"All your royal people so far, though not perfect men, have had redeeming traits. I once knew one who had not a single characteristic, except, perhaps, some pluck. My man was simply a royal liar. In Western parlance, 'he was a boss.' His name was Colonel Jensen.
"Now, in my judgment, lying is the very grossest of human evils. A common liar is a perpetual proof of the truth of the doctrine of original sin. By that vice more friendships are broken and more real misery is perpetrated and perpetuated in the world than comes through any other channel.
"But as genius excites admiration even when exerted for sinister purposes, so when the art of lying is reduced to an absolute science there is something almost fine about it.
"My liar, when I first knew him, seemed to be between fifty and sixty years of age; but no one ever knew what his real age was.
"But he was quite an old man, for his hair was perfectly white, and that, with a singularly striking face and fine faculty of expressing his ideas, gave him an appearance at once venerable and engaging. It was hard to look into his almost classical face and to think that if he had told the truth within twenty years, it must have been an accident; but such was the fact, nevertheless.
"He was indeed a colossal prevaricator. He was at home, too, on every theme, and there was the charm of freshness to every new falsehood, for he spoke as one who was on the spot—an actor. If it was an event that he was describing, he was a participant; if a landscape or a structure, it was from actual observation; if it chanced to be a scientific theme, he invariably reported the words of some great scientist 'just as they fell from his lips.'
"He knew and had dined with all the great men of his generation—that is, he said so. He always spoke with particularly affectionate remembrance of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, always referring to them as 'Hank' and 'Dan,' so intimate had he been with them.
"My introduction to him was on a stormy winter night, in the early years of the Washoe excitement. A few of us were conversing in a hotel. One gentleman was describing something that he had witnessed in his boyhood, in Columbus, Ohio.
"As he finished his story, a venerable gentleman, who was a stranger in Washoe, and who had, for several minutes, been slowly pacing up and down the room, suddenly stopped and inquired of the gentleman who had been talking if he was from Columbus? When answered in the affirmative, the stranger extended his hand, dropped into a convenient seat as he spoke, and expressed his pleasure at meeting a gentleman from Columbus, at the same time introducing himself as Colonel Jensen and remarking that one of the happiest recollections of his life was of a day in Columbus, on which day all his prospects in life were changed and wonderfully brightened.
"With such an exordium, the rest could do no less than to press the old gentleman to favor the company with a rehearsal of what had transpired.