Bruno shook his head impatiently. “That’s what he calls his hair, not his self, oo silly!” He appealed to me. “What doos he call his self, Mister Sir?”
“That’s the only name I know of,” I said. “But he looks very lonely. Don’t you pity his grey hairs?”
“I pities his self,” said Bruno, still harping on the misnomer; “but I doosn’t pity his hair, one bit. His hair ca’n’t feel!”
“We met him this afternoon,” said Sylvie. “We’d been to see Nero, and we’d had such fun with him, making him invisible again! And we saw that nice old gentleman as we came back.”
“Well, let’s go and talk to him, and cheer him up a little,” I said: “and perhaps we shall find out what he calls himself.”
CHAPTER XI.
THE MAN IN THE MOON.
The children came willingly. With one of them on each side of me, I approached the corner occupied by ‘Mein Herr.’ “You don’t object to children, I hope?” I began.
“Crabbed age and youth cannot live together!” the old man cheerfully replied, with a most genial smile. “Now take a good look at me, my children! You would guess me to be an old man, wouldn’t you?”
At first sight, though his face had reminded me so mysteriously of “the Professor,” he had seemed to be decidedly a younger man: but, when I came to look into the wonderful depth of those large dreamy eyes, I felt, with a strange sense of awe, that he was incalculably older: he seemed to gaze at us out of some by-gone age, centuries away.
