ntelligence, although
it was singularly oracular on "The State of Europe," and "Jeffersonian
Democracy." A certain cheap assurance, a copy-book dogmatism, a
colloquial familiarity, even in the impersonal plural, and a series of
inaccuracies and blunders here and there, struck some old chord in my
memory. I was mutely wondering where and when I had become personally
familiar with rhetoric like that, when the door of the office opened
and a man entered. I was surprised to recognize Captain Jim.

I had not seen him since he had indignantly left us, three years
before, in Eureka Gulch. The circumstances of his defection were
certainly not conducive to any voluntary renewal of friendship on
either side; and although, even as a former member of the Eureka Mining
Company, I was not conscious of retaining any sense of injury, yet the
whole occurrence flashed back upon me with awkward distinctness. To my
relief, however, he greeted me with his old cordiality; to my amusement
he added to it a suggestion of the large forgiveness of conscious
rectitude and amiable toleration. I thought, however, I detected, as
he glanced at the paper which was still in my hand and then back again
at my face, the same uneasy canine resemblance I remembered of old. He
had changed but little in appearance; perhaps he was a trifle stouter,
more mature, and slower in his movements. If I may return to my canine
illustration, his grayer, dustier, and more wiry ensemble gave me the
impression that certain pastoral and agricultural conditions had varied
his type, and he looked more like a shepherd's dog in whose brown eyes
there was an abiding consciousness of the care of straying sheep, and
possibly of one black one in particular.

He had, he told me, abandoned mining and taken up farming on a rather
large scale. He had prospered. He had other interests at stake, "A
flour-mill with some improvements--and--and"--here his eyes wandered to
the "Guardian" again, and he asked me somewhat abruptly what I thought
of the paper. Something impelled me to restrain my previous fuller
criticism, and I contented myself by saying briefly that I thought it
rather ambitious for the locality. "That's the word," he said with a
look of gratified relief, "'ambitious'--you've just hit it. And what's
the matter with thet? Ye kan't expect a high-toned man to write down to
the level of every karpin' hound, ken ye now? That's what he says to
me"-- He stopped half con