With all his reflective habits he never made up his mind on a subject.  His adherents accounted for this by the astonishing magnitude of his ideas.  He conceived every subject on so grand a scale that he had not room in his head to turn it over and examine both sides of it.  Certain it is that if any matter were propounded to him, on which ordinary mortals would rashly determine at first glance, he would put on a vague mysterious look, shake his capacious head, smoke some time in profound silence, and at length observe that “he had his doubts about the matter;” which gained him the reputation of a man slow of belief, and not easily imposed upon.  What is more, it gained him a lasting name, for to this habit of the mind has been attributed his surname of Twiller, which is said to be a corruption of the original Twijfler, or, in plain English, Doubter.

The person of this illustrious old gentleman was formed and proportioned, as though it had been moulded by the hands of some cunning Dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur.  He was exactly five feet six inches in height and six feet five inches in circumference.  His head was a perfect sphere, and of such stupendous dimensions, that Dame Nature, with all her sex’s ingenuity, would have been puzzled to construct a neck capable of supporting it; wherefore, she wisely declined the attempt, and settled it firmly on the top of his backbone; just between the shoulders.  His body was oblong and particularly capacious at bottom, which was wisely ordered by Providence, seeing that he was a man of sedentary habits, and very averse to the idle labor of walking.

His legs were short, but sturdy in proportion to the weight they had to sustain; so that, when erect, he had not a little the appearance of a beer barrel on skids.  His face, that infallible index of the mind, presented a vast expanse, unfurrowed by any of those lines and angles which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression.  Two small gray eyes twinkled feebly in the midst, like two stars of lesser magnitude in a hazy firmament; and his full-fed cheeks, which seemed to have taken toll of everything that went into his mouth, were curiously mottled and streaked with dusky red, like a Spitzenberg apple.

His habits were as regular as his person.  He daily took his four stated meals; appropriating exactly an hour to each; he smoked and doubted eight hours, and he slept the remaining twelve of the four-and-twenty.  Such was the renowned Wouter Van Twiller—­a true philosopher, for his mind was either elevated above, or tranquilly settled below, the cares and perplexities of this world.  He had lived in it for years, without feeling the least curiosity to know whether the sun revolved round it, or it round the sun; and he had watched for at least half century the smoke curling from his pipe to the ceiling, without once troubling his head with any of those numerous theories by which a philosopher would have perplexed his brain in accounting for its rising above the surrounding atmosphere.