The man cast his eyes around, saw that the only open table save the poker table was the one I held, and came and sat down opposite me. With a slightly insolent motion he dragged his chair around sidewise, turned his shoulder to me and stared across the room at a gaudy lithograph of the good ship Isabella bound for Naples, eighty-five dollars first class. Philomène, with a porky look, asked him what he wished. He announced in French that he desired of all things to "strangle a parrokeet." This was some absurd slang for saying he wanted an absinthe. He was a gaunt, tall, round-shouldered, queer old fellow with a gray beard and a matted moustache, colored with the brown stain of cigarette smoke. As ugly, I thought, as ugly as--oh, Socrates. And yet with something lovable about him. And his combination of dress was certainly odd enough: a frayed, cutaway coat with extremely long tails, dripping wet and dangling cylindrically like sections of melted stovepipe; mussy, baggy old gray trousers; a blue plush waistcoat; a black, but clean muffler pinned tight up under his chin with a safety pin of the brassiest; and a broad-brimmed black slouch hat, so broad of brim that he walked forever in its shadow. This hat he kept on all the time. His hands were long and clean and white--the virile, sensitive hands of a poet, I thought. The eyes were the fascinating feature of the man. I said to myself right away, "This man is a mystic." Though they burned brightly in their sockets, they had a trick of turning abruptly dim; a sort of film or veil, closed over them. "Druid or old Celt," I murmured. "Give him a bit of mistletoe and he'd call his gods right down into my _demi-tasse_ and scare the poker game into fits." He swallowed his whole glass of absinthe in five gulps--a performance that it would make a cow shudder to watch--threw back his head, and, with a hoarse burr, called for another. This time he spoke English; but the burr was decidedly Scotch. Pigalle now looked around at him--gross, pleasant, Provençal Pigalle--and nodded; then went on placidly shuffling the tiny cards in his great fat hands. When the second absinthe came the old man took it slowly; settled himself back on his shoulder-blades and the tail of his spine, and pulled his hat down level with his eyes, as if he intended to spend a considerable time with us. He called for a package of French cigarettes--_cigarettes jaunes_--and proceeded to color his moustache a riper brown. "Now my adventure has knocked and come in," I thought. "If he is my adventure, I cannot help him--nor can I keep him off. He is the _primum mobile_. It is up to him." Suddenly my ears were shocked with a sharp argument between two young fellows at the poker table. No, it was not about the game. One said something; the other shrieked his answer; the first shouted back; the second in a violent burst that had a finality about it slammed down his cards and said something curt, with a solemn rolling of his eyes.