“Now that you have found us, Sir Ulysses”—­continued my eccentric host, motioning me, with an indescribably princely wave of the hand to accompany him—­“you must certainly give us the pleasure of your company to luncheon.  Visitors are as rare as black swans on this Ultima Thule of ours—­though, by the way, the black swan, cygnus atratus, is nothing like so rare as the ancients believed.  I have shot them myself out in Australia.  Still they are rare enough for the purpose of imagery, though really not so rare as a human being one can talk intelligently to on this island.”

Talk!  My friend, indeed, very evidently was a talker—­one of those fantastic monologists to whom an audience is little more than a symbol.  I saw that there was no need for me to do any of the talking.  He was more than glad to do it all.  Plainly his encounter with me was to him like a spring in a thirsty land.

“Solitude,” he continued, “is perhaps the final need of the human soul.  After a while, when we have run the gamut of all our ardours and our dreams, solitude comes to seem the one excellent thing, the summum bonum.”

I murmured that he certainly seemed to have come to the right place for it.

“Very true, indeed,” he assented, with a courtly inclination of his head, as though I had said something profound; “very true, indeed, and yet, wasn’t it the great Bacon who said:  ’Whoever is delighted with solitude is either a beast or a god’?—­and this particular solitude, I confess, sometimes seems to me a little too much like that enforced solitude of the Pontic marshes of which Ovid wailed and whimpered in the deaf ears of Augustus.”

I could not help noticing at last as he talked on with this fantastic magnificence, the odd contrast between his speech and the almost equally fantastic poverty of his clothing.  The suit he wore, though still preserving a certain elegance of cut, was so worn and patched and stained that a negro would hardly have accepted it as a gift; and his almost painful emaciation gave him generally the appearance of an animated framework of rags and bones, startlingly embodying the voice and the manners of a prince.  Yet the shabby tie about his neck was bound by a ring, in which was set a turquoise of great size and beauty.  Evidently he was a being of droll contrasts, and I prepared myself to be surprised at nothing concerning him.

Presently, as we loitered on through the palms, we came upon two negroes chopping away with their machetes, trimming up the debris of broken and decaying palm fans.  They were both sturdy, ferocious-looking fellows, but one of them was a veritable giant.

“Behold my bodyguard!” said my magnificent friend, with the usual possessive wave of his hand; “my Switzers, my Janissaries, so to say.”

The negroes stopped working, touched their great straw hats, and flashed their splendid teeth in a delighted smile.  Evidently they were used to their master’s way of talking, and were devoted to him.