Before we had been an hour together, I had also observed that he was good-natured, impulsive, and, in a sort, kindly,—­that he loved himself and his own enjoyment too well ever knowingly to annoy or distress another.  There is a little difference between this and kindness.  No matter how I found him out.  He who runs may read, if he looks sharply enough; and in travelling, people betray and assert character continually.  I was also as sure as I was years afterwards, that he would walk rough-shod over heart-violets and -daisies, nor once notice them bleeding under his heel.  It was in the grain of the man’s nature.  He had lived at least thirty-five years, and was too old to be made over into anything else by any experience.

His bag was half full of tulip-bulbs which he had bought and begged, he said.  He had a passion at present for cultivating tulips, and was quite sure, that, if he had lived in the seventeenth instead of the nineteenth century, he would have ruined himself twenty times over for a favorite bulb, even without being a Dutchman.

His dominant idea, to which for the first hour he sacrificed without scruple every other, was flowers.  I had a mischievous pleasure in professing a similar passion, on purpose to confound him with a description of a Weston flower-garden.  If he talked of jessamine and Daphne odora, I talked of phlox and bachelor’s-buttons.  If he raved of azaleas and gladioluses, I told him of our China-asters, sunflowers, and hollyhocks.

“Ah, now I see you are laughing at me!” said he, good-humoredly, after I had said, that, after all, I could not get up an admiration for day-lilies or tulips; “promise me that I may show you my tulips, and I will promise you that you shall like botany hereafter.”

We agreed at last to bury the hatchet at the foot of a rose-bush, which I said I would allow, excused the existence of other flowers.  The bulbs he gave me on the top of the stage-coach that day made a revolution in the taste of Weston; and some climbing plants, from his house afterwards, took root in our rude homes, and have displaced the old glaring colors with soft beauty and grace.  Before I left Weston, which happened in time, we had prairie-roses, honeysuckles, and woodbine clambering over half the houses in the place, and bouncing-Bets were extinguished forever.

I forgot that we had never heard this man’s name, though it did not matter at all.  He was a cultivated gentleman, and we had no occasion for introduction.  We met freely on that platform, and it was pleasant to us to talk on so many subjects outside of personal interest.  He had travelled, and gave us results, in a sketchy, off-hand way, of much that he had observed that was extremely entertaining in foreign manners.

Suddenly his loud, cheery voice rang out,—­

“Halloo, old boy, get up here!”

He did get up, a languid, pale man, with sharp features, and a frame so attenuated that I involuntarily placed a soft bag for him to lean against, and removed a cane and umbrella that seemed likely to hurt his bones.