rowded to his lips. It was easy enough for him to speak, but he
must speak right. The thoughts he wished to utter must be clothed in the
right kind of words arranged in the right way, and he resolved that it
should be so.

The way in which men thought and the way in which their thoughts were
put in the Bible and the great Elizabethans fascinated him. That was the
way in which he would try to think, and the way in which he would try to
put his thoughts. So he recited the noble passages over and over again,
he memorized many of them, and he listened carefully to himself as he
spoke them, alike for the sense and the music and power of the words.

It was then perhaps that he formed the great style for which he was so
famous in after years. His vocabulary became remarkable for its range,
flexibility and power, and he developed the art of selection. His rivals
even were used to say of him that he always chose the best word. He
learned there on the island that language was not given to man merely
that he might make a noise, but that he might use it as a great marksman
uses a rifle.

Work and study together filled his days. They kept far from him also any
feeling of despair. He had an abiding faith that a ship of the right
kind would come in time and take him away. He must not worry about it.
It was his task now to fit himself for the return, to prove to his
friends when he saw them once more that all the splendid opportunities
offered to him on the island had not been wasted.

Almost unconsciously, he began to reason more deeply, to look further
into the causes of things, and his mind turned particularly to the
present war. The more he thought about it the greater became his
conviction that England and the colonies were bound to win. Courage and
numbers, resources and tenacity must prevail even over great initial
mistakes. Duquesne and Ticonderoga would be brushed away as mere events
that had no control over destiny.

He remembered Bigot's ball in Quebec that Willet and Tayoga and he had
attended. It came before him again almost as vivid as reality. He
realized now in the light of greater age and experience how it typified
decadence. A power that was rotten at the top, where the brain should
be, could never defeat one that was full of youthful ardor and strength,
sound through and through, awkward and ill directed though that strength
might be. The young French leaders and their soldiers were valiant,
skillful and endurin