credit for his asses' ears.

However, I had long felt that contempt for popular opinion which every
man feels who knows of what miserable materials it is made--how much
of it is mere absurdity--how much malice--how much more the frothy
foolery and maudlin gossip of the empty of this empty generation.
"What was it to me if the grown children of our idle community, the
male babblers, and the female cutters-up of character, voted me, in
their commonplace souls, the blackest of black sheep? I was still
strong in the solid respect of a few worth them all."

Let no man smile when I say that, on reckoning up this Theban band of
sound judgment and inestimable fidelity, I found my muster reduced to
three, and those three of so unromantic a class as the grey-headed
exciseman, the equally grey-headed solicitor, and the curate.

But let it be remembered that a man must take his friends as fortune
wills; that he who can even imagine that he has three is under rare
circumstances; and that, as to the romance, time, which mellows and
mollifies so many things, may so far extract the professional _virus_
out of excisemen and solicitor, as to leave them both not incapable of
entering into the ranks of humanity.

* * * * *




SPIRIT of DISCOVERY.