It is, indeed, a strange physiognomy, to which Celt and Calmuc seem equally to contribute. The low, overhanging forehead, the intensely keen eye, sparkling with an almost imp-like drollery, are contrasted by a firmly compressed mouth and a far-projecting under-jaw that imply sternness even to cruelty; a mass of waving black hair, that covers neck and shoulders, adds a species of savagery to a head which assuredly has no need of such aid. Bent down over a large quarto volume, he never lifts his eyes; but, intently occupied, his lips are rapidly repeating the words as he reads them.
“Do you mean to pass the morning here?” asks the youth, at length, “or where shall I find you later on?”
“I 'll do whatever you like best,” said the other, in a rich brogue; “I 'm agreeable to go or stay,—ad utrumque pa-ratus.” And Billy Traynor, for it was he, shut up his venerable volume.
“I don't wish to disturb you,” said the boy, mildly, “you can read. I cannot; I have a fretful, impatient feeling over me that perhaps will go off with exercise. I'll set out, then, for a walk, and come back here towards evening, then go and dine at the Rocca, and afterwards whatever you please.”
“If you say that, then,” said Billy, in a voice of evident delight, “we'll finish the day at the Professor Tadeucci's, and get him to go over that analysis again.”
“I have no taste for chemistry. It always seems to me to end where it began,” said the boy, impatiently. “Where do all researches tend to? how are you elevated in intellect? how are your thoughts higher, wider, nobler, by all these mixings and manipulations?”
“Is it nothing to know how thunder and lightning is made; to understand electricity; to dive into the secrets of that old crater there, and see the ingredients in the crucible that was bilin' three thousand years ago?”
“These things appeal more grandly to my imagination when the mystery of their forces is unrevealed. I like to think of them as dread manifestations of a mighty will, rather than gaseous combinations or metallic affinities.”
“And what prevents you?” said Billy, eagerly. “Is the grandeur of the phenomenon impaired because it is in part intelligible? Ain't you elevated as a reasoning being when you get what I may call a peep into God's workshop, rather than by implicitly accepting results just as any old woman accepts a superstition?”
“There is something ignoble in mechanism,” said the boy, angrily.