that guided
him.

His favorite theory was, that however well a horse may gallop, there
is always, if one but knew it, some kind of ground that would throw
him "out of stride;" and so of men: he calculated that every one
is accompanied by some circumstance or other which forms his
stumbling-block through life; and however it may escape notice, that
to its existence will be referrable innumerable turnings and windings,
whose seeming contradictions excite surprise and astonishment.

To learn all these secret defects, to store his mind with every incident
of family and fortune of the chief actors of the time, was the mechanism
by which he worked, and certainly in such inquisitorial pursuits it
would have been hard to find his equal. By keenly watching the lines
of action men pursued, he had taught himself to trace back to their
motives, and by the exercise of these faculties he had at last attained
to a skill in reading character that seemed little short of marvellous.

Nature had been most favorable in fitting him for his career, for his
features were of that cast which bespeaks a soft, easy temperament,
careless and unsuspecting. His large blue eyes and curly golden hair
gave him, even at thirty, a boyish look, and both in voice and manner
was he singularly youthful, while his laugh was like the joyous outburst
of a happy schoolboy.

None could have ever suspected that such a figure as this, arrayed in
the trappings of a courtly usher, could have inclosed within it a whole
network of secret intrigue and plot. My mother had the misfortune to
make a still more fatal blunder; for, seeing him in what she pardonably
enough believed to be a livery, she took him to be a menial, and
actually despatched him to her carriage to fetch her fan! The incident
got abroad, and Rutledge, of course, was well laughed at; but he seemed
to enjoy the mirth so thoroughly, and told the story so well himself,
that it could never be imagined he felt the slightest annoyance on the
subject. By all accounts, however, the great weakness of his character
was the belief that he was decidedly noble-looking and highbred; that
place him where you would, costume him how you might, surround him
with all that might disparage pretension, yet that such was the innate
gentlemanhood of his nature, the least critical of observers would not
fail to acknowledge him. To say that he concealed this weakness most
completely, that he shrouded it in the very depth of