No need for you to go, nephew, let us stop and drink another glass of wine; the sooner we grow intimate the better, nephew.' It was thus that first I became acquainted with Senor Andres de Fonseca, my benefactor, the strangest man whom I have ever known.

Doubtless any person reading this history would think that I, the narrator, was sowing a plentiful crop of troubles for myself in having to deal with him, setting him down as a rogue of the deepest, such as sometimes, for their own wicked purposes, decoy young men to crime and ruin.

But it was not so, and this is the strangest part of the strange story.

All that Andres de Fonseca told me was true to the very letter.
He was a gentleman of great talent who had been rendered a little mad by misfortunes in his early life.

As a physician I have never met his master, if indeed he has one in these times, and as a man versed in the world and more especially in the world of women, I have known none to compare with him.