“Have you, then, had these apartments for—­more—­than—­seventy years?” I asked.

“They look as if they had not been swept for that time—­don’t they?  Hey?  I did not say that I had them for seventy years, but that Sir Joshua has visited me here.”

“When?” I asked, eying the man sternly, for I began to think he was an impostor.

He answered me with a glance still more stern:  “Sir Joshua Reynolds was here this very morning, with Angelica Kaufmann and Mr. Oliver Goldschmidt.  He is still very much attached to Angelica, who still does not care for him.  Because he is dead (and I was in the fourth mourning coach at his funeral) is that any reason why he should not come back to earth again?  My good sir, you are laughing at me.  He has sat many a time on that very chair which you are now occupying.  There are several spirits in the room now, whom you cannot see.  Excuse me.”  Here he turned round as if he was addressing somebody, and began rapidly speaking a language unknown to me.  “It is Arabic,” he said; “a bad patois, I own.  I learned it in Barbary, when I was a prisoner among the Moors.  In anno 1609, bin ick aldus ghekledt gheghaen.  Ha! you doubt me:  look at me well.  At least I am like—­”

Perhaps some of my readers remember a paper of which the figure of a man carrying a barrel formed the initial letter, and which I copied from an old spoon now in my possession.  As I looked at Mr. Pinto I do declare he looked so like the figure on that old piece of plate that I started and felt very uneasy.  “Ha!” said he, laughing through his false teeth (I declare they were false—­I could see utterly toothless gums working up and down behind the pink coral), “you see I wore a beard den; I am shafed now; perhaps you tink I am A spoon.  Ha, ha!” And as he laughed he gave a cough which I thought would have coughed his teeth out, his glass eye out, his wig off, his very head off; but he stopped this convulsion by stumping across the room and seizing a little bottle of bright pink medicine, which, being opened, spread a singular acrid aromatic odor through the apartment; and I thought I saw—­but of this I cannot take an affirmation—­a light green and violet flame flickering round the neck of the vial as he opened it.  By the way, from the peculiar stumping noise which he made in crossing the bare-boarded apartment, I knew at once that my strange entertainer had a wooden leg.  Over the dust which lay quite thick on the boards, you could see the mark of one foot very neat and pretty, and then a round O, which was naturally the impression made by the wooden stump.  I own I had a queer thrill as I saw that mark, and felt a secret comfort that it was not cloven.

In this desolate apartment in which Mr. Pinto had invited me to see him, there were three chairs, one bottomless, a little table on which you might put a breakfast tray, and not a single other article of furniture.  In the next room, the door of which was open, I could see a magnificent gilt dressing case, with some splendid diamond and ruby shirt studs lying by it, and a chest of drawers, and a cupboard apparently full of clothes.