ossible, and see if he and his master Socrates
cannot give you, if not altogether a solution for your puzzle, at
least a method whereby you may solve it yourself. But tell me
first-What has all this to do with your evident sympathy for a man
so unlike yourself as Professor Windrush?"

"Perhaps I feel for him principally because he has broken loose from
it all in desperation, just as I have. But, to tell you the truth,
I have been reading more than one book of his school lately; and, as
I said, I owe you no thanks for demolishing the little comfort which
I seemed to find in them."

"And what was that then?"

"Why-in the first place, you can't deny that however incoherent they
may be they do say a great many clever things, and noble things too,
about man, and society, and art, and nature."

"No doubt of it."

"And moreover, they seem to connect all they say with-with-I suppose
you will laugh at me-with God, and spiritual truths, and eternal
Divine laws; in short, to consecrate common matters in that very
way, which I could not find in my poor mother's teaching."

"No doubt of that either. And therein is one real value of them, as
protests in behalf of something nobler and more unselfish than the
mere dollar-getting spirit of their country."

"Well, then, can you not see how pleasant it was to me to find
someone who would give me a peep into the unseen world, without
requiring as an entrance-fee any religious emotions and experiences?
Here I had been for years, shut out; told that I had no business
with anything eternal, and pure, and noble, and good; that to all
intents and purposes I was nothing better than a very cunning animal
who could be damned; because I was still 'carnal,' and had not been
through all Jane's mysterious sorrows and joys. And it was really
good news to me to hear that they were not required after all, and
that all I need do was to be a good man, and leave devotion to those
who were inclined to it by temperament."

"Not to be a good man," said I, "but only a good specimen of some
sort of man. That, I think, would be the outcome of Emerson's
'Representative Men,' or of those most tragic 'Memoirs of Margaret
Puller Ossoli.'"

"How then, hair-splitter? What is the mighty difference?"

"Would you call Dick Turpin a good man, because he was a good
highwayman?"

"What now?"

"That he would be an excellent representative man of his class; and
therefore, on Mr. Emerson's grounds, a fit