“If the colonel will allow me,” I said, “it would give me great pleasure to drink a bottle with him.” He agreed, plainly not unwilling. He pushed the wine list over to the waiter, lining with his finger the sort he wanted, and said in a commanding tone: “A bottle of that.” “That is a brand I know well,” he said, turning to me, while he threw his hat on a chair and sat down at one of the tables--“it’s good blood.” I had placed myself at a table with him so that I could see his face in profile. His look was again turned toward the window, and as he gazed past me up into the heavens, the glow of the sunset was reflected in his eyes. It was the first time I had seen him at such close quarters. By the look of his eyes he was lost in dreams, and as his hand played mechanically through his long beard, there seemed to rise before him out of the flood of the years that had rushed behind, forms that were once young when he was young, and which were now--who can say where? The bottle which the waiter had brought and placed at a table before us contained a rare wine. An old Bordeaux, brown and oily, poured into our glasses. I recalled the expression which the old man had used a short time before. “I must admit, colonel, that this is indeed ‘good blood.’” His flushed eyes came slowly back from the far away, turned upon me, and remained fixed there, as if he would say: “What do you know about it?” He took a deep draft, wiped his beard, and gazed at his glass. “Strange,” he said, “when a man grows old--he recalls the earliest days far easier than those that come later.” I was silent; I felt that I ought neither to speak nor question. When a man is lost in recollections he is making poetry, and one must not question a poet. A long pause followed. “What an assortment of people one has to meet with,” he continued. “When one thinks of it--many who live on and on--it were often better they did not live at all--and others have to go so much too early.” He passed the palm of his hand over the surface of the table. “Beneath that lies much.” It seemed as if the table had become to him as the surface of the earth, and that he was thinking of those lying beneath the ground. “Had to keep thinking of this a little while ago”--his voice sounded hollow--“when I saw that little fellow. With a boy like that nature comes right out, fairly gushes out--thick as your arm. You can see blood in it. Pity, though, that good blood flows so freely--more freely than the other. I once knew a little chap like that.” And there it was. The waiter had seated himself in a back corner of the room; I kept perfectly quiet; the heavy voice of the old colonel went laboring through the stillness of the room like a gust of wind that precedes a storm or some serious outbreak in nature. His eyes turned toward me as if to search me, whether I could bear to listen. He did not ask, I did not speak, but I looked at him, and my look eagerly replied: “Go on.”