The first--he who did not wish to be known by the title of duke, and who pretended to be a naturalist, calling himself Dubois--was a man about fifty-two years of age, but who appeared more than sixty. His body, long and lean, was slightly bent; his slender limbs were lost, so to say, in the ample folds of his clothing; his features, fatigued by watching and intellectual labour, without doubt, must have been at one time handsome. His forehead was large, but furrowed by deep wrinkles; his black and full eye, surmounted by thick eyebrows, had a fixed and penetrating look, which, when he became animated, it was impossible to support. His nose was straight, his mouth rather large, but furnished with magnificent teeth; his lips, somewhat slender, on which a cold and mocking smile appeared stereotyped. His square chin, with total absence of beard, completed an imposing physiognomy--a little hard, perhaps, but which, when he pleased, he could render extremely prepossessing. All his person manifested that aristocratic, unctuous, and somewhat sleek grace which distinguishes diplomats and the high dignitaries of the Church. It formed, with the nobility of his gesture, a complete contrast, not only to the costume he had thought proper to adopt, but also with the plebeian manners which he affected, and which, like a part badly learned, he every now and then forgot. The other traveller was named Émile Gagnepain; he was about thirty or thirty-two years of age, his figure was ordinary, but well and strongly made; his shoulders were large his chest prominent; health characterised his whole person; his arms, on which large muscles stood out like cords, hard as iron, manifested uncommon bodily strength. His countenance indicated frankness and good humour; his regular features, his brown eyes full of intelligence, his laughing mouth, his hair--tawny blonde in colour--curled like that of a Negro, his moustache, oiled with care and coquettishly turned up; his chin shaved, and his bushy whiskers, which reached nearly the corner of his mouth, formed a physiognomy full of frankness and energy, which, at the first glance, attracted sympathy. The rather rude liberty of his movements, his rapid and decided conversation, caused him to be easily set down as one of those privileged beings, as some say--but unfortunate as we say--whom people call artists. In a word, he was a painter. For the rest--a peculiarity that we have forgotten to mention--he had firmly attached to the croup of his horse a box of colours, a large umbrella, an easel, and a maulstick, an apparatus indispensable to all painters, and which, in a country less savage than that in which he was, would have immediately pronounced his profession, notwithstanding his costume of a gaucho. It was he who first began the conversation. Scarcely had he stretched himself on the grass than, getting up abruptly, and tracing a circle in space with his right arm stretched out before him--