My lameness, which dated from that ride down the Navajo canon,
persisted, which was another worriment; for Zulime was too busy with
sewing-women to give much time to me and walking was very painful, hence
I spent most of my day down at the bank, talking with my prospective
father-in-law, who interested me much more than the sordid little
village and its empty landscape. He was a sturdy, slow-moving man with
long, gray beard, a powerful and strongly individual thinker, almost as
alien to his surroundings as a Hindoo Yoghi would have been. With the
bland air of a kindly teacher he met his customers in the outer office
and genially discoursed to them of whatever happened to be in his own
mind--what they were thinking about was of small account to him.

As a deeply-studied philosopher of the old-fashioned sort, his words,
even when addressed to a German farmer, were deliberately chosen, and
his sentences stately, sonorous and precise. Regarding me as a man of
books, he permitted himself to roam widely over the fields of medieval
history, and to wander amid the gardens of ancient faiths and dimly
remembered thrones.

Although enormously learned, his knowledge was expressed in terms of the
past. His quotations, I soon discovered, were almost entirely confined
to books whose covers were of a faded brown. His scientists, his
historians were all of the Victorian age or antecedent thereto. Breasted
and Ferrero did not concern him. His biologists were of the time of
Darwin, his poets of an age still earlier, and yet, in spite of his
musty citations, he was a master mind. He knew what he knew (he guessed
at nothing), and, sitting there in that bare little bank, I listened in
silence what time he marched from Zoroaster down to Charlemagne, and
from Rome to Paris. He quoted from Buckle and Bacon and Macaulay till I
marveled at the contrast between his great shaggy head and its
commonplace surroundings, for in the midst of a discussion of the bleak
problems of Agnosticism, or while considering Gibbon's contribution to
the world's stock of historical knowledge, certain weather-worn Bavarian
farmers came and went, studying us with half-stupid, half-suspicious
glances, having no more kinship with Don Carlos Taft than so many
Comanches.

It is probable that the lonely old scholar rejoiced in me as a
comprehending, or at least a sympathetic, listener, for he talked on and
on, a steady, slow-moving stream. I was content to listen. Tha