"Christopher," said Anthony, and his big paw squeezed the thin one tightly, and his eyes beamed, "you have not changed at all. You are not fatter; you have no more hair upon your head; you are just the same human, interested man you were, years and years ago."
"As for being human," said Christopher Dent, "why not, since I have around me in their natural concentrated forms all the organic elements upon which humanity is founded? Age is not a hard thing to check when one breathes constantly those fragrances which regulate the action of the system. I could do with more hair upon my head," a little ruefully; "but," with immediate cheeriness, "we'll let that pass, for what signifies hair? It is but a horny growth, meant to protect the skull, which is the casket of the brain, in those times when the world had not yet reached the point of hats."
He then invited Anthony into a little room, a sort of laboratory, at the back of the shop, in which were a brick furnace, a still in operation, crucibles, mortars, jars of various colored liquids, and bladders filled with powders.
"Sit down," said old Christopher, as he took some dusty, sheep-covered books from a stool. "Sit down and tell me how it has been with you these many years."
Anthony sat down; and the little apothecary sat near him, a shaft of noonday light from a window dazzling upon the crown of his head.
"I have seen your uncle, of course, many times since," said he. "But in what talk I've had with him he never mentioned you."
"I suppose," said Anthony, "he had nothing to tell. There was a difference between my father and him—nothing serious, but still a difference—at the time of the separation of their interests. I don't think a half-dozen letters passed between them afterwards, I know they never saw each other again."
The old apothecary clicked his tongue pityingly.
"Such wretched states of mind people permit themselves to get into," said he. "There was no reason why, if your mother desired to go back to her native land, that your father should not sell out his interest and take her away."
"I think, from the little I've heard my father say,—for he seldom mentioned it,—my uncle understood and agreed to all that. But what he disliked was the sudden curtailing of the firm's operations because of the moneys that had gone out of it."