r his family to meet him at
Marseilles, and now approached that place with the fullest confidence
that his family would be there according to appointment. This type of
man is entirely and exclusively the product of America, the country
of magnificent distances, and the place where Nature works on so
grand a scale that human beings insensibly catch her style of
expression. Obed Chute was a man who felt in every fibre the
oppressive weight of his country's grandeur. Yet so generous was his
nature that he forbore to overpower others by any allusions to that
grandeur, except where it was absolutely impossible to avoid it.

These two had gradually come to form a strong regard for one another,
and Obed Chute did not hesitate to express his opinion about his
friend.

"I do not generally take to Britishers," said he, once, "for they are
too contracted, and never seem to me to have taken in a full breath
of the free air of the universe. They seem usually to have been in
the habit of inhaling an enervating moral and intellectual
atmosphere. But you suit me, you do. Young man, your hand."

And grasping Windham's hand, Obed wrung it so heartily that he forced
nearly all feeling out of it.

"I suppose living in India has enabled me to breathe a broader moral
atmosphere," said Windham, with his usual melancholy smile.

"I suppose so," said Obed Chute. "Something has done it, any how. You
showed it when the steamer was burning."

"How?"

"By your eye."

"Why, what effect can one's moral atmosphere have on one's eyes?"

"An enormous effect," said Obed Chute. "It's the same in morals as in
nature. The Fellahs of the Nile, exposed as they are to the action of
the hot rays of the sun, as they strike on the sand, are universally
troubled with ophthalmia. In our Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky, there is
a subterranean lake containing fishes which have no eyes at all. So
it is in character and in morals. I will point you out men whose eyes
are inflamed by the hot rays of passion; and others who show by their
eyes that they have lived in moral darkness as dense as that of the
Kentucky cave. Take a thief. Do you not know him by his eye? It takes
an honest man to look you in the face."

"Yon have done a great many things," said Windham, at another time.
"Have you ever preached in your country?"

"No," said Obed Chute, with a laugh; "but I've done better--I've been
a stump orator; and stump oratory, as it is practiced in America, is
a l