trait; can you say any one it resembles?" How much more generous had
he said, "Tell me all about this wager of yours with Father Dyke; I want
to hear _your_ account of it, for old Tom is not the most veracious of
mortals, nor the most mealy-mouthed of commentators. Just give me _your_
version of the incident, Potts, and I am satisfied it will be the true
one." That's what he might, that's what he ought to have said. I can
swear it is what I, Potts, would have done by _him_, or by any other
stranger whose graceful manners and pleasing qualities had won my esteem
and conciliated my regard. I 'd have said, "Potts, I have seen enough
of life to know how unjust it is to measure men by one and the same
standard. The ardent, impassioned nature cannot be ranked with the cold
and calculating spirit The imaginative man has the same necessity for
the development of his creative faculty as the strongly muscular man
of bodily exercise. He must blow off the steam of his invention, or the
boiler will not contain it. You and Le Sage and Alexandre Dumas are a
category. You are not the Clerks of a Census Commission, or Masters
in Equity. You are the chartered libertines of fiction. Shake out your
reefs, and go free,--free as the winds that waft you!"

To all these reflections came the last one. "I must be up and doing, and
that speedily! I will recover Blondel, if I devote my life to the
task. I will regain him, let the cost be what it may. Mounted upon that
creature, I will ride up to the Rosary; the time shall be evening; a sun
just sunk behind the horizon shall have left in the upper atmosphere a
golden and rosy light, which shall tip his mane with a softened lustre,
and shed over my own features a rich Titian-like tint. 'I come,' will I
say, 'to vindicate the fair fame of one who once owned your affection.
It is Potts, the man of impulse, the child of enthusiasm, who now
presents himself before you. Poor, if you like to call him so, in
worldly craft or skill, poor in its possessions, but rich, boundlessly
rich, in the stores of an ideal wealth. Blondel and I are the embodiment
of this idea. These fancies you have stigmatized as lies are but the
pilot balloons by which great minds calculate the currents in that upper
air they are about to soar in.'"

And, last of all, there was a sophistry that possessed a great charm for
my mind, in this wise: to enable a man, humble as myself, to reach that
station in which a career of adventure sho