to have the nobility where you can put your hand on it in a handsome young form than to be chasin' back for it up a family tree, climbin' up mouldy old branches, follerin' rotten, decayin' old limbs, and some sound ones," sez I, reasonable; "but, anyway, nobility a century or so old seems sort o' shadowy and spectral, and don't impress me so much as it duz while it is right before me, strugglin' on through disappointments and pain, tryin' to reach the high prizes of success and Anna—or, I mean, happiness."
She tossted her head real kinder disdainful, but I went on, for I begun to feel eloquent: "It is so difficult to know a hero when you see him right before your face and eyes. It is easy now, after everything is passed, to open your encyclopedia and read the names of Columbus, and Washington, and Newton, and Luther, etc. But the time wuz when Columbus walked the streets unknown, all the fire of genius, the passion of the discoverer must have looked out of his sad eyes onto the onsympathetic faces of the crowd; it wuz all hidden in his soul. His ears heard the swash of new seas breakin' on onknown shores, his eyes saw the tall mountains of a grander continent risin' through the mists, but them around couldn't see it, they wuz down there in the mists and stayed there. The discoverer of a new world walked homeless and friendless through the streets. He couldn't carry them cold, blind eyes into the glorious possibilities of the future. No, the poor blind eyes looked scornful at him and laughed at his hopes. The great philosophers and inventors who apprehended what they couldn't comprehend; who looked through the summer skies cleft by the fall of an apple and saw great systems of philosophy; who saw by the steam of a tea kettle a whole
