titude. You might make a name in science or art, but everything
you do lacks substance, because you live only in your old eternal
catchwords of the Past and the Future. You can sketch and paint,
yet have never exhibited your pictures except in ladies' albums.
You profess to love botany, yet your sole herbarium has been the
mignonette in sewing-girls' windows. You are inoffensive, you are
possessed of a competency, but in everything, in every vocation, you
rest in the state of amateur--amateur housekeeper, amateur artist,
amateur traveler, amateur geographer. And such a geographer as
you might be, with your taste for travel and the Hakluyt Society's
publications you have pored over for years!"

This chance allusion to my grand secret took me from my guard.
Hohenfels, blundering up and down in search of something to
anathematize, had stumbled upon the very fortress of my strength.
I deemed it time to let him into a part of my reserved intellectual
treasure--to whirl away a part at least of the sand in which my
patient sphinx had been buried.

"I have indeed been a reader," I said modestly. "When a youth at
Heidelberg, I perused, with more profit than would be immediately
guessed from the titles, such works as the Helden-Buchs and
the Nibelungen-Lieds, the Saxon Rhyme-Chronicles, the poems of
Minnesingers and Mastersingers, and Ships of Fools, and Reynard Foxes,
and Death-Dances, and Lamentations of Damned Souls. My study since
then has been in German chemistry from its renaissance in Paracelsus,
and physical science, including both medicine and the evolution of
life. Shall I give you a few dozen of my favorite writers?"

"Quite unnecessary," said the baron with some haste. "But I fancied
you were going to speak of geographical authors."

[Illustration]

"Are you fond of such writings yourself?" I asked.

"Immensely--that is, not too scientific, you know," said the baron,
who was out of his element here. "Bayard Taylor, now, or some such
fellows as the Alpine Club."

"My dear baron, the republications by the Hakluyt Society are but
a small part of the references I have taken down for my Progressive
Geography. You admire Switzerland?"

"Vastly. Steep jump, the Staubbach."

"But the Alps are only hillocks compared with the Andes of Peru, with
the Cordilleras, with Chimborazo! Ah, baron, Chimborazo! Well, my dear
boy, the system I elaborate makes it a matter of simple progression
and calculation to arrive at mount