answers; then, catching his sister’s eye, came to unnatural full stops; and so warmly and skillfully was he pressed that it cost him a gigantic effort to avoid giving much amusement and instruction.  The courtier saw this hesitation, and the vivid flashes of intelligence, and would not lose her prey.  She drew him with all a woman’s tact, and with a warmth so well feigned that it set him on real fire.  His instinct of politeness would not let him go on all night giving short answers to inquiring beauty.  He turned his eye, which glowed now like a live coal, toward that enticing voice, and presently, like a ship that has been hanging over the water ever so long on the last rollers, with one gallant glide he took the sea, and towed them all like little cockle-boats in his wake.  From sea to sea, from port to port, from tribe to tribe, from peril to peril, from feat to feat, David whirled his wonderstruck hearers, and held them panting by the quadruple magic of a tuneful voice, a changing eye, an ardent soul, and truth at first-hand.

They sat thrilled and surprised, most of all Miss Fountain.  To her, things great and real had up to that moment been mere vague outlines seen through a mist.  Moreover, her habitual courtesy had hitherto drawn out pumps; but now, when least expected, all in a moment, as a spark fires powder, it let off a man.

A sailor is a live book of travels.  Check your own vanity (if you possibly can) and set him talking, you shall find him full of curious and profitable matter.

The Fountains did not know this, and, even if they had, Dodd would have taken them by surprise; for, besides being a sailor and a sea-enthusiast, he was a fellow of great capacity and mental vigor.

He had not skimmed so many books as we have, but I fear he had sucked more.  However, his main strength did not lie there.  He was not a paper man, and this—­oh! men of paper and oh!  C. R. in particular—­gave him a tremendous advantage over you that Sunday evening.

The man whose knowledge all comes from reading accumulates a great number of what?—­facts?  No, of the shadows of facts; shadows often so thin, indistinct and featureless, that, when one of the facts themselves runs against him in real life, he does not know his old friend, round about which he has written a smart leader in a journal and a ponderous trifle in the Polysyllabic Review.

But this sailor had stowed into his mental hold not fact-shadows, but the glowing facts all alive, O. For thirteen years, man and boy, he had beat about the globe, with real eyes, real ears, and real brains ever at work.  He had drunk living knowledge like a fish, and at fountainheads.

Yet, to utter intellectual wealth nobly, two things more are indispensable the gift of language and a tunable voice, which last does not always come by talking with tempests.

Well, David Dodd had sucked in a good deal of language from books and tongues; not, indeed, the Norman-French and demi-Latin and jargon of the schools, printed for English in impotent old trimestrials for the further fogification of cliques, but he had laid by a fair store of the best—­of the monosyllables—­the Saxon—­the soul and vestal fire of the great English tongue.