a telling facer from his adversary.  Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep.  Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim.  His talk is like the driest of all imaginable dry champagnes.  Sleight of hand and inimitable quickness are the qualities by which he lives.  Athelred,[20] on the other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking aloud.  He is the most unready man I ever knew to shine in conversation.  You may see him sometimes wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end.  And there is something singularly engaging, often instructive, in the simplicity with which he thus exposes the process as well as the result, the works as well as the dial of the clock.  Withal he has his hours of inspiration.  Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, coming from deeper down, they smack the more personally, they have the more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humour.  There are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into the very grain of the language; you would think he must have worn the words next his skin and slept with them.  Yet it is not as a sayer of particular good things that Athelred is most to be regarded, rather as the stalwart woodman of thought.  I have pulled on a light cord often enough, while he has been wielding the broad-axe; and between us, on this unequal division, many a specious fallacy has fallen.  I have known him to battle the same question night after night for years, keeping it in the reign of talk, constantly applying it and re-applying it to life with humorous or grave intention, and all the while, never hurrying, nor flagging, nor taking an unfair advantage of the facts.  Jack at a given moment, when arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating but still judicial, and still faithfully contending with his doubts.

Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion studied in the “dry light"[21] of prose.  Indirectly and as if against his will the same elements from time to time appear in the troubled and poetic talk of Opalstein.[22] His various and exotic knowledge, complete although unready sympathies, and fine, full, discriminative flow of language, fit him out to be the best of talkers; so perhaps he is with some, not quite with me—­proxime accessit,[23] I should say.  He sings the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes.  But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx.  Jarring Byronic notes interrupt