And, late that spring, at some date at which he could not possibly have been expected to arrive, he turned up at our house.

Of course we had talked a great deal about him, and wondered what manner of a man we should find him.  Between us, my wife and I had got an idea of his personal appearance which I despair of conveying in words.  Vaguely, I should say that we had pictured him as something mid-way between an abnormally tall Chinese mandarin and a benevolent Quaker.  What we found when we got home and were told that our uncle from India was awaiting us, was a shrunken and bent old gentleman, dressed very cleanly and neatly in black broadcloth, with a limp, many-pleated shirt-front of old-fashioned style, and a plain black cravat.  If he had worn an old-time stock we could have forgiven him the rest of the disappointment he cost us; but we had to admit to ourselves that he had the most absolutely commonplace appearance of all our acquaintance.  In fact, we soon discovered that, except for a taciturnity the like of which we had never encountered, our aromatic uncle had positively not one picturesque characteristic about him.  Even his aroma was a disappointment.  He had it, but it was patchouly or some other cheap perfume of the sort, wherewith he scented his handkerchief, which was not even a bandanna, but a plain decent white one of the unnecessarily large sort which clergymen and old gentlemen affect.

But, even if we could not get one single romantic association to cluster about him, we very soon got to like the old gentleman.  It is true that at our first meeting, after saying “How d’ye do” to me and receiving in impassive placidity the kiss which my wife gave him, he relapsed into dead silence, and continued to smoke a clay pipe with a long stem and a short bowl.  This instrument he filled and re-filled every few minutes, and it seemed to be his only employment.  We plied him with questions, of course, but to these he responded with a wonderful brevity.  In the course of an hour’s conversation we got from him that he had had a pleasant voyage that it was not a long voyage, that it was not a short voyage, that it was about the usual voyage, that he had not been seasick, that he was glad to be back, and that he was not surprised to find the country very much changed.  This last piece of information was repeated in the form of a simple “No,” given in reply to the direct question; and although it was given politely, and evidently without the least unamiable intent, it made us both feel very cheap.  After all, it was absurd to ask a man if he were surprised to find the country changed after fifty or sixty years of absence.  Unless he was an idiot, and unable to read at that, he must have expected something of the sort.