as if they were so many
children; and, indeed, they were children in his hands. All these gifts
made it apparent that he must have been a remarkable and able man; but
no stranger would have guessed as much from his appearance or his talk.
There were people, indeed, who knew him well, and who remained
incredulous and bewildered, trying to persuade themselves that his
success must be owing to pure luck, for that he had nothing else to
secure it. The cause of this, perhaps, was that he knew nothing about
books, and was one of those jeering cynics who are so common under one
guise or another. Fine cynics are endurable, and give a certain zest
often to society, which might become too civil without them; but your
coarse cynic is not pleasant. Mr. Copperhead's eye was as effectual in
quenching emotion of any but the coarsest kind as water is against
fire. People might be angry in his presence--it was the only passion he
comprehended; but tenderness, sympathy, sorrow, all the more generous
sentiments, fled and concealed themselves when this large, rich, costly
man came by. People who were brought much in contact with him became
ashamed of having any feelings at all; his eye upon them seemed to
convict them of humbug. Those eyes were very light grey, prominent, with
a jeer in them which was a very powerful moral instrument. His own
belief was that he could "spot" humbug wherever he saw it, and that
nothing could escape him; and, I suppose, so much humbug is there in
this world that his belief was justified. But there are few more awful
people than those ignoble spectators whose jeer arrests the moisture in
the eye, and strangles the outcry on their neighbour's lip.

Mr. Copperhead had risen from the ranks; yet not altogether from the
ranks. His father before him had been a contractor, dealing chiefly with
canals and roads, and the old kind of public works; a very rough
personage indeed, but one to whose fingers gold had stuck, perhaps
because of the clay with which they were always more or less smeared.
This ancestor had made a beginning to the family, and given his son a
name to start with. _Our_ Mr. Copperhead had married young, and had
several sons, who were all in business, and all doing well; less
vigorous, but still moderately successful copies of their father. When,
however, he had thus done his duty to the State, the first Mrs.
Copperhead having died, he did the only incomprehensible action of his
life--he married a seco