Chapter 7 - Page 2

Upon hearing the name of Doctor Franklin mentioned, the old woman, all
alacrity, hurried out of her den, and with much courtesy showed Israel
across the court, up three flights of stairs to a door in the rear of
the spacious building. There she left him while Israel knocked.

"Come in," said a voice.

And immediately Israel stood in the presence of the venerable Doctor
Franklin.

Wrapped in a rich dressing-gown, a fanciful present from an admiring
Marchesa, curiously embroidered with algebraic figures like a conjuror's
robe, and with a skull-cap of black satin on his hive of a head, the man
of gravity was seated at a huge claw-footed old table, round as the
zodiac. It was covered with printer papers, files of documents, rolls of
manuscript, stray bits of strange models in wood and metal, odd-looking
pamphlets in various languages, and all sorts of books, including many
presentation-copies, embracing history, mechanics, diplomacy,
agriculture, political economy, metaphysics, meteorology, and geometry.
The walls had a necromantic look, hung round with barometers of
different kinds, drawings of surprising inventions, wide maps of far
countries in the New World, containing vast empty spaces in the middle,
with the word DESERT diffusely printed there, so as to span
five-and-twenty degrees of longitude with only two syllables,--which
printed word, however, bore a vigorous pen-mark, in the Doctor's hand,
drawn straight through it, as if in summary repeal of it; crowded
topographical and trigonometrical charts of various parts of Europe;
with geometrical diagrams, and endless other surprising hangings and
upholstery of science.

The chamber itself bore evident marks of antiquity. One part of the
rough-finished wall was sadly cracked, and covered with dust, looked dim
and dark. But the aged inmate, though wrinkled as well, looked neat and
hale. Both wall and sage were compounded of like materials,--lime and
dust; both, too, were old; but while the rude earth of the wall had no
painted lustre to shed off all fadings and tarnish, and still keep fresh
without, though with long eld its core decayed: the living lime and dust
of the sage was frescoed with defensive bloom of his soul.

The weather was warm; like some old West India hogshead on the wharf,
the whole chamber buzzed with flies. But the sapient inmate sat still
and cool in the midst. Absorbed in some other world of his occupations
and thoughts, these insects, like daily cark and care, did not seem one
whit to annoy him. It was a goodly sight to see this serene, cool and
ripe old philosopher, who by sharp inquisition of man in the street, and
then long meditating upon him, surrounded by all those queer old
implements, charts and