Nevertheless, what really tickled me most was the boy's peroration. It gave me a pretty clear insight into his “innard workings.” He led up to it in his favourite way: stepping backward a pace or two and sinking his voice to a kind of Edwin Booth quiet; gradually growing a little louder; then suddenly turning on the thunder and running forward. “You ask _me_ for our credentials?” he roared. (Nobody had, this time.) “In the Lexicon of the Peoples, you ask _me_ for my country's credentials? The credentials of our pastures, our population and our pride! You ask me for my country's credentials? I reply: 'The credentials of our youth and our enthusiasm! Of red corpuscles! Of red blood! The credentials of the virility and of the magnificent manhood of the Columbian Continent!' You ask for my country's credentials and I answer: 'The credentials of Glory! By right of the eternal and Almighty God!'” Of course there was a great deal more, but that's enough to show how he had polished it. * * * * * I walked back to Mary's with Joe Lane, while Hector followed, making a kind of Royal Progress through the crowds, with his mother and Miss Rainey. “You see it now, yourself, don't you?” Joe said to me. “You mean about his doing well?” “What else? He's just shown what he can do with people. The day will come when you'll have to take him at his own valuation.” I couldn't help laughing. “Well, Joe,” I said, “that sounds as if _you_, at least, already took Hector at his own valuation.” “In some things,” he answered, “I think I do. Don't you take him for an ass, sir. Sometimes I believe he's guided by a really superior intelligence--” “Must be a sub-consciousness, then, Joe!” “Exactly,” he said seriously. “He doesn't make a single mistake. He's trained his manner so that, while a very few people laugh at him, he does things that the town would resent in any one else. He doesn't go round with the boys, and they look up to him for it. He isn't pompous, but he's acquired a kind of stateliness of manner that's made Greenville call him 'Mister Ransom' instead of 'Hec.' You probably think that his request to the National Committee only shows he's got all the nerve in the world; but I believe, on my soul, that if it had been granted he could have made good.” “What did he want to run Passley Trimmer into his Pantheon for, to-day?” I asked.