Meet to be sent on errands.
Idem.
We will now enter one of the upper rooms of the notorious Graham House, with the interior of which we have before been familiarised, and which had been reopened, on a modified basis. A single glance at the confused piles of manuscripts, books, and papers, scattered about the room and on the table, mingled with stumps of pens and cigars, and a long-tubed meerschaum, showed that it could be no other than the characteristic den of a literary bachelor, who, with chair and table drawn close to the stove, sat there to show for himself, earnestly engaged in what seemed to be the business of his life—writing.
You saw in a moment that this was not a Northern man, for in addition to the long, black, and wavy hair, the dark, bronzed, and vaulting features indicated clearly a Southern origin. He was evidently young—certainly not more than twenty-seven, judging, as one instinctively does, by contour of person and features, and not by the expression of the face. But that expression, when you saw it, as he lifted his head, at once left you in doubt whether it could possibly belong to so immature a period of life. Although the brow was broad, and mild as that of a child, yet there was a solemn and unnatural fixedness in the whole face, which, united with the cold stillness of the great, gray, hollow eyes, told at once a dreary tale of suffering, which sent an involuntary shudder through your soul. Where the expression rested most, it was impossible for you to tell; but the feeling it conveyed was one of absolute horror. That a face, which seemed so young, should be one that never smiled!—And could the story that it told be true? Could it be that for years that face had never smiled?
A light tap was heard at the door, and, with a momentary frown of vexation at the interruption, he turned his head, and a young man entered the room, with somewhat hesitating step, which showed that he was by no means certain of his ground.
He was slight and thin, something below the average height, with even a darker complexion than that of the face we have just described; his black hair, and preternaturally black and vivid eyes, glittered beneath straight, heavy brows, which nearly met. His nose was prominent and partly arched; and there was, in the whole bowed bearing and cat-like gait of this person, an inexplicably strange and foreign look, which, alike in all countries, characterises that fated race which is yet an outcast among the nations.
His greeting was singularly expressive of eager appreciation, while that of his host to him was cold, distant, and merely polite. Pushing aside his writing materials, as he handed him a chair, Manton—for such was the name of our young writer—turned upon his visitor a frigid look of inquiry, and said, with a formality almost drawling—
“Doctor E. Willamot Weasel, I hope it is well with you this evening?”
His visitor, in rather a confused manner, commenced—“Ye-es, yes—I—I fear I am intruding on your seclusion; but p-pardon me, I cannot bear any longer to see you thus seclude yourself from all the amenities of social life. You need relaxation; your stern isolation here with the pen, and pen alone, is playing wild work with your fine faculties. Pardon me, if I insist upon it, that you must and should accept the sympathies of the men and women around you. In the doctrine of unity in diversity, Fourier demonstrates that there is nothing more fatal to consistent development of both body and mind, than entire pre-occupation in a single object or pursuit.”
Detecting a shade of vexation, at this juncture, crossing the open brow of Manton, Doctor Ebenezer Willamot Weasel hastily reiterated his apologies.