You know I have dropped things down--little jokes and metaphors, little fantasies and paradoxes--and I have never heard them touch bottom!" This was an epigram on the part of a young man who had a lively play of fancy; but it was none the less true that Gordon Wright had a firmly-treading, rather than a winged, intellect.

Every phrase in his letter seemed, to Bernard, to march in stout-soled walking-boots, and nothing could better express his attachment to the process of reasoning things out than this proposal that his friend should come and make a chemical analysis--a geometrical survey--of the lady of his love.

"That I shall have any difficulty in forming an opinion, and any difficulty in expressing it when formed--of this he has as little idea as that he shall have any difficulty in accepting it when expressed." So Bernard reflected, as he rolled in the train to Munich.

"Gordon's mind," he went on, "has no atmosphere; his intellectual process goes on in the void.

There are no currents and eddies to affect it, no high winds nor hot suns, no changes of season and temperature.