He turned next to me.  What a grand face it was!  What a broad, white forehead—–­what fiercely brilliant black eyes—­what perfect regularity and refinement in the other features; with the long, venerable hair, framing them in, as it were, on either side!  Poor as I was, I felt that I could have painted his portrait for nothing.  Titian, Vandyke, Valasquez—­any of the three would have paid him to sit to them!

“Accept my humblest excuses, sir,” said the old man, speaking English with a singularly pure accent for a foreigner.  “That absurd book plunged me so deep down in the quagmires of sophistry and error, Mr. Kerby, that I really could not get to the surface at once when you came into the room.  So you are willing to draw my likeness for such a small sum as five pounds?” he continued, rising, and showing me that he wore a long black velvet gown, instead of the paltry and senseless costume of modern times.

I informed him that five pounds was as much as I generally got for a drawing.

“It seems little,” said the professor; “but if you want fame, I can make it up to you in that way.  There is my great work” (he pointed to the piles of manuscript), “the portrait of my mind and the mirror of my learning; put a likeness of my face on the first page, and posterity will then be thoroughly acquainted with me, outside and in.  Your portrait will be engraved, Mr. Kerby, and your name shall be inscribed under the print.  You shall be associated, sir, in that way, with a work which will form an epoch in the history of human science.  The Vital Principle—­or, in other words, the essence of that mysterious Something which we call Life, and which extends down from Man to the feeblest insect and the smallest plant—­has been an unguessed riddle from the beginning of the world to the present time.  I alone have found the answer; and here it is!” He fixed his dazzling eyes on me in triumph, and smacked the piles of manuscript fiercely with both his sallow hands.

I saw that he was waiting for me to say something; so I asked if his great work had not cost a vast expenditure of time and pains.

“I am seventy, sir,” said the Professor; “and I began preparing myself for that book at twenty.  After mature consideration, I have written it in English (having three other foreign languages at my fingers’ ends), as a substantial proof of my gratitude to the nation that has given me an asylum.  Perhaps you think the work looks rather long in its manuscript state?  It will occupy twelve volumes, sir, and it is not half long enough, even then, for the subject.  I take two volumes (and no man could do it in less) to examine the theories of all the philosophers in the world, ancient and modern, on the Vital Principle.  I take two more (and little enough) to scatter every one of the theories, seriatim, to the winds.  I take two more (at the risk, for brevity’s sake, of doing things by halves) to explain the exact stuff, or vital compound,