his active mind could not but observe the change in me; and whether from
envy or a better feeling, he was willing to learn from me how to eclipse
me and resume his earlier superiority,--not to be superior chafed him.
Thus he listened to me with docility when I pointed out the books which
connected themselves with the various subjects incidental to the
miscellaneous matters on which he was employed. Though he had less of
the literary turn of mind than any one equally clever I had ever met,
and had read little, considering the quantity of thought he had acquired
and the show he made of the few works with which he had voluntarily made
himself familiar, he yet resolutely sat himself down to study; and
though it was clearly against the grain, I augured the more favorably
from tokens of a determination to do what was at the present irksome for
a purpose in the future. Yet whether I should have approved the purpose
had I thoroughly understood it, is another question. There were
abysses, both in his past life and in his character, which I could not
penetrate. There was in him both a reckless frankness and a vigilant
reserve: his frankness was apparent in his talk on all matters
immediately before us, in the utter absence of all effort to make
himself seem better than he was. His reserve was equally shown in the
ingenious evasion of every species of confidence that could admit me
into such secrets of his life as he chose to conceal where he had been
born, reared, and educated; how he came to be thrown on his own
resources; how he had contrived, how he had subsisted, were all matters
on which he had seemed to take an oath to Harpocrates, the god of
silence. And yet he was full of anecdotes of what he had seen, of
strange companions whom he never named, but with whom he had been
thrown. And, to do him justice, I remarked that though his precocious
experience seemed to have been gathered from the holes and corners, the
sewers and drains of life, and though he seemed wholly without dislike
to dishonesty, and to regard virtue or vice with as serene an