"Very well; that's a proof positive to me that you had nobody else to address--a most unwholesome state of affairs. How does my beard strike you? Black as blackness, I fancy." He was right. I assured him that it was now as black as Erebus and pleased him extremely. I told him, however, that I thought he would have more difficulty with the rest of his description, which gave him a middle size and a cold in the head. He was, in person, gigantic, and in health appeared to be as sound as a bell. "I shall get through," said the friar, "on my beard, and where that goes I can follow as easily as a tomcat his head. But I have a trick of bending the knees which will serve me for some hundreds of yards--and if you suppose that I can't snivel you are very much mistaken. Listen to this." He hung his head, looked earnestly at the ground: then he sniffed. Sniffed, do I say? It was as if all the secret rills of the broad earth had been summoned from their founts. No noise more miserably watery could have proceeded from a nose. He beamed upon me. "Am I a wet blanket?" he cried. "Now, friend, shall we go?" He had packed up his tools in his begging-bag and stood ready to depart. I reminded him that I had no papers. "That need not disturb you at all," he said. "You pass in as my convert. All you have to do is to do nothing and keep your mouth shut. If you cannot speak you cannot answer; that is good logic, I hope. We will discuss our several affairs presently in the reasonable air of Tuscany. I stifle in the Pope's dominions. You might say that there was not room enough for two such men." He blew out his shining cheeks till his eyes disappeared; he looked like a swollen tree-bole with a mossy growth dependent; then he deflated them with a bang, and shouted with laughter --a single expression of delight, sharply reverberant--and suddenly stopped. "Poh! what a rattle you'll think me," he said. "Come--and remember that you are a deaf-mute."