"He would no doubt have been much surprised could he have known that he was already mapped out, craniologically and physiognomically, catalogued with care, and neatly laid by in his proper ethnological box, in my private type museum, that, as I sat and examined him from my different coigns of vantage in library, in dining and smoking room that evening, not a look of his, not a gesture went forth but had significance for me.
"You, I had thought, with your broad shoulders and deep chest, your massive head that should have gone with a tall stature, not with those short, sturdy limbs; with your thick red hair, that should have been black for that matter, with your wide-set, yellow eyes, you would be a real puzzle to one who did not recognize in you equal mixtures of the fair, stalwart, and muscular Slav with the bilious-sanguine, thick-set, wiry Turanian. Your pedigree would no doubt bear me out; there is as much of the Magyar as of the Pole in your anatomy. Athlete, and yet a tangle of nerves; a ferocious brute at bottom, I dare say, for your broad forehead inclines to flatness, under your bristling beard your jaw must protrude, and the base of your skull is ominously thick. And, with all that, capable of ideal transports; when that girl played and sang to-night I saw the swelling of your eyelid veins, and how that small, tenacious, clawlike hand of yours twitched. You would be a fine leader of men--but God help the wretches in your power!
"So had I mused upon him. Yet I confess that when we came into closer contact with each other even I was not proof against the singular courtesy of his manner and his unaccountable personal charm.
"Our conversation soon grew interesting; to me as a matter of course, and evidently to him also. A few general words led to interchange of remarks upon the country we were both visitors in and so to national characteristics--Pole and Irishman have not a few in common, both in their nature and history. An observation which he made, not without a certain flash in his light eyes and a transient uncovering of the teeth, on the Irish type of female beauty, suddenly suggested to me a stanza of an ancient Polish ballad, very full of milk-and-blood imagery, of alternating ferocity and voluptuousness. This I quoted to the astounded foreigner, in the vernacular, and this it was that metamorphosed his mere perfection of civility into sudden warmth, and, in fact, procured me the invitation in question.