My uncle bounded as if he had been shot,--bounded so incautiously,
considering the materials of which one leg was composed, that he would
have fallen into a strawberry-bed if I had not caught him by the arm.

"Why, you--you--you young jackanapes!" cried the Captain, shaking me off
as soon as he had regained his equilibrium. "You do not mean to inherit
that infamous crotchet my brother has got into his head? You do not
mean to exchange Sir William de Caxton, who fought and fell at Bosworth,
for the mechanic who sold black-letter pamphlets in the Sanctuary at
Westminster?"

"That depends on the evidence, uncle!"

"No, sir; like all noble truths, it depends upon faith. Men, nowadays,"
continued my uncle, with a look of ineffable disgust, "actually require
that truths should be proved."

"It is a sad conceit on their part, no doubt, my dear uncle; but till a
truth is proved, how can we know that it is a truth?"

I thought that in that very sagacious question I had effectually caught
my uncle. Not I. He slipped through it like an eel.

"Sir," said he, "whatever in Truth makes a man's heart warmer and his
soul purer, is a belief, not a knowledge. Proof, sir, is a handcuff;
belief is a wing! Want proof as to an ancestor in the reign of King
Richard? Sir, you cannot even prove to the satisfaction of a logician
that you are the son of your own father. Sir, a religious man does not
want to reason about his religion; religion is not mathematics.