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“Not quite an animal yet, it seems?” said I with a smile, half to hide my own sadness at a set of experiences which are, alas! already far too common, and will soon be more common still.

“Nearer it than you fancy. I am getting fonder and fonder of a good dinner and a second bottle of claret-about their meaning there is no mistake. And my principal reason for taking the hounds two years ago was, I do believe, to have something to do in the winter which required no thought, and to have an excuse for falling asleep after dinner, instead of arguing with Jane about her scurrilous religious newspapers-There is a great gulf opening, I see, between me and her- And as I can’t bridge it over I may as well forget it. Pah! I am boring you, and over-talking myself. Have a cigar, and let us say no more about it. There is more here, old fellow, than you will cure by doses of Socratic Dialectics.”

“I am not so sure of that,” I replied. “On the contrary, I should recommend you in your present state of mind to look out your old Plato as quickly as possible, and see if he and his master Socrates cannot give you, if not altogether a solution for your puzzle, at least a method whereby you may solve it yourself. But tell me first-What has all this to do with your evident sympathy for a man so unlike yourself as Professor Windrush?”

“Perhaps I feel for him principally because he has broken loose from it all in desperation, just as I have. But, to tell you the truth, I have been reading more than one book of his school lately; and, as I said, I owe you no thanks for demolishing the little comfort which I seemed to find in them.”

“And what was that then?”

“Why-in the first place, you can’t deny that however incoherent they may be they do say a great many clever things, and noble things too, about man, and society, and art, and nature.”

“No doubt of it.”

“And moreover, they seem to connect all they say with-with-I suppose you will laugh at me-with God, and spiritual truths, and eternal Divine laws; in short, to consecrate common matters in that very way, which I could not find in my poor mother’s teaching.”

“No doubt of that either. And therein is one real value of them, as protests in behalf of something nobler and more unselfish than the mere dollar-getting spirit of their country.”

“Well, then, can you not see how pleasant it was to me to find someone who would give me a peep into the unseen world, without requiring as an entrance-fee any religious emotions and experiences? Here I had been for years, shut out; told that I had no business with anything eternal, and pure, and noble, and good; that to all intents and purposes I was nothing better than a very cunning animal who could be damned; because I was still ‘carnal,’ and had not been through all Jane’s mysterious sorrows and joys. And it was really good news to me to hear that they were not required after all, and that all I need do was to be a good man, and leave devotion to those who were inclined to it by temperament.”

“Not to be a good man,” said I, “but only a good specimen of some sort of man. That, I think, would be the outcome of Emerson’s ‘Representative Men,’ or of those most tragic ‘Memoirs of Margaret Puller Ossoli.'”

“How then, hair-splitter? What is the mighty difference?”

“Would you call Dick Turpin a good man, because he was a good highwayman?”

“What now?”

“That he would be an excellent representative man of his class; and therefore, on Mr. Emerson’s grounds, a fit subject for a laudatory lecture.”

“I hate reductiones ad absurdum. Let Turpin take care of himself. I suppose I do not belong to such a very bad sort of men, but that it may be worth my while to become a good specimen of it?”