“He never can have looked like anything but a bundle of sticks,” Murchard had once said of him.  “Or a phosphorescent log, rather,” some one else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this description of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes in a face like mottled bark.  He had always been possessed of a leisure which he had nursed and protected, instead of squandering it in vain activities.  His carefully guarded hours had been devoted to the cultivation of a fine intelligence and a few judiciously chosen habits; and none of the disturbances common to human experience seemed to have crossed his sky.  Nevertheless, his dispassionate survey of the universe had not raised his opinion of that costly experiment, and his study of the human race seemed to have resulted in the conclusion that all men were superfluous, and women necessary only because some one had to do the cooking.  On the importance of this point his convictions were absolute, and gastronomy was the only science which he revered as dogma.  It must be owned that his little dinners were a strong argument in favour of this view, besides being a reason—­though not the main one—­for the fidelity of his friends.

Mentally he exercised a hospitality less seductive but no less stimulating.  His mind was like a forum, or some open meeting-place for the exchange of ideas:  somewhat cold and draughty, but light, spacious and orderly—­a kind of academic grove from which all the leaves had fallen.  In this privileged area a dozen of us were wont to stretch our muscles and expand our lungs; and, as if to prolong as much as possible the tradition of what we felt to be a vanishing institution, one or two neophytes were now and then added to our band.

Young Phil Frenham was the last, and the most interesting, of these recruits, and a good example of Murchard’s somewhat morbid assertion that our old friend “liked ’em juicy.”  It was indeed a fact that Culwin, for all his mental dryness, specially tasted the lyric qualities in youth.  As he was far too good an Epicurean to nip the flowers of soul which he gathered for his garden, his friendship was not a disintegrating influence:  on the contrary, it forced the young idea to robuster bloom.  And in Phil Frenham he had a fine subject for experimentation.  The boy was really intelligent, and the soundness of his nature was like the pure paste under a delicate glaze.  Culwin had fished him out of a thick fog of family dulness, and pulled him up to a peak in Darien; and the adventure hadn’t hurt him a bit.  Indeed, the skill with which Culwin had contrived to stimulate his curiosities without robbing them of their young bloom of awe seemed to me a sufficient answer to Murchard’s ogreish metaphor.  There was nothing hectic in Frenham’s efflorescence, and his old friend had not laid even a finger-tip on the sacred stupidities.  One wanted no better proof of that than the fact that Frenham still reverenced them in Culwin.