proachfully, "you ought
to have sympathized with that man; tell me, did you feel no
fellow-feeling? Look at his tract here, quite in the transcendental
vein."

"Excuse me," said the stranger, declining the tract, "I never patronize
scoundrels."

"Scoundrels?"

"I detected in him, sir, a damning peep of sense--damning, I say; for
sense in a seeming madman is scoundrelism. I take him for a cunning
vagabond, who picks up a vagabond living by adroitly playing the madman.
Did you not remark how he flinched under my eye?'

"Really?" drawing a long, astonished breath, "I could hardly have
divined in you a temper so subtlely distrustful. Flinched? to be sure he
did, poor fellow; you received him with so lame a welcome. As for his
adroitly playing the madman, invidious critics might object the same to
some one or two strolling magi of these days. But that is a matter I
know nothing about. But, once more, and for the last time, to return to
the point: why sir, did you warn me against my friend? I shall rejoice,
if, as I think it will prove, your want of confidence in my friend rests
upon a basis equally slender with your distrust of the lunatic. Come,
why did you warn me? Put it, I beseech, in few words, and those
English."

"I warned you against him because he is suspected for what on these
boats is known--so they tell me--as a Mississippi operator."

"An operator, ah? he operates, does he? My friend, then, is something
like what the Indians call a Great Medicine, is he? He operates, he
purges, he drains off the repletions."

"I perceive, sir," said the stranger, constitutionally obtuse to the
pleasant drollery, "that your notion, of what is called a Great
Medicine, needs correction. The Great Medicine among the Indians is less
a bolus than a man in grave esteem for his politic sagacity."

"And is not my friend politic? Is not my friend sagacious? By your own
definition, is not my friend a Great Medicine?"

"No, he is an operator, a Mississippi operator; an equivocal character.
That he is such, I little doubt, having had him pointed out to me as
such by one desirous of initiating me into any little novelty of this
western region, where I never before traveled. And, sir, if I am not
mistaken, you also are a stranger here (but, indeed, where in this
strange universe is not one a stranger?) and that is a reason why I felt
moved to warn you against a companion who could not be otherwise than
perilous to one of a free and