“It is impossible to describe Caliphronas,” said Maurice many years afterwards, in speaking of this man. “I can tell you that his figure was as perfect as the Apollo Belvedere, and say that his face was as flawless in its virile beauty as the Antinous of the Vatican, but this will give you no idea of his physical perfection. His body seemed to be instinct with the lawless fierceness of wind and wave; he moved with the stately grace of a nude savage unaccustomed to the restraint of clothing. I never understood the phrase ‘child of Nature’ until I saw Caliphronas, and it is the only way in which he can be explained. I believe his mother was a Nereid and his father a hunter, for he was the offspring of earth and ocean—the consummate flower of both. Yet I do not think he had what we call brains—true, he possessed the cunning and instinct of a wild animal, but that was all. I think, myself, brains and culture would have spoiled him; he was born to be a wild, free thing, happy only on the hills, a type, a visible incarnation of Nature in a male form. If you ask me whom he resembled in real life, I cannot tell you, as I never saw any one in the least like him. But in fiction—well, study the character of Margrave in ‘A Strange Story,’ and Donatello in Hawthorne’s ‘Marble Faun,’ and by blending the two you may arrive at some conception of Count Caliphronas.” Such was the man who now sat at the table of the Rector, chatting gayly with his host and Maurice Roylands. Being a hot day, the Rector had wisely provided a cold luncheon, and himself presided over a noble piece of beef, which looked as though it had been taken from one of Apollo’s oxen. There was also a capital salad,—the Rector was famous for his salads,—fruit, wine, cheese, and bread. A simple repast, truly, but then the Rector was simple in his tastes, and detested those highly-spiced dishes, which but create thirst, and whose chief merit seems to be that the diner cannot tell of what they are composed. An artificial life creates artificial tastes, and the principal mission of cookery now seems to lie in the direction of tickling the palate, not of satisfying the stomach, with the result that gout and dyspepsia have it all their own way. If half, nay, if the whole of the French cooks now engaged in ruining the healths of Englishmen and Englishwomen were bundled back to their beloved Paris, the income of every doctor in London would decrease with the rapidity of lightning. As before mentioned, the Rector liked the good things of this life, but he thought the simplest food the most enjoyable, in which he was right, though epicures may doubt the truth of such an opinion. Yet, after all, do not epicures hold the simplicity of a well-roasted leg of mutton to be a dish fit for a king.