"An enormous effect," said Obed Chute. "It's the same in morals as in nature. The Fellahs of the Nile, exposed as they are to the action of the hot rays of the sun, as they strike on the sand, are universally troubled with ophthalmia. In our Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky, there is a subterranean lake containing fishes which have no eyes at all. So it is in character and in morals. I will point you out men whose eyes are inflamed by the hot rays of passion; and others who show by their eyes that they have lived in moral darkness as dense as that of the Kentucky cave. Take a thief. Do you not know him by his eye? It takes an honest man to look you in the face." "Yon have done a great many things," said Windham, at another time. "Have you ever preached in your country?" "No," said Obed Chute, with a laugh; "but I've done better--I've been a stump orator; and stump oratory, as it is practiced in America, is a little the tallest kind of preaching that this green earth" (he was fond of that expression) "has ever listened to. Our orb, Sir, has seen strange experiences; but it is getting rayther astonished at the performances of the American man." "Generally," said Windham, "I do not believe in preaching so much as in practice; but when I see a man like you who can do both, I'm willing to listen, even if it be a stump speech that I hear. Still, I think that you are decidedly greater with a revolver in the midst of a crowd than you could be on a stump with a crowd before you." Obed Chute shook his head solemnly. "There," said he, "is one of the pecooliarities of you Europeans. You don't understand our national ways and manners. We don't separate saying and doing. With us every man who pretends to speak must be able to act. No man is listened to unless he is known to be capable of knocking down any one who interrupts him. In a country like ours speaking and acting go together. The Stump and the Revolver are two great American forces--twin born--the animating power of the Great Republic. There's no help for it. It must be so. Why, if I give offense in a speech, I shall of course be called to account afterward; and if I can't take care of myself and settle the account--why--where am I? Don't you see? Ours, Sir, is a singular state of society; but it is the last development of the human race, and, of course, the best." Conversations like these diverted Windham and roused him from his brooding melancholy. Obed Chute's fancies were certainly whimsical; he had an odd love for paradox and extravagance; he seized the idea that happened to suggest itself, and followed it out with a dry gravity and a solemn air of earnestness which made all that he said seem like his profound conviction. Thus in these conversations Windham never failed to receive entertainment, and to be roused from his preoccupying cares. [Illustration.] CHAPTER XXX. PICKED UP ADRIFT.