The Strange Companion
done with ease. The visit had impressed him deeply; it may be he had not seen such things before, or it may be that he was more at leisure to attend to the details which had been presented to him. This last I gathered on his telling me, as we walked towards the Inn, that he had had no work to do for two days, but that same evening he was to meet a man in Birmingham, by whom, he earnestly assured me, he was offered opportunities of wealth in return for so small an investment of capital as was negligible, and here he would have permitted me also to share in this distant venture, had I not, at some great risk to that human esteem without which we none of us can live, given him clearly to understand that his generosity was waste of time, and that for the reason that there was no money to invest. It impressed him much more sharply than any plea of judgment or of other investments could have done.
Though I had lost very heavily by permitting myself such a confession to him, he was ready to dine with me at the Inn before taking his train, and as he dined he told me at some length the name of his native place, which was, oddly enough, that of a great German statesman, whether Bismarck or another I cannot now remember; its habits and its character he also told me, but as I forgot to press him as to its latitude or longitude to this day I am totally ignorant of the quarter of the globe in which it may lie.
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