My Library

announced his arrival. “The man was a tall and comely personage, apparently of Irish extraction, and had nothing whatever about him at all remarkable; indeed, he was a very so-soish sort of individual, who at first refused his name to everybody, because, to quote his own words: ‘If I remain incog. I shall not be lionized, which in other terms means “bored,” and pestered by persons seeking to gratify a morbid and impertinent curiosity— people who look for full-grown miracles, and expect to find them, instead of studying arts and sciences, and therewith increasing their knowledge and enriching their experience by a more intimate acquaintance with philosophic truths, and the recondite mysteries of mighty Nature.’ “The gentleman was very polished and polite, entering freely into conversation, and seemed altogether so well pleased with his audience that he threw off all reserve, laughed, joked, made puns, played upon words, and kept us in good spirits for half an hour, at the end of which time he gave us his name as a profound secret, to go no further. That name was a singular one. It was Mai Vatterale—a very curious name! He soon proposed an adjournment to the back parlor, and after reaching it he proceeded to arrange the chairs, six in a line, in the form of a triangle; after doing this, Monsieur Vatterale signified to the Baron that his part of the preliminaries was