I was amused
to see, by stolen glances, Mrs. Smith study him. She did not know she
frowned, nor did he; but Mrs. Fontenette knew it every time.
We all had the advantage of him as to common sight. His glasses were
obviously of a very high power, yet he could scarcely see anything till he
clapped his face close down and hunted for it. When he pencilled for me
the new Latin name he had given to a small, slender, almost dazzling
green, beetle inhabiting the Spanish moss--his own scientific discovery--
he wrote it so minutely that I had to use a lens to read it.
As we sat close around the library lamp, I noticed how often his poor
clothing had been mended by a woman's needle. His linen was discouraging,
his cravat awry and dingy, and his hands--we had better pass his hands;
yet they were slender and refined.
Also they shook, though not from any habit commonly called vicious. You
could see that no vice of the body nor any lust of material things had
ever led him captive. He gave one the tender despair with which we look on
a blind babe.
When we expressed regret that his wife had not come with him, he only bent
with a deeper greed into a book I had handed him, and after a moment laid
it down disappointedly, saying that it was "fool of plundters.
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