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as to scorch the wood of it. The stove had two compartments; in one of
them Ursus cooked his chemicals, and in the other his potatoes. At night
the wolf slept under the van, amicably secured by a chain. Homo's hair
was black, that of Ursus, gray; Ursus was fifty, unless, indeed, he was
sixty. He accepted his destiny, to such an extent that, as we have just
seen, he ate potatoes, the trash on which at that time they fed pigs and
convicts. He ate them indignant, but resigned. He was not tall--he was
long. He was bent and melancholy. The bowed frame of an old man is the
settlement in the architecture of life. Nature had formed him for
sadness. He found it difficult to smile, and he had never been able to
weep, so that he was deprived of the consolation of tears as well as of
the palliative of joy. An old man is a thinking ruin; and such a ruin
was Ursus. He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of a
prophet, the irascibility of a charged mine: such was Ursus. In his
youth he had been a philosopher in the house of a lord.
This was 180 years ago, when men were more like wolves than they are
now.
Not so very much though.
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