“You are no relative, no connection of the young lady who has just left the room?” said he to me with a grave manner, so significant of something under it that I replied hastily, “None,--none whatever.” “Was that servant who spoke to me in the porch, as I came in this evening, yours?” “Yes.” This I said more boldly, as I suspected he was coming to the question François had opened. “He mentioned to me,” said he, slowly, and puffing his cigar at easy intervals, “that you desire your servant should sleep in the same room with you. I am always happy to meet the wishes of courteous fellow-travellers, and so I have ordered my servant to give you _his_ bed; he will sleep upstairs in what was intended for _you_. Good-night.” And with an insolent nod he lounged out of the room and left me. CHAPTER XXIV. MY CANDOR AS AN AUTOBIOGRAPHER. My reader is sufficiently acquainted with me by this time to know that there is one quality in me on which he can always count with safety,--my candor! There may be braver men and more ingenious men; there may be, I will not dispute it, persons more gifted with oratorical powers, better linguists, better mathematicians, and with higher acquirements in art; but I take my stand upon candor, and say, there never lived the man, ancient or modern, who presented a more open and undisguised section of himself than I have done, am doing, and hope to do to the end. And what, I would ask you, is the reason why we have hitherto made so little progress in that greatest of all sciences,--the knowledge of human nature? Is it not because we are always engaged in speculating on what goes on in the hearts of others, guessing, as it were, what people are doing next door, instead of honestly recording what takes place in their own house? You think this same candor is a small quality. Well, show me one thoroughly honest autobiography. Of all the men who have written their own memoirs, it is fair to presume that some may have lacked personal courage, some been deficient in truthfulness, some forgetful of early friendships, and so on. Yet where will you find me one, I only ask one, who declares, “I was a coward, I never could speak truth, I was by nature ungrateful”?