him. Still, when he actually arrived, and I took his hand as he stepped
from the train, I found it less difficult to say that I was glad to see
him than I expected. In fact, I was glad, for I could not look upon his
face without feeling a glow of kindness for him. I had not the least
trouble in identifying him, for he was so unlike all the Americans who
dismounted from the train with him, and who all looked hot, worried, and
anxious. He was a man no longer young, but in what we call the heyday of
life, when our own people are so absorbed in making provision for the
future that they may be said not to live in the present at all. This
Altrurian's whole countenance, and especially his quiet, gentle eyes,
expressed a vast contemporaneity, with bounds of leisure removed to the
end of time; or, at least, this was the effect of something in them which
I am obliged to report in rather fantastic terms. He was above the middle
height, and he carried himself vigorously. His face was sunburned, or
sea-burned, where it was not bearded; and, although I knew from my
friend's letter that he was a man of learning and distinction in his own
country, I should never have supposed him a person of scholarly life, he
was so far from sicklied over with anything like the pale cast of thought.
When he took the hand I offered him in my half-hearted welcome he gave it
a grasp that decided me to confine our daily greetings to something much
less muscular.

"Let me have your bag," I said, as we do when we meet people at the train,
and he instantly bestowed a rather heavy valise upon me, with a smile in
his benignant eyes, as if it had been the greatest favor. "Have you got
any checks?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, in very good English, but with an accent new to me, "I
bought two." He gave them to me, and I passed them to our hotel porter,
who was waiting there with the baggage-cart. Then I proposed that we