A negro man wearing a white jacket came through the iron gate, with its immense granite posts and wrought-iron lamp-holders.

“What is going on here to-night?” asked the hermit.

“Well, sah,” said the servitor, “dey is having de reg’lar Thursday-evenin’ dance in de casino.  And in de grill-room dere’s a beefsteak dinner, sah.”

The hermit glanced up at the inn on the hillside whence burst suddenly a triumphant strain of splendid harmony.

“And up there,” said he, “they are playing Mendelssohn—­what is going on up there?”

“Up in de inn,” said the dusky one, “dey is a weddin’ goin’ on.  Mr. Binkley, a mighty rich man, am marryin’ Miss Trenholme, sah—­de young lady who am quite de belle of de place, sah.”

HE ALSO SERVES

If I could have a thousand years—­just one little thousand years—­more of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to touch the hem of her robe.

Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words of the things they have seen and considered.  The recording of their tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers.  There are only two fates I dread—­deafness and writer’s cramp.  The hand is yet steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true camp-follower of fortune.

Biography shall claim you but an instant—­I first knew Hunky when he was head-waiter at Chubb’s little beefsteak restaurant and cafe on Third Avenue.  There was only one waiter besides.

Then, successively, I caromed against him in the little streets of the Big City after his trip to Alaska, his voyage as cook with a treasure-seeking expedition to the Caribbean, and his failure as a pearl-fisher in the Arkansas River.  Between these dashes into the land of adventure he usually came back to Chubb’s for a while.  Chubb’s was a port for him when gales blew too high; but when you dined there and Hunky went for your steak you never knew whether he would come to anchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan Archipelago.  You wouldn’t care for his description—­he was soft of voice and hard of face, and rarely had to use more than one eye to quell any approach to a disturbance among Chubb’s customers.

One night I found Hunky standing at a corner of Twenty-third Street and Third Avenue after an absence of several months.  In ten minutes we had a little round table between us in a quiet corner, and my ears began to get busy.  I leave out my sly ruses and feints to draw Hunky’s word-of-mouth blows—­it all came to something like this: 

“Speaking of the next election,” said Hunky, “did you ever know much about Indians?  No?  I don’t mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or Laughing Water kind—­I mean the modern Indian—­the kind that takes Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the half-back on the other side in football games.  The kind that eats macaroons and tea in the afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills up on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the ancestral wickiup.