The old hawker picked up the missing spectacles and handed them over.
"You wouldn't remember me, in any case," he said. "I last saw you twenty-five years ago, when you were trying to dig at Verria. There was an old man there, do you remember, being beaten by armed Bashi-Bazouks, and you held them up with an empty revolver, and took the old man to your camp and nursed him, and you said things to the Turkish Governor, and . . ."
"My excavations came to an untimely end," said the Student. "I always owed that old man a grudge for being beaten before my tent. Why couldn't he have been beaten somewhere else? I should like to meet him again and tell him precisely what I thought of his conduct."
"You have done both now," said the hawker. "And it is his turn."
"Impossible," said the Student. "He was as old twenty-five years ago as you are now."
"At my age," said the old man, "one grows no older. No one who walks the world as I do need ever grow any older. You can walk thirty miles on Monday when you are twenty years old; good. If you can do it on Monday you can do it on Tuesday; and if on Tuesday, then on Wednesday; therefore, by an easy reckoning, you can do it as well at eighty years old as at twenty. Thus you never age."
"There's a flaw in that somewhere," said the Student. "I know; it's the Heap. How many grains of sand make a heap?"
"How many buttons do you want?" said the hawker. "You saved my life once; you shall have all the buttons you want for nothing."
"I thought you couldn't answer my question," said the Student. "But we are getting on much too fast; we haven't really begun yet. I suppose you came here to sell things? Anne seemed to know you, and she said I wanted buttons. I pointed out to her that her statement was either an untruth or a truism, and equally objectionable in either sense; and now you repeat it, just as I was beginning to consider you quite an intelligent person. By the way, who are you?"
"I have a different name in most countries which I visit," said the old man. "But by profession I sell buttons—and other things."