“You seem to be making a study of my pot-hunter.”
“It’s my natural instinct,” replied Mr. Tarbox. “The study of human nature comes just as natural to me as it does to a new-born duck to scratch the back of its head with its hind foot; just as natural—and easier. The pot-hunter is a study; you’re right.”
“But he reciprocates,” said the engineer; “he studies you.”
The student of man held his smiling companion’s gaze with his own, thrust one hand into his bosom, and lifted the digit of the other: “The eyes are called the windows of the soul,—
‘And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.’
“Have you tried to look into his eyes? You can’t do it. He won’t let you. He’s got something in there that he doesn’t want you to see.”
In the middle of the afternoon, when Achille’s skiff was already re-entering the shades of the swamp on his way homeward, and his two landed passengers stood on the levee at the head of Harvey’s Canal with the Mississippi rolling by their feet and on its farther side the masts and spires of the city, lighted by the western sun, swinging round the long bend of her yellow harbor, Mr. Tarbox offered his hand to say good-by. The surveyor playfully held it.
“I mean no disparagement to your present calling,” he said, “but the next time we meet I hope you’ll be a contractor.”
“Ah!” responded Tarbox, “it’s not my nature. I cannot contract; I must always expand. And yet—I thank you.
“‘Pure thoughts are angel visitors. Be such
The frequent inmates of thy guileless breast.’