Sir Simon was an inexhaustible talker, and M. de la Bourbonais an indefatigable listener; he had what Voltaire called a talent for holding his tongue. But this negative condition of a good listener was not his only one; he possessed in a rare degree all the merits that go to the composition of that delightful personage. Most people, while you are talking to them, are more occupied in thinking what they will say to you than in attending to what you are saying to them, and these people are miserable listeners. M. de la Bourbonais gave his whole mind to what you were saying, and never thought of his answer until the time came to give it. He not only seemed interested, he really was interested, in your discourse; and he would frequently hear more in it than it was meant to convey, supplying from his own quick intelligence what was wanting in your crude, disjointed remarks. There was nothing in a quiet way that Sir Simon liked better than an hour’s talk with his tenant, and he always came away from the luxury of having been listened to by a cultivated, philosophical mind in high good-humor with himself. His vanity, moreover, was flattered by the fact beyond the mere personal gratification it afforded him. Everybody knew that the French _emigré_ was a man of learning, given to abstruse study of some abstract kind; the convivial squire must therefore be more learned than he cared to make believe, since this philosophical student took such pleasure in his society. When his fox-hunting friends would twit him jocosely on this score, Sir Simon would pooh-pooh them with a laugh, observing in a careless way: “One must dip into this sort of thing now and then, you see, or else one’s brain gets rusty. I don’t care much myself about splitting hairs on Descartes or untwisting the fibres of a Greek root, but it amuses Bourbonais; you see he has so few to talk to who can listen to this sort of thing.” It was true that the conversation did occasionally take such learned turns, and equally true that M. de la Bourbonais enjoyed airing his views on the schools and dissecting roots, and that Sir Simon felt elevated in his own opinion when the count caught up some hazardous remark of his on one of the classic authors, and worked it up into an elaborate defence of the said author; and when, on their next meeting, Raymond would accost him with “Mon cher, I didn’t quite see at the moment what you meant by pointing that line from Sophocles at me, but I see now,” Sir Simon would purr inwardly like a stroked cat. Every now and then, too, he would startle the Grand Jury by the brilliancy of his classical quotations, and the way in which he bore down on them with a weight of argument worthy of a Q.C. in high practice; little they dreamed that the whole case had been sifted the day before by the orator’s learned friend, who had analyzed it, and put it in shape for the rhetorical purpose of the morrow. The baronet was serenely