He made a French gesture, a shrug of his thin shoulders, which caused me to suspect he was not always so good-natured.

“Dr. Franklin would better have stuck to his newspaper, my young friend,” said he.  “But I like your appearance too well to quarrel with you, and we’ll have no politics before eating.  Come, gentlemen, come!  Let us see what Goble has left after his shaking.”

He struck off with something of a painful gait, which he explained was from the gout.  And presently we arrived at his parlour, where supper was set out for us.  I had not tasted its equal since I left Maryland.  We sat down to a capon stuffed with eggs, and dainty sausages, and hot rolls, such as we had at home; and a wine which had cobwebbed and mellowed under the Castle Inn for better than twenty years.  The personage did not drink wine.  He sent his servant to quarrel with Goble because he had not been given iced water.  While he was tapping on the table I took occasion to observe him.  His was a physiognomy to strike the stranger, not by reason of its nobility, but because of its oddity.  He had a prodigious length of face, the nose long in proportion, but not prominent.  The eyes were dark, very bright, and wide apart, with little eyebrows dabbed over them at a slanting angle.  The thin-lipped mouth rather pursed up, which made his smile the contradiction it was.  In short, my dears, while I do not lay claim to the reading of character, it required no great astuteness to perceive the scholar, the man of the world, and the ascetic—­and all affected.  His conversation bore out the summary.  It astonished us.  It encircled the earth, embraced history and letters since the world began.  And added to all this, he had a thousand anecdotes on his tongue’s tip.  His words he chose with too great a nicety; his sentences were of a foreign formation, twisted around; and his stories were illustrated with French gesticulations.  He threw in quotations galore, in Latin, and French, and English, until the captain began casting me odd, uncomfortable looks, as though he wished himself well out of the entertainment.  Indeed, poor John Paul’s perturbation amused me more than the gentleman’s anecdotes.  To be ill at ease is discouraging to any one, but it was peculiarly fatal with the captain.  This arch-aristocrat dazzled him.  When he attempted to follow in the same vein he would get lost.  And his really considerable learning counted for nothing.  He reached the height of his mortification when the slim gentleman dropped his eyelids and began to yawn.  I was wickedly delighted.  He could not have been better met.  Another such encounter, and I would warrant the captain’s illusions concerning the gentry to go up in smoke.  Then he might come to some notion of his own true powers.  As for me, I enjoyed the supper which our host had insisted upon our partaking, drank his wine, and paid him very little attention.

“May I make so bold as to ask, sir, whether you are a patron of literature?” said the captain, at length.