or I be able to find it out for ourselves?"

Harcourt shook his head doubtfully.

"Well, now," said Billy, returning to the charge, "did you ever see
a waxwork model of anatomy? Every nerve and siny of a nerve was
there,--not a vein nor an artery wanting. The artist that made it all
just wanted to show you where everything was; but he never wanted you to
believe it was alive, or ever had been. But with janius it's different.
He just gives you some traits of a character, he points him out to you
passing,--just as I would to a man going along the street,--and there he
is alive for ever and ever; not like you and me, that will be dead and
buried to-morrow or next day, and the most known of us three lines in
a parish registhry, but he goes down to posterity an example, an
illustration--or a warning, maybe--to thousands and thousands of living
men. Don't talk to me about fiction! What _he_ thought and felt is truer
than all that you and I and a score like us ever did or ever will do.
The creations of janius are the landmarks of humanity; and well for us
is it that we have such to guide us!"

"All this may be very fine," said Harcourt, contemptuously, "but
give _me_ the sentiments of a living man, or one that has lived, in
preference to all the imaginary characters that have ever adorned a
story."

"Just as I suppose that you'd say that a soldier in the Blues, or some
big, hulking corporal in the Guards, is a finer model of the human form
than ever Praxiteles chiselled."

"I know which I 'd rather have alongside of me in a charge, Doctor,"
said Harcourt, laughing; and then, to change the topic, he pointed to
a lone cabin on the sea-shore, miles away, as it seemed, from all other
habitations.

"That's Michel Cady's, sir," said Traynor; "he lives by birds,--hunting
them saygulls and cormorants through the crevices of the rocks, and
stealing the eggs. There isn't a precipice that he won't climb, not a
cliff that he won't face."

"Well, if that be his home, the pursuit does not seem a profitable one."

"'Tis as good as breaking stones on the road for four-pence a day, or
carrying sea-weed five miles on your back to manure the potatoes," said
Billy, mournfully.

"That's exactly the very thing that puzzles me," said Harcourt, "why, in
a country so remarkable for fertility, every one should be so miserably
poor!"

"And you never heard any explanation of it?"

"Never; at least, never one that satisfied me."

"Nor eve