whistle, and I will run!"

Notes of expressive facts, of words also worthy of note (for he was a
lover of style), collected in the first instance for the help of an
irregular memory, were becoming, in the quaintly labelled drawers,
with labels of wise old maxim or device, the primary, rude stuff, or
"protoplasm," of his intended work, and already gave token of its
scope and variety. "All motion discovers us"; if to others, so also
to ourselves. Movement, rapid movement of some kind, a ride, the
hasty survey of a shelf of books, best of all a conversation like
this morning's with a visitor for the first time,--amid the
felicitous chances of that, at some random turn by the way, he would
become aware of shaping purpose: the beam of light or heat would
strike down, to illuminate, to fuse and organise the coldly
accumulated matter, of reason, of experience. Surely, some
providence over thought and speech led one finely through those
haphazard journeys! But thus dependent to so great a degree on
external converse for the best fruit of his own thought, he was also
an efficient evocator of the thought of another--himself an original
spirit more than tolerating [87] the originality of others,--which
brought it into play. Here was one who (through natural
predilection, reinforced by theory) would welcome one's very self,
undistressed by, while fully observant of, its difference from his
own--one's errors, vanities, perhaps fatuities. Naturally eloquent,
expressive, with a mind like a rich collection of the choice things
of all times and countries, he was at his best, his happiest, amid
the magnetic contacts of an easy conversation. When Gaston years
afterwards came to read the famous Essays, he found many a delightful
actual conversation re-set, and had the key we lack to their
surprises, their capricious turns and lapses.--Well! Montaigne had