We sat up late that evening. The hours passed rapidly. Dr. Borrow had laid aside his preoccupations, and gave himself up to the pleasures of discourse. He passed over a wide range of topics, opening freely for us his magazines of learning, scientific and scholastic, and displaying a power of graphic narration I was not prepared for. He aids himself with apt and not excessive gesture. In relating conversations, without descending to mimicry, he characterizes his personages for you, so that you are never in doubt. Selden, telling me almost everything else about the Doctor, had said nothing of his age; but he spoke of him as of a friend of his own, and is himself only twenty-seven; so I had supposed it to lie on the brighter side of thirty. It did, indeed, seem marvellous that the stores of erudition attributed to him could have been gathered in so early, but I made allowance for Selden's generous faculty of admiration. Dr. Borrow must be forty, or perhaps a little more. He is of middle height, square-built, of a dull complexion, which makes his open blue eyes look very blue and open. You are to imagine for him a strong, clear voice, a rapid, yet distinct utterance, and a manner which denotes long habit of easy and secure superiority. I have never known the Doctor in finer vein than that first evening. We were only three to listen to him, but it was long since he had had even so large an audience capable of admiring, I will not say of appreciating him. Whatever his topic, he enchained our attention; but he made his power most felt, perhaps, when treating of his own specialty, or scientific subjects connected with it. He is, as he told us, emphatically a practical man, preferring facts to speculations. He propounds no theories of his own, but he develops those of others very happily, setting forth the most opposite with the same ingenuity and clearness. When, in these expositions, he sometimes approached the limits where earthly science merges in the heavenly, Harry's face showed his mind tending powerfully forward. But the Doctor always stopped short of the point to which he seemed leading, and was on the ground again without sharing in the fall he had prepared for his listeners.