to drink with him, and, when I declined, got furious and wanted to fight me. I told him that I never drank whiskey and that it made me sick, and finally succeeded in pacifying him without touching his poison. In fact he made me a kind of apology for having offered to cut my throat. 'Wa'al, fact is, stranger,' said he, 'I,' (laying an accent as strong as his liquor on the personal pronoun) 'I use whiskey.'—You understand the inference, I suppose: a man who refused whiskey was a contradiction, a reproach to his personality: such a man he could not suffer to live. It was the Brooks and Sumner affair over again. Brooks says, 'Fact is I believe in slavery,' and immediately hits Sumner over the head for not believing in it." [Pg 15] "Something like my grandfather, who, when he had to diet, used to want the whole family to live on dry toast," observed Colburne. "For the time being he believed in the universal propriety and necessity of toast." "Were you in danger of violence before you left New Orleans?" he presently asked. "I beg pardon if I am too curious." "Violence? Why, not precisely; not immediate violence. The breaking-off point was this. I must explain that I dabble in chemistry as well as mineralogy. Now in all that city of raw materialism, of cotton-bale and sugar-hogshead instinct—I can't call it intelligence—there was not a man of southern principles who knew enough of chemistry to make a fuse. They wanted to possess themselves of the United States forts in their State. They supposed that they would be obliged to shell them. The shells they had plundered from the United States arsenal; but the fuses were wanting. A military committee requested me to fabricate them. Of course I was driven to make an immediate choice between rebellion and loyalty. I took the first steamboat to New York, getting off just in time to escape the system of surveillance which the vigilance committees established." [Pg 16] [Pg 16] It may seem odd to some sensible people that this learned gentleman of over fifty should expose his own history so freely to a young fellow whom he had not seen until half an hour before. But it was a part of the Doctor's character to suppose that humanity took an interest in him just as he took an interest in all humanity; and his natural frankness had been increased by contact with the prevailing communicativeness of his open-hearted fellow-citizens of the South. I dare say that he would have unfolded the
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