“Like myself, sir, you are a traveler this way?” he spoke, with a voice clear and musical, and with just enough of a refined brogue to discover the land of his nativity, or to give melody to his conversation.  “You will pardon me, sir; but I saw you evinced an interest in the notice of my lecture.  Ah! sir; even a look of encouragement cheers and fortifies this misgiving heart of mine.  Few, sir, very few, think of me, seeing that there is nothing about me pleasing to the eye.”  And as he said this, he sighed, frisked his left hand across his forehead, and shook his head.  I saw he was troubled with that lack of confidence in himself, so common to men of his kind; he was also too timid for one thrown upon a strange land with only genius to aid him in struggling against adversity.  On discovering to him who I was, and that I had written a Life and Times of Captain Seth Brewster, which my publisher, and several independent critics he kept in his employ, had praised into an unprecedented sale, though it was indeed the veriest rubbish, his pent up enthusiasm gushed forth in a rhapsody of joy.  I told him, too, that two sonnets which I had written, over the signature of Mary, had been published in the “New Bedford Mercury,” the editor of which very excellent paper said they were charming, though he never paid me a penny for them.  It may interest all aspiring female poets to know that these little attempts at verse found their way into the “Home Journal,” and were highly praised by it, as is everything written by Marys of sixteen.

“Men of letters are brothers!” said the little, deformed man, grasping tightly my hand.  “They should bind their sympathies in eternal friendship.  You have no other word for it!  The world never thinks of them until they are dead; ought they not then to be brothers to one another while they live?” He now placed two chairs, frisked about like one half crazed, expressed his joy at meeting one who had aspirations in common with him, said he wished the meek old lover in the corner had his young bride in paradise, and bid me be seated and join him in a talk over the past and present of letters.  I replied by saying I was more impatient to know what had brought him to Barnstable with so strange a subject for his lecture.  “That is the point, and I will tell you; for a stranger is never to blame for doing wrong when he thinks he is doing right!” said he, with great earnestness of manner.  And he drew his chair closer, and tapped me impressively on the arm with the fore finger of his right hand.  “And you read my name, Giles Sheridan, on the pink poster.  I am well known in some parts of the world, and not so well known in others.  Thanks to a merciful God, I am not the worst man in the world, and yet I am deformed; and as the world praises most the beauty that adorns the surface, so few think of me, care for me, or say, ’Giles Sheridan, there is meat and wine at my house, where you will be welcome.’  Thinking even a cripple might find favor and fortune in the