From this you readily gather that I am severely taciturn at a table d’hote.  I refrain from joining in the “delightful conversation” which flies across the table, and know that my reticence is attributed to “insular pride.”  It is really and truly nothing but impatience of commonplace.  I thoroughly enjoy good talk; but, ask yourself, what are the probabilities of hearing that rare thing in the casual assemblage of forty or fifty people, not brought together by any natural affinities or interests, but thrown together by the accident of being in the same district, and in the same hotel?  They are not “forty feeding like one,” but like forty.  They have no community, except the community of commonplace.  No, tables d’hote are not delightful, and do not gather interesting people together.

Such has been my extensive experience.  But this at Nuremberg is a conspicuous exception.  At that table there was one guest who, on various grounds, personal and incidental, remains the most memorable man I ever met.  From the first he riveted my attention in an unusual degree.  He had not, as yet, induced me to emerge from my habitual reserve, for in truth, although he riveted my attention, he inspired me with a strange feeling of repulsion.  I could scarcely keep my eyes from him; yet, except the formal bow on sitting down and rising from the table, I had interchanged no sign of fellowship with him.  He was a young Russian, named Bourgonef, as I at once learned; rather handsome, and peculiarly arresting to the eye, partly from an air of settled melancholy, especially in his smile, the amiability of which seemed breaking from under clouds of grief, and still more so from the mute appeal to sympathy in the empty sleeve of his right arm, which was looped to the breast-button of his coat.  His eyes were large and soft.  He had no beard or whisker, and only delicate moustaches.  The sorrow, quiet but profound, the amiable smile and the lost arm, were appealing details which at once arrested attention and excited sympathy.  But to me this sympathy was mingled with a vague repulsion, occasioned by a certain falseness in the amiable smile, and a furtiveness in the eyes, which I saw—­or fancied—­and which, with an inexplicable reserve, forming as it were the impregnable citadel in the center of his outwardly polite and engaging manner, gave me something of that vague impression which we express by the words “instinctive antipathy.”

It was, when calmly considered, eminently absurd.  To see one so young, and by his conversation so highly cultured and intelligent, condemned to early helplessness, his food cut up for him by a servant, as if he were a child, naturally engaged pity, and, on the first day, I cudgeled my brains during the greater part of dinner in the effort to account for his lost arm.  He was obviously not a military man; the unmistakable look and stoop of a student told that plainly enough.  Nor was the loss one dating from early life: