The stranger placed his broad-brimmed hat on the ground beside him, exposing a large round head somewhat bald in front, but not from age, and the rest of it covered with close-cut brown hair. His black clothes fitted him very closely, their extreme tightness suggesting that they had shrunken in the course of wearing, or that he had grown much plumper since he had come into possession of them; and their general worn and dull appearance gave considerable distance to the period of their first possession. But there was nothing worn or dull about the countenance of the man, upon which was an expression of mellow geniality which would have been suitably consequent upon a good dinner with plenty of wine. But his only beverage had been coffee, and in his clear bright eye there was no trace of any exhilaration, except that caused by the action of a hearty meal upon a good digestion and an optimistic disposition.
“I am very glad,” he said, looking about him at the company, and then glancing with a friendly air towards the two guides, who stood a little back of Mr. Archibald, “to have this opportunity to explain my appearance here. In the first place, I must tell you that I am a bishop whose diocese has been inundated, and who consequently has been obliged to leave it.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Mr. Archibald; and Margery looked at Mr. Clyde, with the remark:
“There! You see I was very near to it.”
“I presume this statement will require some explanation,” continued the man in black, “and I will make it presently. I am going to be exceedingly frank and open in all that I say to you, and as frankness and openness are so extremely rare in this world, it may be that I shall obtain favor in your eyes from the fact of my possessing those unusual qualities. Originally I was a teacher, and for a year or two I had a very good country school; but my employment at last became so repugnant to me that I could no longer endure it, and this repugnance was due entirely to my intense dislike for children.”
“That is not at all to your credit,” observed Mrs. Archibald; “and I do not see how you became a bishop, or why you should have been made one.”
“Was your diocese entirely meadow-land?” inquired Mr. Archibald.
“I am coming to all that,” said the stranger, with a smile of polite consideration towards Mrs. Archibald. “I know very well that it is not at all to my credit to dislike children, but I said I would be honest, and I am. I do dislike them—not their bodies, but their minds. Children, considered physically, are often pleasant to the view, and even interesting as companions, providing their innate juvenility is undisturbed; but when their personalities are rudely thrown open by a teacher, and the innate juvenility prematurely exposed to the air, it is something so clammy, so chilly to the mental marrow, that I shrink from it as I would shrink from the touch of any cold, clammy thing.”
“Horrible!” exclaimed Mrs. Archibald.
“I am not sure,” observed Margery, “that there is not some truth in that. I had a Sunday-school class for a little while, and although I can’t say there was a clamminess, there was—well, I don’t know what there was, but I gave it up.”