"Glad to hear it," said I, earnestly. "I had been thinking lately that the distinguished savant was going decidedly wrong."
"Ah! he understands me!" sighed the Spectre.
It was more than I did; and I said so.
"Who and what are you, anyhow?" I inquired.
The lines of Long-thin-and-hungry seemed to shift and reshape.
"Ah!" came his voice, the same yet not the same, "elevation does not always give coolness, and one may be torrid and tempestuous even among the Alps."
Somehow this statement, though a truism, did not seem to fit on to previous remarks.
"I was once said to be 'Up in a balloon,'" continued Proteus (now looking rather like the Ancient Mariner,) "long and lean and brown, but letters written to the Times even from the utmost height lately attained by the French Aëronauts—to say nothing of the top of the tallest Lightning Conductor—would, I fear, be hot and ill-balanced. Look at Mr. H. O. Arnold-Foster!"
"Perhaps—in a sense—we are Lightning Conductors, you know," pursued my companion.
"As how?" I asked vaguely.