[Illustration: "He pumped me dry.">[
Tim stopped suddenly, and winked at Captain. "I told him I wanted to go away and see something as you had done, for I was weary of listening to your accounts of things you'd seen. It's awful to have to listen to another's travels. It must be fine to tell about your own."
"Well, is it my talking that's driving you away, or is it Weston's alluring offers?"
"Alluring?" Tim laughed. "I'll say for Weston, he is frank. He told me that to his mind business was worse than death. He was born to it. His father left it to him and he has to keep it going to live; but he lets his partner look after it mostly, and he is always worrying lest his partner should die and leave him with the whole thing on his hands. He told me I'd have to drudge in a dark office over books for ten hours a day, and that it would be years before I began to see any rewards. By that time I would probably decide that the old-fashioned scheme of having kings born to order was more sensible than making men wear their lives out trying to become rulers. A cow was contented, he said, because it was satisfied to stand under a tree and breathe the free air, and look up into the blue skies and over the green fields, and chew the cud. As long as the cow was satisfied with one cud it would be contented; but once the idea got abroad in the pasture that two cuds were required for a respectable cow, peace and happiness were gone forever."
"Our lanky stranger seems a wise man," said I. "In the face of all that, what did you say?"
"I told him I wasn't a cow," Tim answered.
There was no controverting such a reply, and though my sympathies were with the pessimistic Weston, I dared not raise my voice in defence of his logic as against this young brother. Tim seemed to think that the fact that he was not a cow turned from him all the force of Weston's philosophy, and insisted on going blindly on in search of another cud.
"He laughed when I said that," Tim continued, "and he said he guessed there was no sense in using figures of speech to me, but he was willing to bet that some time I would come to his way of thinking. I told him that perhaps I would when I had seen as much of men and things as he had; but now I looked about me with the mind and the eye of a yokel. That was just what I wanted to escape. He was himself talking to me from a vantage-point of superior knowledge, and the consciousness of my own inferiority was one of the main things to spur me on."
"At that he gave you up?" said I.
"He gave me up," Tim answered; "and after all, Mark, old Weston is a fine fellow. He said that there was just one thing for me to do, and that was to see and learn for myself. So he wrote to his partner to-day, and I go in the morning."