tter is
coming, with his nasty science, and his lenses, and his mathematics. Of
course he will wear those vivid green spectacles morning, noon, and
night,--such a dreadfully offensive color."

"Yes," said John, gazing down at his neat shoes, as he stood rubbing his
broad hands slowly together before the fire, "Cutter is coming, too.
What a queer party we shall be at Christmas."

And when Christmas came, we were a very queer party indeed.

At the prospect of seeing united, under an English roof, an English
family, consisting of a great manufacturer,--at the same time a
thorough-going country gentleman of old descent,--his wife, his
beautiful daughter, and his aesthetic sister-in-law, having with them as
guests the son of the master of the house, being a young English
diplomatist; an English professor, who had given up his professorship to
devote himself to the study of diseases of the mind; a Russian secretary
of the embassy, who had seen the world, and was thirty years old; and,
lastly, your humble slave of the pen, being an American,--at the
prospect of such a heterogeneous assembly of men and women, you will
suppose, my dear lady, that I am about to embark upon the cerulean
waters of a potentially platonic republic, humbly steering my craft by
the charts of a recent voyager, who, after making a noble but
ineffectual attempt to discover the Isles of the Blessed, appears to
have stumbled into the drawing-rooms of the Damned.

I am not going to do anything of the kind. My story is written for the
sole purpose of amusing you, and as a form of diversion for your
leisure moments I would select neither the Wordsworthian pastoral, nor
the platonic doctrine of Ideas. Mary Carvel would give her vote for the
Dalesman, and Chrysophrasia for Plato, but I have not consulted them;
and if I do not consult you, it is because I think I understand your
tastes. You will, moreover, readily understand that in telling this tale
I sometimes speak of things I did not actually see, because I know the
people concerned very well, and some of them told me at the time, and
have told me since, what they felt and thought about the things they did
and saw done. For myself, I am the man you have long known, Paul Griggs,
the American; a man of many acquaintances and of few friends, who has
seen the world, and is forty-three years of age, ugly and tough, not so
poor as I have been, not so good as I might be, melancholic by
temperament, and a little