would be! But when, a month after, it was necessary for
them to do anything about the thing he had been speaking
of, they did what Brannan had told them to do;
forgetting, most likely, that he had ever told them,
and fancying that these were their own ideas, which, in
fact, had, from his liquid, ponderous, transparent, and
invisible common sense, distilled unconsciously into
their being. I wonder whether Brannan ever knew that he
was eloquent. What I knew, and what dear George knew,
was, that he was one of the leaders of men!

Courage, my friends, we are steadily advancing to the
Brick Moon!

For George had stopped, and seen Brannan; and Brannan
had not forgotten. Seventeen years Brannan had
remembered, and not a ship had been lost on a lee-shore
because her longitude was wrong,--not a baby had wailed
its last as it was ground between wrecked spar and cruel
rock,--not a swollen corpse unknown had been flung up
upon the sand and been buried with a nameless epitaph,--
but Brannan had recollected the Brick Moon, and had, in
the memory-chamber which rejected nothing, stored away
the story of the horror. And now George was ready to
consecrate a round hundred thousand to the building of
the Moon; and Brannan was ready, in the thousand ways in
which wise men move the people to and fro, to persuade
them to give to us a hundred thousand more; and George
had come to ask me if I were not ready to undertake with
them the final great effort, of which our old