actual subversion in the nineteenth.  Every step.  Our politicians might have picked up an idea or two there, I should think!  Then he was so cool about it, so skilful!  He fairly rubbed his hands with glee, enjoying the combat.  And he was so sure that the Doctor was savagely in earnest:  why, any one with half an ear could hear that!  He did not see how, in the very heat of the fray, his eyes would wander off listlessly.  But Mr. Howth did not wander; there was nothing careless or two-sided in the making of this man,—­no sham about him, or borrowing.  They came down gradually, or out,—­for, as I told you, they dug into the very heart of the matter at first,—­they came out gradually to modern times.  Things began to assume a more familiar aspect.  Spinoza, Fichte, Saint Simon,—­one heard about them now.  If you could but have heard the schoolmaster deal with these his enemies!  With what tender charity for the man, what relentless vengeance for the belief, he pounced on them, dragging the soul out of their systems, holding it up for slow slaughter!  As for Humanity, (how Knowles lingered on that word, with a tenderness curious in so uncouth a mass of flesh!)—­as for Humanity, it was a study to see it stripped and flouted and thrown out of doors like a filthy rag by this poor old Howth, a man too child-hearted to kill a spider.  It was pleasanter to hear him when he defended the great Past in which his ideal truth had been faintly shadowed.  How he caught the salient tints of the feudal life!  How the fine womanly nature of the man rose exulting in the free picturesque glow of the day of crusader and heroic deed!  How he crowded in traits of perfected manhood in the conqueror, simple trust in the serf, to color and weaken his argument, not seeing that he weakened it!  How, when he thought he had cornered the Doctor, he would color and laugh like a boy, then suddenly check himself, lest he might wound him!  A curious laugh, genial, cheery,—­bubbling out of his weak voice in a way that put you in mind of some old and rare wine.  When he would check himself in one of these triumphant glows, he would turn to the Doctor with a deprecatory gravity, and for a few moments be almost submissive in his reply.  So earnest and worn it looked then, the poor old face, in the dim light!  The black clothes he wore were so threadbare and shining at the knees and elbows, the coarse leather shoes brought to so fine a polish!  The Doctor idly wondered who had blacked them, glancing at Margaret’s fingers.

There was a flower stuck in the buttonhole of the schoolmaster’s coat, a pale tea-rose.  If Dr. Knowles had been a man of fine instincts, (which his opaque shining eyes would seem to deny,) he might have thought it was not unapt or ill-placed even in the shabby, scuffed coat.  A scholar, a gentleman, though in patched shoes and trousers a world too short.  Old and gaunt, hunger-bitten even it may be, with loose-jointed, bony limbs, and yellow face; clinging, loyal and brave, to the knightly honor, to the quaint, delicate fancies of his youth, that were dust and ashes to other men.  In the very haggard face you could find the quiet purity of the child he had been, and the old child’s smile, fresh and credulous, on the mouth.