Shrouded in this delightful taciturnity, my list of acquaintances at Langen-Schwalbach daily increased, until I found myself on just the sort of amicable terms with almost everybody, which, to my present taste, is the most agreeable. In early life young people (if I recollect right) are never quite happy, unless they are either talking, or writing letters to their fellow-creatures. Whenever, even as strangers, they get together, everything that happens or passes seems to engender conversation--even when they have parted, there is no end to epistolary valedictions, and creation itself loses half its charms, unless the young beholder has some companion with whom the loveliness of the picture may be shared and enjoyed.
But old age I find stiffens, first of all, the muscles of the tongue; indeed, as man gradually decays, it seems wisely provided by Nature that he should be willing to be dumb, before time obliges him to be deaf: in short the mind, however voraciously it might once have searched for food, at last instinctively prefers rumination, to seeking for more.
By young people I shall be thought selfish, yet I do confess that I enjoy silence, because my own notions now suit me best; other people's opinions, like their shoes, don't fit me, and however ill-constructed or old-fashioned my own may really be, yet use has made them easy: my sentiments, ugly as they may seem, don't pinch, and I therefore feel I had rather not exchange them; the one or two friends I have lost rank in my memory better than any I can ever hope to gain: in fact, I had rather not replace them, and at Langen-Schwalbach, as there was no necessity for a passing stranger like myself to set up a fine new acquaintance with people he would probably never see again, I considered that with my eyes and ears open, my tongue might harmlessly enjoy natural and delightful repose.
But there is a perverseness in human nature, which it is quite out of my power to account for; and strange as it may sound, it is nevertheless too true, that the only person at Langen-Schwalbach I felt desirous to address, was the only individual who seemed to shun every human being.
He was a withered, infirm man, who appeared to be tottering on the brink of his grave; and I had long remarked that, for some reason or other, he studiously avoided the brunnen until every person had left it. He spoke to no one--looked at no one--but as soon as he had swallowed off his dose, he retired to a lone bench, on which, with both hands leaning upon his ivory-handled cane, he was always to be seen sitting with his eyes sorrowfully fixed on the ground. Although the weather was, to every person but himself, oppressively hot, he was constantly muffled up in a thick cloak, and I think I must have passed him a hundred times before I detected, one exceedingly warm day, that underneath it there hung upon his left breast the Cross of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. As, ages ago, I had myself passed many a hot summer on the parched, barren rock of Malta,--always, however, feeling much interested in the history of its banished knights,--I at once fully comprehended why the poor old gentleman's body was so chilly, and why his heart felt so chilled with the world. By many slow and scientific approaches which it would be only tedious to detail, I at last managed, without driving him from his bench, most quietly to establish myself at his side, and then by coughing when he coughed,--sighing when he sighed,--and by other (I hope innocent) artifices, I at last ventured in a _sotto voce_ to mumble to him something about the distant island in which apparently all his youthful feelings lay buried. The words Valetta, Civitta Vecchia, Floriana, Cottonera, &c., as I pronounced them, produced, by a sort of galvanic influence, groans--ejaculations--short sentences, until at last he began to show me frankly without disguise the real colour of his mind. Poor man! like his eye it was jaundiced--"nullis medicabilis herbis!" I could not at all extract from him what rank, title, or situation he held in the ancient order, but I could too clearly see that he looked upon its extinction as the Persian would look upon the annihilation of the sun. Creation he fancied had been robbed of its colours,--Christianity he thought had lost its heart,--and he attributed every political ailment on the surface of the globe to the non-existence of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem.