then my companion’s genius shines out.  Almost always in life the third person is a discord, or at least a burden; but he is so genial, so diffusive, so sympathetic, that, like some tints by which painters know how to bring out all the other colors in a picture, he forces every one to do his best.  I am indebted to him already for a better knowledge of some men and women with whom I had talked for years before to little purpose.  It is most wonderful that he produces this effect, because he himself is so silent; but there is some secret charm in his very smile which puts people en rapport with each other, and with him at once.

I am almost afraid to go on with the list of the things my companion can do.  I have not yet told the half, nor the most wonderful; and I believe I have already overtaxed credulity.  I will mention only one more,—­but that is to me far more inexplicable than all the rest.  I am sure that it belongs, with mesmerism and clairvoyance, to the domain of the higher psychological mysteries.  He has in rare hours the power of producing the portraits of persons whom you have loved, but whom he has never seen.  For this it is necessary that you should concentrate your whole attention on him, as is always needful to secure the best results of mesmeric power.  It must also be late and still.  In the day, or in a storm, I have never known him to succeed in this.  For these portraits he uses only shadowy gray tints.  He begins with a hesitating outline.  If you are not tenderly and closely in attention, he throws it aside; he can do nothing.  But if you are with him, heart and soul, and do not take your eyes from his, he will presently fill out the dear faces, full, life-like, and wearing a smile, which makes you sure that they too must have been summoned from the other side, as you from this, to meet on the shadowy boundary between flesh and spirit.  He must see them as clearly as he sees you; and it would be little more for his magic to do if he were at the same moment showing to their longing eyes your face and answering smile.