Pilgrim said with an accommodating smile, "Old sir, you have eyes but no pupils in them, and you do not know this consumptive ghost of mine.

陪笑 is a smile put on to smooth something over, not one that means anything. Pilgrim picks up the old man's own insult — consumptive ghost — and wears it as a name.

"The books of physiognomy say: where the appearance is strange and old, there is a hoard of fine jade within the stone."

Face-reading was a going professional concern in Ming China, with manuals, and Pilgrim is quoting one. 相 is xiàng, the physiognomy reading — automatic transcription supplies the unrelated xiāng, "mutually." 藏 is the noun zàng, a hoard: the 1716 dictionary keeps the two apart under separate spellings, one for the verb "to hide" and one for the thing hidden, and the 之 in front of it makes this the noun.

"If you take the measure of a man by his speech and his looks, you are quite wrong."

乾淨 is gān jìng, "clean" — used here as an adverb, the way English says "clean wrong." Automatic transcription reads the first character as the qián of the trigram, which is a different word entirely.

"Ugly I may be, ugly enough — but I do have some skill in me."

倒 is the adverb dào, which flags a turn against what you were expecting. 雖醜便醜 — "ugly, well, ugly" — concedes the point by simply repeating it, a vernacular shrug.

The old man said, "What region do you come from?

那 is the question-word nǎ: he is asking which region, not pointing at one.

"What is your surname, what your name? And what skill have you?"

甚 is shén, "what" — against the shèn, "extremely," that the same character took two passages back. The closing four-character question folds into this segment rather than standing alone, since it has no speaker named and only shuts the quotation.