t made the
minnows look larger than salmons.

"Trevanion had been at Cambridge with me. We were even intimate. He was
a young man like myself, with his way to make in the world. Poor as I,
of a family upon a par with mine, old enough, but decayed. There was,
however, this difference between us: he had connections in the great
world; I had none. Like me, his chief pecuniary resource was a college
fellowship. Now, Trevanion had established a high reputation at the
University; but less as a scholar, though a pretty fair one, than as
a man to rise in life. Every faculty he had was an energy. He aimed at
everything: lost some things, gained others. He was a great speaker in
a debating society, a member of some politico-economical club. He was an
eternal talker,--brilliant, various, paradoxical, florid; different
from what he is now, for, dreading fancy, his career since has been one
effort to curb it. But all his mind attached itself to something that we
Englishmen call solid; it was a large mind,--not, my dear Kitty, like a
fine whale sailing through knowledge from the pleasure of sailing,
but like a polypus, that puts forth all its feelers for the purpose of
catching hold of something. Trevanion had gone at once to London from
the University; his reputation and his talk dazzled his connections,
not unjustly. They made an effort, they got him into Parliament; he had
spoken, he had succeeded. He came to Compton in the flush of his virgin
fame. I cannot convey to you who know him now--with his careworn face
and abrupt, dry manner, reduced by perpetual gladiatorship to the skin
and bone of his former self--what that man was when he first stepped
into the arena of life.

"You see, my listeners, that you have to recollect that we middle-aged
folks were young then; that is to say, we were as different from what we
are now as the green bough of summer is from the dry wood out of which
we make a ship or a gatepost. Neither man nor wood comes to the uses of
life till the green leaves are stripped and the sap gone. And then the
uses of life transform us into strange things with other names: the tree
is a tree no more, it is a gate or a ship; the youth is a youth no more,
but a one-legged soldier, a hollow-eyed statesman, a scholar spectacled
and slippered! When Micyllus"--here the hand slides into the waistcoat
again--"when Micyllus," said my father, "asked the cock that had once
been Pythagoras(2) if the affair of Troy was really a