"I suppose living in India has enabled me to breathe a broader moral atmosphere," said Windham, with his usual melancholy smile.
"I suppose so," said Obed Chute. "Something has done it, any how. You showed it when the steamer was burning."
"How?"
"By your eye."
"Why, what effect can one's moral atmosphere have on one's eyes?"
"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.