These words touched the Philosopher a little. To have been abroad was the next best thing to having been a foreigner _ab origine_. But still he felt a little suspicious. He was superior to the popular prejudice against the mustache, but he could not endure hair-oil. "Nature," he maintained, "made the whole beard to be worn, and Nature provides an oil for the hair. Let Nature have her way." He was suspicious of Humphreys, not because he wore a mustache, but because he shaved the rest of his face and greased his hair. He had, besides, a little intuitive perception of the fact that a smile which breaks against the rock-bound coast of cold cheek-bones and immovable eyes is a mask. And so he determined to test the literary man. I have heard that Masonic lodges have been deceived by impostors. I have never heard that a literary man was made to believe in the genuineness of the attainments of a charlatan. And yet Humphreys held his own well. He could talk glibly and superficially about books; he simulated considerable enthusiasm for the books which Andrew admired. His mistake and his consequent overthrow came, as always in such cases, from a desire to overdo. It was after half an hour of talking without tripping that Andrew suddenly asked: "Do you like the ever-to-be-admired Xenophanes?" It certainly is no disgrace to any literary man not to know anything of so remote a philosopher as Xenophanes. The first characteristic of a genuine literary man is the frankness with which he confesses his ignorance. But Humphreys did not really know but that Xenophanes was part of the daily reading of a man of letters. "Oh! yes," said he. "I have his works in turkey morocco." "What do you think of his opinion that God is a sphere?" asked the Philosopher, smiling. "Oh! yes--ahem; let me see--which God is it that he speaks of, Jupiter or--well, you know he was a Greek." "But he only believed in one God," said Andrew sternly. "Oh! ah! I forgot that he was a Christian." So from blunder to blunder Andrew pushed him, Humphreys stumbling more and more in his blind attempts to right himself, and leaving, at last, with much internal confusion but with an unruffled smile. He dared not broach his errand by asking the address of August. For Andrew did not conceal his disgust, having resumed work at his loom, suffering the bowing impostor to find his own way out without so much as a courteous adieu. CHAPTER XXII. JONAS EXPRESSES HIS OPINION ON DUTCHMEN. Sometimes the virus of a family is all drawn off in one vial. I think it is Emerson who makes this remark. We have all seen the vials.