he free, dashing, rushing
water. So were his bright blue eyes, merry lips, and wind-crimsoned
cheeks, interpreters of his nature. They linked him firmly to the
outward. The man's soul was made up of joyfulness, strength, and a sort
of purposeless activity,--energy for its own sake. While his energies
harmonized with the right, or were exercised in the pursuit of
knowledge, one felt that he would have much power for good. But suppose
his activities to take a wrong direction, all his powers would help him
to be and enjoy the wrong. In either case, his nature would have the
same harmonious energy, and the moral part of him would not disturb the
balance of his character. He had no special liking for evil, I am sure;
yet, according to all the theories, his intense love of Nature ought to
have elevated and refined him far more than it had done.

Before we had been an hour together, I had also observed that he was
good-natured, impulsive, and, in a sort, kindly,--that he loved himself
and his own enjoyment too well ever knowingly to annoy or distress
another. There is a little difference between this and kindness. No
matter how I found him out. He who runs may read, if he looks sharply
enough; and in travelling, people betray and assert character
continually. I was also as sure as I was years afterwards, that he would
walk rough-shod over heart-violets and -daisies, nor once notice them
bleeding under his heel. It was in the grain of the man's nature. He had
lived at least thirty-five years, and was too old to be made over into
anything else by any experience.

His bag was half full of tulip-bulbs which he had bought and begged, he
said. He had a passion at present for cultivating tulips, and was quite
sure, that, if he had lived in the seventeenth instead of the nineteenth
century, he would have ruined himself twenty times over for a favorite
bulb, even without being a Dutchman.

His dominant idea, to which for the first hour he sacrificed without
scruple every other, was flowers. I had a mischievous pleasure in
professing a similar passion, on purpose to confound him with a
description of a Weston flower-garden. If he talked of jessamine and
Daphne odora, I talked of phlox and bachelor's-buttons. If he raved of
azaleas and gladioluses, I told him of our China-asters, sunflowers,
and hollyhocks.

"Ah, now I see you are laughing at me!" said he, good-humoredly, after I
had said, that, after all, I could not get up an admir