it was doubtless his present purpose to get back to Connecticut as fast
as possible. But no! The resolve to see the Queen was as strong in him
as ever; and it was marvellous the pertinacity with which he clung to it
amid raggedness and starvation, and the earnestness of his supplication
that I would supply him with funds for a suitable appearance at Windsor
Castle.

I never had so satisfactory a perception of a complete booby before in my
life; and it caused me to feel kindly towards him, and yet impatient and
exasperated on behalf of common-sense, which could not possibly tolerate
that such an unimaginable donkey should exist. I laid his absurdity
before him in the very plainest terms, but without either exciting his
anger or shaking his resolution. "O my dear man," quoth he, with
good-natured, placid, simple, and tearful stubbornness, "if you could but
enter into my feelings and see the matter from beginning to end as I see
it!" To confess the truth, I have since felt that I was hard-hearted to
the poor simpleton, and that there was more weight in his remonstrance
than I chose to be sensible of, at the time; for, like many men who have
been in the habit of making playthings or tools of their imagination and
sensibility, I was too rigidly tenacious of what was reasonable in the
affairs of real life. And even absurdity has its rights, when, as in
this case, it has absorbed a human being's entire nature and purposes. I
ought to have transmitted him to Mr. Buchanan, in London, who, being a
good-natured old gentleman, and anxious, just then, to gratify the
universal Yankee nation, might, for the joke's sake, have got him
admittance to the Queen, who had fairly laid herself open to his visit,
and has received hundreds of our countrymen on infinitely slighter
grounds. But I was inexorable, being turned to flint by the insufferable
proximity of a fool, and refused to interfere with his business in any
way except to procure him a passage home. I can see his face of mild,