latile idea, Mr. Radnor found
repose in thoughts of his daughter and her dear mother. They had begged
him to put on an overcoat this day of bitter wind, or a silken kerchief
for the throat. Faithful to the Spring, it had been his habit since
boyhood to show upon his person something of the hue of the vernal
month, the white of the daisied meadow, and although he owned a light
overcoat to dangle from shoulders at the Opera crush, he declined to
wear it for protection. His gesture of shaking and expanding whenever
the tender request was urged on him, signified a physical opposition to
the control of garments. Mechanically now, while doating in fancy over
the couple beseeching him, he loosened the button across his defaced
waistcoat, exposed a large measure of chest to flaws of a wind barbed on
Norwegian peaks by the brewers of cough and catarrh--horrid women of the
whistling clouts, in the pay of our doctors. He braved them; he starved
the profession. He was that man in fifty thousand who despises hostile
elements and goes unpunished, calmly erect among a sneezing and tumbled
host, as a lighthouse overhead of breezy fleets. The coursing of his
blood was by comparison electrical; he had not the sensation of cold,
other than that of an effort of the elements to arouse him; and so quick
was he, through this fine animation, to feel, think, act, that the three
successive tributaries of conduct appeared as an irreflective flash and
a gamester's daring in the vein to men who had no deep knowledge of him
and his lightning arithmetic for measuring, sounding, and deciding.

Naturally he was among the happiest of human creatures; he willed it so,
with consent of circumstances; a boisterous consent, as when votes are
reckoned for a favourite candidate: excepting on the part of a small
band of black dissentients in a corner, a minute opaque body, devilish
in their irreconcilability, who maintain their struggle to provoke
discord, with a cry disclosing the one error of his youth, the sole bad
step chargeable upon his antecedents. But do we listen to them? Shall
we not have them turned out? He gives the sign for it; and he leaves his
buoying constituents to outroar them: and he tells a friend that it
was not, as one may say, an error, although an erratic step: but let us
explain to our bosom friend; it was a step quite unregretted, gloried
in; a step deliberately marked, to be done again, were the time renewed:
it was a step necessitated