is wasted. But nothing of the sort is going to happen, as I
conjecture. My belief is that as soon as he hears your challenge, he
will embrace the contest; pricked on by emulous pride, he will insist
upon getting the better of you in kindness of word and deed.

At present you two are in the condition of two hands formed by God to
help each other, but which have let go their business and have turned
to hindering one another all they can. You are a pair of feet
fashioned on the Divine plan to work together, but which have
neglected this in order to trammel each other's gait. Now is it not
insensate stupidity[8] to use for injury what was meant for advantage?
And yet in fashioning two brothers God intends them, methinks, to be
of more benefit to one another than either two hands, or two feet, or
two eyes, or any other of those pairs which belong to man from his
birth.[9] Consider how powerless these hands of ours if called upon to
combine their action at two points more than a single fathom's length
apart;[10] and these feet could not stretch asunder[11] even a bare
fathom; and these eyes, for all the wide-reaching range we claim for
them, are incapable of seeing simultaneously the back and front of an
object at even closer quarters. But a pair of brothers, linked in
bonds of amity, can work each for the other's good, though seas divide
them.[12]

[8] "Boorishness verging upon monomania."

[9] "With which man is endowed at birth."

[10] "More than an 'arms'-stretch' asunder."

[11] Lit. "reach at one stretch two objects, even over that small