and in death;
Sole permissible Discoverer, Denouncer, Judge, and Executioner of
Ostensible Hypnotists;
Fifty-handed God of Excommunication—­with a thunderbolt in every hand;
Appointer and Installer of the Pastor of all the Churches—­the Perpetual
Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, “the Comforter.”

CHAPTER X

There she stands-painted by herself.  No witness but herself has been allowed to testify.  She stands there painted by her acts, and decorated by her words.  When she talks, she has only a decorative value as a witness, either for or against herself, for she deals mainly in unsupported assertion; and in the rare cases where she puts forward a verifiable fact she gets out of it a meaning which it refuses to furnish to anybody else.  Also, when she talks, she is unstable, she wanders, she is incurably inconsistent; what she says to-day she contradicts tomorrow.

But her acts are consistent.  They are always faithful to her, they never misinterpret her, they are a mirror which always reflects her exactly, precisely, minutely, unerringly, and always the same, to date, with only those progressive little natural changes in stature, dress, complexion, mood, and carriage that mark—­exteriorly—­the march of the years and record the accumulations of experience, while—­interiorly—­through all this steady drift of evolution the one essential detail, the commanding detail, the master detail of the make-up remains as it was in the beginning, suffers no change and can suffer none; the basis of the character; the temperament, the disposition, that indestructible iron framework upon which the character is built, and whose shape it must take, and keep, throughout life.  We call it a person’s nature.

The man who is born stingy can be taught to give liberally—­with his hands; but not with his heart.  The man born kind and compassionate can have that disposition crushed down out of sight by embittering experience; but if it were an organ the post-mortem would find it still in his corpse.  The man born ambitious of power and glory may live long without finding it out, but when the opportunity comes he will know, will strike for the largest thing within the limit of his chances at the time-constable, perhaps—­and will be glad and proud when he gets it, and will write home about it.  But he will not stop with that start; his appetite will come again; and by-and-by again, and yet again; and when he has climbed to police commissioner it will at last begin to dawn upon him that what his Napoleon soul wants and was born for is something away higher up—­he does not quite know what, but Circumstance and Opportunity will indicate the direction and he will cut a road through and find out.