Page:The Quest Volume 11 (1919-20).djvu/549

 cut features was sitting there, with his chin resting on the ivory handle of his walking-stick. As I approached he glanced at me with strangely vivid eyes, as of one in whom the likeness to a well-remembered face had awakened a host of memories. He was dressed in old-fashioned clothes, high collar and stock—one might almost have said like a family portrait in Louis Philippe or early Victorian style.

I was so astonished at a sight so out of keeping with present-day surroundings, moreover my brooding thoughts were so deeply sunk in what I had gathered from my grandfather's writings, that scarcely knowing what I did I uttered half-aloud the name 'Obereit.'

"Yes, my name is Johann Hermann Obereit," said the old gentleman without showing the least surprise. I nearly stopped breathing. And what I learned from the conversation that followed was even less calculated to diminish my astonishment.

It is indeed not an every-day experience to find oneself face to face with a man to all appearances not much older than oneself yet who had Jived so long—some century and a half, he said! I felt like a youth in spite of my already white hair, as we paced side by side, while he spoke of Napoleon and historic persons he had known long years ago, as one would speak of people who had died the other day.

"In Runkel," he said with a smile, "I am believed to be my own grandson." He pointed to a tomb we were passing and which bore the date 1798. "By right I should be lying there," he continued. "I had the date put on to avoid the curiosity of the crowd for a modern Methuselah. The 'VIVO,'" he added, as if divining my thought, "will be put on only when I am dead for good."