ow," turning to the stranger, "will you, if you please,
give me your reason for the warning words you first addressed to me?"

"I hope they were not such warnings as most warnings are," said the
stranger; "warnings which do not forewarn, but in mockery come after the
fact. And yet something in you bids me think now, that whatever latent
design your impostor friend might have had upon you, it as yet remains
unaccomplished. You read his label."

"And what did it say? 'This is a genial soul,' So you see you must
either give up your doctrine of labels, or else your prejudice against
my friend. But tell me," with renewed earnestness, "what do you take him
for? What is he?"

"What are you? What am I? Nobody knows who anybody is. The data which
life furnishes, towards forming a true estimate of any being, are as
insufficient to that end as in geometry one side given would be to
determine the triangle."

"But is not this doctrine of triangles someway inconsistent with your
doctrine of labels?"

"Yes; but what of that? I seldom care to be consistent. In a
philosophical view, consistency is a certain level at all times,
maintained in all the thoughts of one's mind. But, since nature is
nearly all hill and dale, how can one keep naturally advancing in
knowledge without submitting to the natural inequalities in the
progress? Advance into knowledge is just like advance upon the grand
Erie canal, where, from the character of the country, change of level is
inevitable; you are locked up and locked down with perpetual
inconsistencies, and yet all the time you get on; while the dullest part
of the whole route is what the boatmen call the 'long level'--a
consistently-flat surface of sixty miles through stagnant swamps."

"In one particular," rejoined the cosmopolitan, "your simile is,
perhaps, unfortunate. For, after all these weary lockings-up and
lockings-down, upon how much of a higher plain do you finally stand?
Enough to make it an object? Having from youth been taught reverence for
knowledge, you must pardon me if, on but this one account, I reject your
analogy. But really you someway bewitch me with your tempting discourse,
so that I keep straying from my point unawares. You tell me you cannot
certainly know who or what my friend is; pray, what do you conjecture
him to be?"

"I conjecture him to be what, among the ancient Egyptians, was called a
----" using some unknown word.

"A ----! And what is that?"

"A ---- is wh