"Ha! ha!" called a pleasant voice, evidently belonging to a man of an unusually tall and lean figure who was approaching me through the palm trunks; "so you have discovered my hidden paradise--my Alcinoüs garden, so to say"; and he quoted two well-known lines of Homer in the original Greek, adding: "or if you prefer it in Pope's translation, which I think,--don't you?--remains the best:
"Close to the gates a spacious garden lies, From storms defended and inclement skies--
"and so on. Alas! for an old man's memory! It grows shorter and shorter--like his life, eh? Never mind, you are welcome, sir stranger, mysteriously tossed up here like Ulysses, on our island coast."
I gazed with natural wonderment at this strange individual, who thus in the heart of the wilderness had saluted me with a meticulously pure English accent, and welcomed me in a quotation from Homer in the original Greek. Who, in the devil's name, was this odd character who, I saw, as I looked closer at him, was, as he had hinted, quite an old man, though his unusual erectness and sprightliness of manner, lent him an illusive air of youth? Who on earth was he?--and how did he happen in the middle of this haunted wood?
Of course a glance, and the first sound of his voice, had told me that I had to do with a gentleman, one of those vagabond English gentlemen in exile who form a type peculiar, I think, to the English race; men that are a curious combination of aristocrat and gipsy, soldier, scholar, and philosopher; men of good family, who have drifted everywhere, seen and seen through everything, but in all their wanderings have never lost their sense and habit of "form," their boyish zest in living, their humorous stoicism, and, above all, their lordly accent.
"Now that you have found us, Sir Ulysses"--continued my eccentric host, motioning me, with an indescribably princely wave of the hand to accompany him--"you must certainly give us the pleasure of your company to luncheon. Visitors are as rare as black swans on this _Ultima Thule_ of ours--though, by the way, the black swan, _cygnus atratus,_ is nothing like so rare as the ancients believed. I have shot them myself out in Australia. Still they are rare enough for the purpose of imagery, though really not so rare as a human being one can talk intelligently to on this island."