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his life he observed that startling prevalence of animal types which
always communicates such a shock to the mind of him who has never
discovered it before. Every countenance suddenly seemed to be the face
of a beast, but thinly and imperfectly veiled. There were foxes and
tigers and wolves, there were bulldogs and monkeys and swine. He had
always seen, or thought he saw, upon the foreheads of his fellow men
some evidence of that divinity which had been communicated to them when
God breathed into the great first father the breath of life; but now he
shuddered at the sight of those thick lips and drooping jaws, those dull
or crafty eyes, those sullen, sodden, gargoyle features, as men do at
beholding monstrosities.

A few weeks ago he would have felt a profound pity at this discovery,
but so rapid and radical had been the alteration in his feelings that he
was now seized by a sudden revulsion and contempt. "Are these creatures
really men?" he asked himself. He stood there among them taller,
straighter, keener, handsomer than them all, and the old feelings that
have made men aristocrats and tyrants in every age of the world, surged
in his heart and hardened it against them.

By this time the quack had finished his few simple preparations, and,
standing erect before his audience, began the business of the evening.

Having observed the habits of the game, David now chose a favorable
position to study those of the hunter. He watched with an almost
breathless interest every expression upon that sinister face and
listened with a boundless interest to every word that fell from those
treacherous lips.

He was not long in justifying the quack's honest criticism of his own
oratory. His voice lacked the vibrant tones of a musical instrument and
his rhetoric that fluency, without which the highest effects of
eloquence can never be attained. By speaking very slowly and
deliberately he avoided stammering, but this always acted like a
dragging anchor upon the movement of his thought. These were radical
defects, but in every other respect he was a consummate artist. He
arrested the attention of his hearers with an inimitable skill and held
it with an irresistible power.

His piercing eye noted every expression on the faces of his hearers, and
seemed to read the inmost secrets of their hearts. He perceived the
slightest inclination to purchase, and was as keen to see a hand steal
towards a pocket-book as a cat to see a mouse stea