Mr. Kinsard’s views, as his colleagues in the legislature had discovered to their confusion, were apt to confirm his hearers in the opposite opinion. A bill was much safer when he arrayed himself against it. Mr. Forsey was not convinced that so serious a charge would have been made with absolutely nothing to support it. The idea of the blurtings of an uncontrolled rage occurred to neither of them. Forsey sat looking so steadily at the dapper toe of his boot for a time, and yet with so stealthy a stillness, that his manner might have suggested the bated exultation of a cat that had had a glimpse of a frisking mouse in that neighborhood, and was waiting to pounce upon it. “Judge Gwinnan has the reputation,” gravely remarked the granger, who looked as if he might be a pillar of the church, “of being a very upright man, a most worthy man, and a Christian gentleman.” “Of course he is,” said Kinsard; “no question about it, and nobody but a fool would have thought of anything else. I am going to introduce a bill,” he added seriously, “to make the fool-killer a State officer. We need him more than a geologist, or a governor, or anybody but a sheriff. A fool-killer ought to be on the State pay-roll.” No one said anything further, for Kinsard was lazily pulling himself out of the contortions into which he had sunk in the chair. He was very striking when he stood at his full height. There was an air of dash and bravery about him engaging to the imagination. His high, broad forehead gave nobility and seriousness to a face that would otherwise have been only sparkling, or sneering, or melancholy, as his mood dictated. One might have hoped that should he wear out his fantastic, aimless, erratic spirit, should some blow subdue it and give it into his control, he would develop great gifts hitherto dwarfed and denied. He was aware of them in some sort; he bore himself as a man endowed with some splendor of preeminence. And others accorded it. Youth has much credit given to its promise, despite that it so often falls in the bud or fails in the fruit. But it rarely has so brilliant a prospect as here; and after he had strolled off at a leisurely, swinging gait, saying that he was going to the House, where a bill was coming up that he wanted to kill, they all looked after him, and commented on him, and called him a fine, high-minded young man, and said that it was a good thing for young fellows to have political ambition, and that it was dying out among that class generally, who was too fond of making money and of using their time to their own advantage.