“I am, sir,” said he, firmly, “for it's not at this time o' day Shaver Quackinboss has to learn life. All the pepperin' and lemon-squeezin' in the world won't make a toad taste like a terrapin: that crittur's gold chains don't impose upon _me!_ You remember that he was n't aboard four- and-twenty hours when I said, 'That sheep's mangy.'” “Perhaps I like your plan the less because it separates us,” said Layton, who now perceived that the Colonel seemed to smart under anything that reflected on his acuteness. “That's jest what galls me too,” said he, frankly. “It's been all sunshine in my life, since we 've been together. All the book-learnin' you 've got has stolen into your nature so gradually as to make part of yourself, but what you tell me comes like soft rain over a dry prairie, and changing the parched soil into something that seems to say, 'I 'm not so barren, after all, if I only got my turn from fortune.' You 've shown me one thing, that I often had a glimmerin' of, but never saw clearly till you pointed it out, that the wisest men that ever lived felt more distrust of themselves than of their fellows. But we only part for a while, Layton. In less than a month we 'll meet again, and I hope to have good news for you by that time.” “Where are we to rendezvous, then?” asked Layton, for he saw how fruitless would be the attempt at further opposition. “I'll have the map out this evening, and we 'll fix it,” said the Colonel. “And now leave me to smoke, and think over what's afore us. There's great thoughts in that bit of twisted 'bacco there, if I only have the wit to trace 'em. Every man that has had to use his head in life finds out by the time he's forty what helps him to his best notions. Bonaparte used to get into a bath to think, Arkwright went to bed, and my father, Methuselah Grip Quackinboss, said he never was so bright as standing up to his neck in the mill-race, with the light spray of the wheel comin' in showers over him. 'I feel,' says he, 'as if I was one-half Lord Bacon and the other John C. Colhoun.' Now my brain- polisher is a long Cuban, a shady tree, and a look-out seaward,--all the better if the only sails in sight be far away.” CHAPTER XLII. A NEW LOCATION