am annoyed by hearing in conversation, or meeting in print, the assertion, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” It is not, and Bulwer would never have put forth such an assertion without the qualifying clause, “when in the hands of one supremely great.” So with the wink. When in the eye of one supremely great. Never in the eye of common folk, like you and me.

I passed around the desk and sat down in the window seat by Statistics’ side, and we soon found ourselves talking familiarly. He did not ask my name, and manifested no curiosity about my history or antecedents. For convenience sake he called me Jim. He had a fashion of calling everybody Jim. When I was off duty that night I waited until he was relieved and we passed out of the office up Broadway and down into Branch’s together. Over a pan of steaming oysters and a subsequent cigar, we got on bravely together until the night had pretty effectually waned. Statistics had recently come to New York from New Orleans, and he spoke of his experiences in that city and in Texas. His career in the latter section had been thrilling, and his original and agreeable way of relating his adventures delighted me beyond my power to describe. The varying expressions of his face, his habits of enforcing points in the narrative by a movement of his eyebrows, and his fluency of speech and originality of illustration, afforded me an entertainment and study which was new, bewitching, winning. Before the night was done I began to see how he had earned the sobriquet of Statistics. He spoke of everything with a perfection of detail, very briefly stated, which made the object of which he spoke stand out as defined and striking as if chiselled in marble. From a casual allusion to Galveston I learned that it was the principal seaport town in the State, that it was situated on Galveston Island, between Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, that it had a population of 13,818, and I received in brief a very accurate idea of its railroad and steamship facilites, its direct trade with Great Britain, its coffee trade with Rio Janeiro, and its commercial relations with the West Indies and Mexico. I also learned that its export of cotton for 1872 had been 333,502 bales, that the city had fifteen churches, thirty-one schools, a Roman Catholic university, a medical school, two daily and four weekly newspapers, and a great deal more that I have now forgotten. Even in referring to the benighted and almost unknown town of Groesbeck, where he had witnessed a riot and narrowly escaped being shot, he oozed out the information that Groesbeck was a post town in Limestone Country, on the Houston and Texas Central Railroad, and that it published a weekly paper.

When I had known him about a year, he said to me one day, “Jim, I’ve got the United States and England down pretty fine now. Can’t you scare me up among your big collection of novels something in the way of foreign travels? I want to take in some of this way of business—Shanghai, Hong Kong, Canton, Singapore, Penang, Calcutta, Bombay, Cairo, Constantinople, Nineveh, Damascus, Naples, and all that business.” I served him next day, when he called at my house, with a copy of Dr. Prime’s “Around the World,” a piece of descriptive writing which had lain uncut on my book shelves for months, and which I would be about as likely to read as Statistics would be to read “Her Dearest Foe,” or any other modern novel. As you may have learned, Stis is a man of facts and figures, who recognizes the ideal and imaginative to a certain extent, but who always subordinates them to the actual and realistic. Dr. Prime’s book proved a perfect mine to my little friend, and its perusal was the cause of our forming a partnership and buying a membership in the Mercantile Library, Afterward, on visiting his quarters in Waverly Place, I never found less than two books on India, Siberia, Africa, Japan, or China lying about the room. I sometimes dropped in hoping to find some readable story, but always withdrew unsatisfied. “The Land of the White Elephant,” and volumes bearing kindred captions, invariably composed his stock.

About a year ago I learned from a mutual friend that Statistics had exhausted the Eastern literature of the Mercantile Library—one of the largest in the world—and had taken up the heavenly bodies. And I very shortly afterward found this to be true. Walking up Broadway one evening, I called his attention to a shooting star. This paved the way to a very interesting discourse from Statistics, of which the following is a sample:

“Shakspeare struck it very hard when he put it into Hamlet’s head to tell Horatio that there were more things in heaven and earth than were ever dreamed of in his philosophy. There are, Jim, you bet your life. Why, do you know there are more than fifty million stars scattered in irregular aggregations forming the milky way, up there? Our sun is simply one of these fifty million stars without, so far as astronomers