ot bound, and no more is he, to place your faith in
these brand-new opinions. But some of them are right enough, durable
even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock-shy--as when idle
people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and have an hour's
diversion ere it sinks. Whichever they are, serious opinions or humours
of the moment, he still defends his ventures with indefatigable wit and
spirit, hitting savagely himself, but taking punishment like a man. He
knows and never forgets that people talk, first of all, for the sake of
talking; conducts himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like a
thorough "glutton," and honestly enjoys a telling facer from his
adversary. Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep.
Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk is like the
driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and inimitable
quickness are the qualities by which he lives. Athelred,[11] on the
other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat
slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most unready man I ever knew to
shine in conversation. You may see him sometimes wrestle with a
refractory jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw
it in the end. And there is something singularly engaging, often
instructive, in the simplicity with which he thus exposes the process as
well as the result, the works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal
he has his hours of inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by
accident, and, coming from deeper down, they smack the more personally,
they have the more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and
humour. There are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into
the very grain of the language; you would think he must have worn the
words next his skin, and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer of
particular good things that Athelred is most to be regarded, rather as
the stalwart woodman of thought. I have pulled on a light cord often
enough, while he has been wielding the broad-axe; and, between us, on
this unequal division, many a specious fallacy has fallen. I have known
him to battle the same question night after night for years, keeping it
in the reign of talk, constantly applying it and re-applying it to life
with humorous or grave intention, and all the while never hurrying, nor
flagging, nor taking an unfair advantage of the facts. Jack at a given
moment, when arising, as it were, from the t