I had remembered him as a man who disliked talk. I had often seen him
sit for hours on end without a word, looking at nothing in particular,
with his expressionless serenity. But on this particular evening the
day's activities appeared to have made his social instincts vividly
assertive, and to arouse him to unusual, and almost unnatural animation.
As we sat at a small round table beside the dining room fireplace, he
launched into a cheerful discourse, ignoring completely any displeasure
I attempted to assume. The great room with its dingy wainscot only half
lighted by the candles on the table before us, was cluttered with a
hundred odds and ends that collect in a deserted house--a ladder, a
stiff, rusted bridle, a coil of frayed rope, a kettle, a dozen sheets of
the Gazette, empty bottles, dusty crockery and broken chairs. He
surveyed them all with a bland, uncritical glance. From his manner he
might have been surrounded by brilliant company. From his conversation
he might have been in a pot house.

I noticed at once what many had been at pains to mention to me
before--that my father was not a temperate man. Nor did our cellar seem
wholly bleak. He pressed wine upon me, and soon had finished a bottle
himself, only to gesture Brutus to uncork a second. And all the while he
regaled me with anecdotes of the gaming table and the vices of a dozen
seaports. With hardly a pause he described a lurid succession of
drinking bouts and gallant adventures. He finished a second bottle of
wine, and was half way through a third. Yet all the while his voice
never lost its pleasant modulation. Never a flush or an increase of
animation came to change him. Politely detached, he discoursed of love
and murder, gambling and chicanery, drawing on the seemingly exhaustless
background of his own experience for illustration. He seemed to have
known the worst men from all the ends of the earth, to have shared in
their business and their pleasures. He seemed to have been in every