I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty seconds.  His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant.  I think it was simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a youthful playfulness, that led him to this outbreak.  I have often noticed that even quiet horses, on a sharp November morning, when their coats are beginning to get the winter roughness, will give little sportive demi-kicks, with slight sudden elevation of the subsequent region of the body, and a sharp short whinny,—­by no means intending to put their heels through the dasher, or to address the driver rudely, but feeling, to use a familiar word, frisky.  This, I think, is the physiological condition of the young person, John.  I noticed, however, what I should call a palpebral spasm, affecting the eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if it were intended for the facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to suspect a disposition to be satirical on his part.

—­Resuming the conversation, I remarked,—­I am, ex officio, as a Professor, a conservative.  For I don’t know any fruit that clings to its tree so faithfully, not even a “froze-’n’-thaw” winter-apple, as a Professor to the bough of which his chair is made.  You can’t shake him off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off.  Hence, by a chain of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism generally.

But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once find yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop your Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher than in the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of facts and swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you are in it.

You can’t keep gas in a bladder, and you can’t keep knowledge tight in a profession.  Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in, through India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and general knowledge will leak in, though a profession were covered with twenty thicknesses of sheepskin diplomas.

By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the people, Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with trip-hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of them—­like Aaron’s calf.

If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up and keep all the soul’s windows down,—­to shut out the sun from the east and the wind from the west,—­to let the rats run free in the cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul’s typhus is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or rave in its delirium,—­I, Sir, am a bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative.