Excerpt from From Pharaoh to Fella
It was in the early part of thc ycar 188-, and in ihe bright courtyard of thc Grand Hotel de Noailles, that they met. The Scribbler, an unmistakable Briton, was moodily inquiring of the waiter whether cggs in Marseilles were invariably hid added, and whether coal was the sole ingredient of black coffee, whcn his eye caught that of another stranger regarding him with some curiosity. The gambling ceased, and with an exclamation of "Sketcher, by Jove!" the Scribbler sprang from his chair with enthusiasm. The terrified look of the waiter at this unusual form of insanity in an Englishman recalled the latter to a sense of his nationality, and falling back into his Anglo-Saxon shell, he said quietly, "How are you, Sketcher?"
The man addressed was evidently no Englishman. The light-blue eyes. under straw-coloured eyebrows, betrayed thc Gothic basis as unmistakably as the light, lithe figure showed the admixture of the Latin-an unmistakable Frenchman with Burgundy in all his veins.
"And what on earth brings you herc?" said the first.
"Sketching, of course, old fellow! What else have I done since the days at Breton whcn you made me do your French exercises for you, and I in revenge got you a hundred lines by sketching the loves of thc Integral and Differential Calculi in the fly-sheet of your 'Todhunter'? A sketcher with nothing to sketch, in search of the picturesque, and with at least as much right to be in my own country as you have. And you?"
"A scribbler in search of material - material that must bc solid and dull, such as no man can read, so that I may obtain a reputation for untold wisdom and inscrutable depth, be voted a bore without a trace of frivolity, be elected a member of a Statistical society, and eventually, in my toothless old age, be considered worthy of a seat in the Cabinet, or the editorship of a comic paper."
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