ended we were to look for the most sweeping epidemics of disease; a
comet had been sighted by one of our comet-hunters, and we were all to
say later whether or not it would have been better if we'd never been
born, and so on, and so on. His mind teemed with a prescience of the
plans and plots of statesmen, of bureaucrats, and of "plutocrats":
Germany was going to overshadow Europe, and "grind all beneath it like a
glacier"; "France was about to strike back at Prussia, and the blow
would be felt in the trembling of the earth from Pole to Pole." Yet
this, I thought, was to the man himself all fiction--the froth on the
limpid and sparkling depths beneath--the overflow of a bright,
undisciplined mind amid the stagnation of a country town. This strange
man would not intentionally have brought actual injury upon even an
enemy--if he ever had a real enemy; he was at heart, and generally in
practice, as kind as a gentle woman. But he seemed unable to exist
without mental super-activity; and the sympathy of his fellows in his
mental gyrations was to him a constant necessity. Few of the persons
whom he habitually met and who had leisure were able to discuss with him
the books he read, and not many of them cared even to hear him talk of
his fresh literary accessions. He had, long ago, and many times,
described for the benefit of the habitues of the corners, the career of
Alexander and of Napoleon, explaining what they had done, and how they
had done it, and _why_; with instances in which the execution of their
plans had met with failure, the reasons for that failure, and the
methods by which, if _he_ had been them, success might easily have been
attained. An ancient-looking apothecary, with an old "Rebel bushwhacker"
and a painter out of work who "loafed" of evenings in, or in front of,
the corner apothecary shop, had stood gap-mouthed at these recitations
until the mine of wonders had been to the last grain exhausted. Still,
excitement must be procured for them. The doctor could better have
dispensed for a day with food for the body, than to have foregone