'Ah!' exclaimed the elderly man, rising from the table. 'I was forgetting. You must pardon me, Alexander Joseph Chemmle. I have, I fear, nothing to offer you but biscuits and tinned meats. Do you care for tinned meats? I keep most kinds.'
'I like bloater paste,' Chimp said. 'I always take a pot or two back to school.'
'Ah!' cried his host eagerly, 'you like bloater paste best? That's famous! So do I. A community of taste!'
He disappeared into the cave, and in a minute or so came forth again, bearing the bloater paste and a plate in one hand, and the biscuits and a knife in the other. 'Now,' he said, 'fall to, and while you are eating these I must try to find something else. Tinned pears—do you like them?'
Chimp mumbled that he did. He was eating with more enjoyment than he ever had eaten in his life. Ambrosia was nothing to bloater paste.
'It is wonderful—our tastes coincide in everything,' said the elderly man as he entered the cave again. He returned with a tin of pears and some marmalade, a jug of water and a glass. Then he sat on a camp stool and observed his guest.
It was not until Chimp was well forward with the pears that his host spoke again. 'I am sorry, Alexander Joseph Chemmle,' he said, 'to have kept you waiting so long, for I take it that this is not your customary appetite—that you were, in fact, unusually, if not painfully, hungry. But I was so interested by the sight of a real boy that I could think of nothing else. You see, I have never met with a boy before.'
Chimp opened his eyes as wide almost as his mouth. 'But,' he began in his astonishment, 'they are as common as dirt, boys are. There's heaps of them—loads.'
'True,' the other made answer, 'true. But when one abandons the world, and, embracing the profession of the eremite, devotes one's life to solitude and reflection, one is deprived of the pleasure of intercourse with so attractive a personality as that of the average boy.'
'Ye-es,' dubiously from Chimp. 'But,' he added, 'you were a boy yourself once.'