girded round him by a thick silk cord. His long white hair escaped on
either side of his face from under a black velvet cap which closely
fitted his head and made a formal setting for his countenance. His
gown enveloped his body like a winding sheet, so that all that was
left visible was a narrow bleached human face. But for the wasted arm,
thin as a draper's wand, which held aloft the lamp that cast all its
light upon him, the face would have seemed to hang in mid air. A gray
pointed beard concealed the chin of this fantastical appearance, and
gave him the look of one of those Jewish types which serve artists as
models for Moses. His lips were so thin and colorless that it needed a
close inspection to find the lines of his mouth at all in the pallid
face. His great wrinkled brow and hollow bloodless cheeks, the
inexorably stern expression of his small green eyes that no longer
possessed eyebrows or lashes, might have convinced the stranger that
Gerard Dow's "Money Changer" had come down from his frame. The
craftiness of an inquisitor, revealed in those curving wrinkles and
creases that wound about his temples, indicated a profound knowledge
of life. There was no deceiving this man, who seemed to possess a
power of detecting the secrets of the wariest heart.

The wisdom and the moral codes of every people seemed gathered up in
his passive face, just as all the productions of the globe had been
heaped up in his dusty showrooms. He seemed to possess the tranquil
luminous vision of some god before whom all things are open, or the
haughty power of a man who knows all things.

With two strokes of the brush a painter could have so altered the
expression of this face, that what had been a serene representation of
the Eternal Father should change to the sneering mask of a
Mephistopheles; for though sovereign power was revealed by the