This and other tales, that knight of St. Louis, our fellow-boarder, knew how to tell with passion and animation; for which reason I was fond of accompanying him in his walks, unlike the others, who avoided such invitations, and left me alone with him.  As with new acquaintances I generally took my ease for a long time without thinking much about them or the effect which they were exercising upon me, so I only remarked gradually that his stories and opinions rather unsettled and confused than instructed and enlightened me.  I never knew what to make of him, although the riddle might easily have been solved.  He belonged to the many to whom life offers no results, and who, therefore, from first to last, exert themselves on individual objects.  Unfortunately he had with this a decided desire, nay, even passion, for meditating, without having any capacity for thinking; and in such men a particular notion easily fixes itself fast, which may be regarded as a mental disease.  To such a fixed view he always came back again, and was thus in the long run excessively tiresome.  He would bitterly complain of the decline of his memory, especially with regard to the latest events, and maintained, by a logic of his own, that all virtue springs from a good memory, and all vice, on the contrary, from forgetfulness.  This doctrine he contrived to carry out with much acuteness; as, indeed, any thing may be maintained when one has no compunction to use words altogether vaguely, and to employ and apply them in a sense now wider, now narrower, now closer, now more remote.

At first it was amusing to hear him; nay, his persuasiveness even astonished us.  We fancied we were standing before a rhetorical sophist, who for jest and practice knew how to give a fair appearance to the strangest things.  Unfortunately this first impression became blunted but too soon; for at the end of every discourse, manage the thing as I would, the man came back again to the same theme.  He was not to be held fast to older events, although they interested him,—­although he had them present to his mind with their minutest circumstances.  Indeed, he was often, by a small circumstance, snatched out of the middle of a wild historical narrative, and thrust into his detestable favorite thought.

One of our afternoon walks was particularly unfortunate in this respect:  the account of it may stand here instead of similar cases, which might weary if not vex the reader.

On the way through the city we were met by an old female mendicant, who, by her beggings and importunities, disturbed him in his story.  “Pack yourself off, old witch!” said he, and walked by.  She shouted after him the well-known retort,—­only somewhat changed, since she saw well that the unfriendly man was old himself,—­“If you did not wish to be old, you should have had yourself hanged in your youth!” He turned round violently, and I feared a scene.  “Hanged cried he, “have myself hanged!  No:  that could not have been,—­I