He's as true as a Tuscan peasant,
as proud as an Indian, and as quick as a Yankee."
"Ah! I _hoped_ you wouldn't go abroad for that last," said
Bellingham.
"No; and it's delightful, seeing the great variety of human nature
there is in every human being here. Our life isn't stratified;
perhaps it never will be. At any rate, for the present, we're all in
vertical sections. But I always go back to my first notion of
Barker: he's ancestral, and he makes me feel like degenerate
posterity. I've had the same sensation with Tom; but Barker seems to
go a little further back. I suppose there's such a thing as getting
too far back in these Origin of Species days; but he isn't excessive
in that or in anything. He's confoundedly temperate, in fact; and
he's reticent; he doesn't allow any unseemly intimacy. He's always
turning me out-of-doors."
"Of course! But what can we old fellows hope to know of what's going
on in any young one? Talk of strangeness! I'd undertake to find more
in common with a florid old fellow of fifty from the red planet Mars
than with any young Bostonian of twenty."
"Yes; but it's the youth of my sires that I find so strange in
Barker. Only, theoretically, there's no Puritanism. He's a thorough
believer in Sewell. I suspect he could formulate Sewell's theology a
great deal better than Sewell could.
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