ing, sir, though perhaps a trifle inclining
to rain. I hope I see you well, sir. Why, no, sir, I don't feel as
hearty myself as I could wish, but I am keeping about my ordinary. I am
pleased to meet you on the road, sir. I assure you I quite look forward
to one of our little conversations." He loved the sound of his own voice
inordinately, and though (with something too off-hand to call servility)
he would always hasten to agree with anything you said, yet he could
never suffer you to say it to an end. By what transition he slid to his
favourite subject I have no memory; but we had never been long together
on the way before he was dealing, in a very military manner, with the
English poets. "Shelley was a fine poet, sir, though a trifle
atheistical in his opinions. His 'Queen Mab,' sir, is quite an
atheistical work. Scott, sir, is not so poetical a writer. With the
works of Shakespeare I am not so well acquainted, but he was a fine
poet. Keats--John Keats, sir--he was a very fine poet." With such
references, such trivial criticism, such loving parade of his own
knowledge, he would beguile the road, striding forward up-hill, his
staff now clapped to the ribs of his deep, resonant chest, now swinging
in the air with the remembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and
all the while his toes looking out of his boots, and his shirt looking
out of his elbows, and death looking out of his smile, and his big,
crazy frame shaken by accesses of cough.

He would often go the whole way home with me: often to borrow a book,
and that book always a poet. Off he would march, to continue his
mendicant rounds, with the volume slipped into the pocket of his ragged
coat; and although he would sometimes keep it quite a while, yet it came
always back again at last, not much the worse for its travels into
beggardom. And in this way, doubtless, his knowledge grew and his glib,
random criticism took a wider range. But my library was not the first he
had drawn upon: at our first encounter, he was already brimful of
Shelley and the atheistical "Queen Mab," and "Keats--John Keats, sir."
And I have often wondered how he came by these acquirements, just as I
often wondered how he fell to be a beggar. He had served through the
Mutiny--of which (like so many people) he could tell practically nothing
beyond the names of places, and that it was "difficult work, sir," and
very hot, or that so-and-so was "a very fine commander, sir." He was far
too smart