“Well, Doctor, you flatter me; but really is not the imagination one of the highest elements of the human mind?  In the wide world’s history was it not a crowning, and one of the most useful qualities of many of the greatest men?”

“Great men have had imagination.  I presume, and achieved great things in spite of it; but through it, never.”

“Why, Doctor! the mere mathematician is the most servile of mortals.  He is useful, but cannot create, or even discover.  He weighs and measures.  Project one of his angles into space, and, though it may reach within ten feet of a blazing star that dazzles men with eyes, yet he will neither see nor know of its existence.  His foot-rule won’t reach it, and he has no eyes.  Imagination! it was the logic of the gods—­the power to create; and among men it abolishes the impossible.  By its force and strength one may strike fire from hidden flints in darkened worlds, and beat new windows in the blind sides of the ages.  Columbus imagined another continent, and sailed to it; and so of all great discoverers.”

The Doctor listened with some surprise.  “Did it ever occur to you, Bart, that you might be an orator of some sort?”

“Such an orator as Brutus is—­cold, formal, and dead?  I’d rather not be an orator at all, ‘but talk right on,’ like plain, blunt Mark Antony.”

“And yet Brutus has been quoted and held up by poets and orators as a sublime example of virtue and patriotism, young man!”

“And yet he never made murder the fashion;” and—­striking an attitude—­“Caesar had his Brutus!  Charles had his Cromwell! and George III. had—­what the devil did George have?  He was stupid enough to have been a mathematician, though I never heard that he was.”

“Oh dear, Bart!” said the Doctor, with a sigh, “for God’s sake, and your own, do study Euclid if you can!  Don’t you see that your mind is always sky-rocketing and chasing thistle-down through the air?”

  “’The downy thistle-seed my fare,
      My strain forever new,’”
said Bart, laughing, and preparing to go.

“By the way,” asked the Doctor, “wouldn’t you like to go fishing one of these nights?  We haven’t been but once or twice this summer.  Jonah, and Theodore, and ‘Brother Young’ and I have been talking about it for some days.  We will rig up a fire-jack, if you will go, and use the spear.”

“I am afraid I would be sky-rocketing, Doctor; but send me word when you are ready.”

* * * * *

Barton had now entered upon something like a regular course.  He had one of those intense nervous temperaments that did not require or permit excessive sleep.  He arose with the first light, and took up at once the severest study he had until breakfast, and then worked with the boys, or alone, the most of the forenoon, at whatever on the farm, or about the house, seemed most to want his hand; the afternoons and evenings were given to unremitting study or reading.  His tone of mind and new habit of introspection induced him to take long walks in the woods and secluded places, and after his work for the day was done; he imposed upon himself a regular and systematic course, and compelled himself to adhere to it.  He saw few, went nowhere; and among that busy people, after the little buzz occasioned by his return had subsided, he ceased to be an object of interest or comment.