The little house on wheels belonged to himself and to the wolf.  Besides his house, his retort, and his wolf, he had a flute and a violoncello on which he played prettily.  He concocted his own elixirs.  His wits yielded him enough to sup on sometimes.  In the top of his van was a hole, through which passed the pipe of a cast-iron stove; so close to his box as to scorch the wood of it.  The stove had two compartments; in one of them Ursus cooked his chemicals, and in the other his potatoes.  At night the wolf slept under the van, amicably secured by a chain.  Homo’s hair was black, that of Ursus, gray; Ursus was fifty, unless, indeed, he was sixty.  He accepted his destiny, to such an extent that, as we have just seen, he ate potatoes, the trash on which at that time they fed pigs and convicts.  He ate them indignant, but resigned.  He was not tall—­he was long.  He was bent and melancholy.  The bowed frame of an old man is the settlement in the architecture of life.  Nature had formed him for sadness.  He found it difficult to smile, and he had never been able to weep, so that he was deprived of the consolation of tears as well as of the palliative of joy.  An old man is a thinking ruin; and such a ruin was Ursus.  He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of a prophet, the irascibility of a charged mine:  such was Ursus.  In his youth he had been a philosopher in the house of a lord.

This was 180 years ago, when men were more like wolves than they are now.

Not so very much though.

II.

Homo was no ordinary wolf.  From his appetite for medlars and potatoes he might have been taken for a prairie wolf; from his dark hide, for a lycaon; and from his howl prolonged into a bark, for a dog of Chili.  But no one has as yet observed the eyeball of a dog of Chili sufficiently to enable us to determine whether he be not a fox, and Homo was a real wolf.  He was five feet long, which is a fine length for a wolf, even in Lithuania; he was very strong; he looked at you askance, which was not his fault; he had a soft tongue, with which he occasionally licked Ursus; he had a narrow brush of short bristles on his backbone, and he was lean with the wholesome leanness of a forest life.  Before he knew Ursus and had a carriage to draw, he thought nothing of doing his fifty miles a night.  Ursus meeting him in a thicket near a stream of running water, had conceived a high opinion of him from seeing the skill and sagacity with which he fished out crayfish, and welcomed him as an honest and genuine Koupara wolf of the kind called crab-eater.

As a beast of burden, Ursus preferred Homo to a donkey.  He would have felt repugnance to having his hut drawn by an ass; he thought too highly of the ass for that.  Moreover he had observed that the ass, a four-legged thinker little understood by men, has a habit of cocking his ears uneasily when philosophers talk nonsense.  In life the ass is a third person between our thoughts and ourselves, and acts as a restraint.  As a friend, Ursus preferred Homo to a dog, considering that the love of a wolf is more rare.