man,
humble as he was, had lived. He never stepped aside from his own path,
yet would always reach a blessing to his neighbor. Almost involuntarily
too, he had become a preacher. The pure and high simplicity of his
thought, which, as one of its manifestations, took shape in the good
deeds that dropped silently from his hand, flowed also forth in speech.
He uttered truths that wrought upon and moulded the lives of those who
heard him. His auditors, it may be, never suspected that Ernest, their
own neighbor and familiar friend, was more than an ordinary man; least
of all did Ernest himself suspect it; but, inevitably as the murmur of
a rivulet, came thoughts out of his mouth that no other human lips had
spoken.

When the people's minds had had a little time to cool, they were ready
enough to acknowledge their mistake in imagining a similarity between
General Blood-and-Thunder's truculent physiognomy and the benign visage
on the mountain-side. But now, again, there were reports and many
paragraphs in the newspapers, affirming that the likeness of the Great
Stone Face had appeared upon the broad shoulders of a certain eminent
statesman. He, like Mr. Gathergold and Old Blood-and-Thunder, was a
native of the valley, but had left it in his early days, and taken up
the trades of law and politics. Instead of the rich man's wealth and
the warrior's sword, he had but a tongue, and it was mightier than both
together. So wonderfully eloquent was he, that whatever he might choose
to say, his auditors had no choice but to believe him; wrong looked
like right, and right like wrong; for when it pleased him, he could
make a kind of illuminated fog with his mere breath, and obscure the
natural daylight with it. His tongue, indeed, was a magic instrument:
sometimes it rumbled like the thunder; sometimes it warbled like the
sweetest music. It was the blast of war, the song of peace; and it
seemed to have a heart in it, when there was no such matter. In good
truth, he was a wondrous man; and when his tongue had acquired him all
other imaginable success,--when it had been heard in halls of state,
and in the courts of princes and potentates,--after it had made him
known all over the world, even as a voice crying from shore to
shore,--it finally persuaded his countrymen to select him for the
Presidency. Before this time,--indeed, as soon as he began to grow
celebrated,--his admirers had found out the resemblance between him and
the Great Ston