Now, if there was one man on earth above another, of whom Eustace Leigh
stood in dread, it was his cousin Amyas. In the first place, he knew
Amyas could have killed him with a blow; and there are natures, who,
instead of rejoicing in the strength of men of greater prowess than
themselves, look at such with irritation, dread, at last, spite;
expecting, perhaps, that the stronger will do to them what they feel
they might have done in his place. Every one, perhaps, has the same
envious, cowardly devil haunting about his heart; but the brave men,
though they be very sparrows, kick him out; the cowards keep him, and
foster him; and so did poor Eustace Leigh.

Next, he could not help feeling that Amyas despised him. They had not
met for three years; but before Amyas went, Eustace never could argue
with him, simply because Amyas treated him as beneath argument. No doubt
he was often rude and unfair enough; but the whole mass of questions
concerning the unseen world, which the priests had stimulated in his
cousin's mind into an unhealthy fungus crop, were to Amyas simply, as he
expressed it, "wind and moonshine;" and he treated his cousin as a
sort of harmless lunatic, and, as they say in Devon, "half-baked." And
Eustace knew it; and knew, too, that his cousin did him an injustice.
"He used to undervalue me," said he to himself; "let us see whether he
does not find me a match for him now." And then went off into an agony
of secret contrition for his self-seeking and his forgetting that
"the glory of God, and not his own exaltation," was the object of his
existence.

There, dear readers, Ex pede Herculem; I cannot tire myself or you
(especially in this book) with any wire-drawn soul-dissections. I have
tried to hint to you two opposite sorts of men,--the one trying to be