“Good morning,” said Olcott, mechanically putting a ceremonious and formal emphasis into the words and getting on his feet. “Good morning, sir, to you,” returned the visitor in a voice of surprising volume, considering that it issued from so slight a frame. “You are Mr. Olcott?” “Yes, that's my name.” And Olcott took a step forward, extending his hand. “Mine, sir, is Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th.” The speaker paused midway of the floor to remove one glove and to shift it and his cane to the left hand. Advancing, with a slight limp, he gave to Olcott a set of fingers that were dry and chilly and fleshless. Almost it was like clasping the articulated bones of a skeleton's hand. “I have come personally, sir, to pay my respects and, as one representing the--ah--the old régime of our people, to bid you welcome to our midst.” “Thank you very much,” said Olcott, a bit amused inwardly, and a bit impressed also by the air of mouldy grandeur which the other diffused. “Won't you sit down, Mr. Van Nicht?” “I shall be able to tarry but a short while.” The big voice boomed out of the little dried-up body as the old man took the chair which Olcott had indicated. He took only part of it. He poised himself on the forward edge of its seat, holding his spine very erect and dramatising his posture with a stiff and stately investure. Olcott caught himself telling himself Morgan had been right: This personage was not really flesh and blood, but something out of a book--an embodied bit of fiction. Why even his language had the stilted shaping of the characters in most of these old-timey classical novels. “He wasn't really born at all,” Olcott thought. “Dickens wrote him and then Cruikshank drew him and now here he is, miraculously preserved to posterity. But Charlotte Brontë endowed him with his conversation.” What Olcott said--aloud--was something fatuous and commonplace touching on the state of the weather. “I have yet other motives in presenting myself to-day, in this, your sanctum,” stated Mr. Van Nicht. “First of all, I wish to congratulate you upon what to me appears to be a very gratifying stroke of journalistic enterprise which has come to light in the columns of your valued organ since your advent into the community and for which, therefore, I assume you are responsible.” “Well,” said Olcott, “we try to get out a reasonably live sheet.”