“What! you think I shall poison you?” he said gaily. “The English intellect is sound, so far as it goes,” he continued, seating himself at the table; “but it has one grave defect⁠—it is always cautious in the wrong place.”

He dipped his pen in the ink, placed the first slip of paper before him with a thump of his hand on the desk, cleared his throat, and began. He wrote with great noise and rapidity, in so large and bold a hand, and with such wide spaces between the lines, that he reached the bottom of the slip in not more than two minutes certainly from the time when he started at the top. Each slip as he finished it was paged, and tossed over his shoulder out of his way on the floor. When his first pen was worn out, that