“Your pardon, Sir Isaac. May I ask if you inherit the genius of your distinguished namesake?”
“Well, yes, to some extent I do; I philoserphize a good deal. I read a good many books folks leaves here, besides what newspapers I can pick up; but you see it costs a lifetime to get knowledge.”
Jaques, the misanthrope, wandering in the Forest of Arden, was not more astonished at Touchstone’s philosophy than I at this answer. “Very true,” I assented. “What is your philosophy of life?”
He tapped his forehead with his forefinger, but it was only too evident the apartment was untenanted. He remained a moment or two as if in deep thought, and then began,
“Well, I’m eighty-six years of age, come next July.”
My flesh began to creep: he was beginning, for the third time, his eternal formula. The hermit, fumbling a red handkerchief, resumed,
“I can say I’ve never wanted for necessaries, and don’t propose to give myself any trouble about it.” And then he expatiated on the folly of fretfulness.
The Hermit of Bethlehem, as he is called, but who opens his door wide for the world to enter, is a very ordinary sort of hermit indeed. Still, his very feebleness of intellect, his vanity even, should be a shield instead of a target for those who, like myself, are lured by the unmeaning trumpery at his door, which has no other significance in the world than a childish passion for objects that glitter in the sun.
The constituents of hotel life do not belong to any locality: they are universal. It is curious to see here people who have spent half their lives in India, or China, or Australia moving about among the untravelled with the well-bred ease and adaptation to circumstances that newly-fledged tourists can neither understand nor imitate. It is very droll, too, that people who have lived ten years in the same street, at home, without knowing each other, meet here for the first time.
I beg to introduce another acquaintance picked up by the roadside while walking from the Twin Mountain House to Bethlehem. Had I been driving, the incident would still have waited for a narrator.