He was a tall, muscular, broad-shouldered man, with features that suggested a mixture of European blood.

Though already past middle age, he was still wiry and active--so active that he could, when on horseback, pick a stone off the ground without dismounting.

He could, however, no longer perform this feat at full gallop, as he had been wont to do in his youth.

His geographical knowledge was extremely limited and inaccurate--his mind being in this respect like those old Russian maps in which the nations of the earth and a good many peoples who had never more than a mythical existence are jumbled together in hopeless confusion--but his geographical curiosity was insatiable.

My travelling-map--the first thing of the kind he had ever seen--interested him deeply.