eccentric friend should be what you
hint. You do not know him, or but imperfectly. His outside deceived you;
at first it came near deceiving even me. But I seized a chance, when,
owing to indignation against some wrong, he laid himself a little open;
I seized that lucky chance, I say, to inspect his heart, and found it an
inviting oyster in a forbidding shell. His outside is but put on.
Ashamed of his own goodness, he treats mankind as those strange old
uncles in romances do their nephews--snapping at them all the time and
yet loving them as the apple of their eye."

"Well, my words with him were few. Perhaps he is not what I took him
for. Yes, for aught I know, you may be right."

"Glad to hear it. Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only
for its being graceful. And now, since you have renounced your notion,
I should be happy, would you, so to speak, renounce your story, too.
That, story strikes me with even more incredulity than wonder. To me
some parts don't hang together. If the man of hate, how could John
Moredock be also the man of love? Either his lone campaigns are fabulous
as Hercules'; or else, those being true, what was thrown in about his
geniality is but garnish. In short, if ever there was such a man as
Moredock, he, in my way of thinking, was either misanthrope or nothing;
and his misanthropy the more intense from being focused on one race of
men. Though, like suicide, man-hatred would seem peculiarly a Roman and
a Grecian passion--that is, Pagan; yet, the annals of neither Rome nor
Greece can produce the equal in man-hatred of Colonel Moredock, as the
judge and you have painted him. As for this Indian-hating in general, I
can only say of it what Dr. Johnson said of the alleged Lisbon
earthquake: 'Sir, I don't believe it.'"

"Didn't believe it? Why not? Clashed with any little prejudice of his?"

"Doctor Johnson had no prejudice; but, like a certain other person,"
with an ingenuous smile, "he had sensibilities, and those were pained."

"Dr. Johnson was a good Christian, wasn't he?"

"He was."

"Suppose he had been something else."

"Then small incredulity as to the alleged earthquake."

"Suppose he had been also a misanthrope?"

"Then small incredulity as to the robberies and murders alleged to have
been perpetrated under the pall of smoke and ashes. The infidels of the
time were quick to credit those reports and worse. So true is it that,
while religion, contrary to the common notio