How short and fat and dark and debauched he makes one feel!  By nothing he says or means, of course, but merely by his old unconscious purity and simplicity—­that slender straightness which makes him remind you of the spire of an English abbey.  He greeted me with smiles, and stares, and alarming blushes.  He assures me that he never would have known me, and that five years have altered me—­sehr!  I asked him if it were for the better?  He looked at me hard for a moment, with his eyes of blue, and then, for an answer, he blushed again.

On my arrival we agreed to walk over from the village.  He dismissed his wagon with my luggage, and we went arm-in-arm through the dusk.  The town is seated at the foot of certain mountains, whose names I have yet to learn, and at the head of a big sheet of water, which, as yet, too, I know only as “the Lake.”  The road hitherward soon leaves the village and wanders in rural loveliness by the margin of this expanse.  Sometimes the water is hidden by clumps of trees, behind which we heard it lapping and gurgling in the darkness:  sometimes it stretches out from your feet in shining vagueness, as if it were tired of making, all day, a million little eyes at the great stupid hills.  The walk from the tavern takes some half an hour, and in this interval Theodore made his position a little more clear.  Mr. Sloane is a rich old widower; his age is seventy-two, and as his health is thoroughly broken, is practically even greater; and his fortune—­Theodore, characteristically, doesn’t know anything definite about that.  It’s probably about a million.  He has lived much in Europe, and in the “great world;” he has had adventures and passions and all that sort of thing; and now, in the evening of his days, like an old French diplomatist, he takes it into his head to write his memoirs.  To this end he has lured poor Theodore to his gruesome side, to mend his pens for him.  He has been a great scribbler, says Theodore, all his days, and he proposes to incorporate a large amount of promiscuous literary matter into these souvenirs intimes.  Theodore’s principal function seems to be to get him to leave things out.  In fact, the poor youth seems troubled in conscience.  His patron’s lucubrations have taken the turn of many other memoirs, and have ceased to address themselves virginibus puerisque.  On the whole, he declares they are a very odd mixture—­a medley of gold and tinsel, of bad taste and good sense.  I can readily understand it.  The old man bores me, puzzles me, and amuses me.

He was in waiting to receive me.  We found him in his library—­which, by the way, is simply the most delightful apartment that I ever smoked a cigar in—­a room arranged for a lifetime.  At one end stands a great fireplace, with a florid, fantastic mantelpiece in carved white marble—­an importation, of course, and, as one may say, an interpolation; the groundwork of the house, the “fixtures,” being throughout plain, solid and domestic.  Over