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 how, in the tumult of passion, to assume the "temperance to give it smoothness." A lie never ran away with him, as it is apt to do with young performers; he could always manage and guide it, and to have seen him fairly mounted would have given you some idea of the polished elegance of D'Orsay and the superb manage of Murat. There is a tone and manner of narration different from those used in delivering ideas just conceived, just as there is difference between the sound of the voice in reading and in speaking. Bolus knew this and practiced on it. When he was narrating he put the facts in order and seemed to speak them out of his memory, but not formally or as if by rote. He would stop himself to correct a date; recollect he was wrong—he was at that year at the White Sulphur or Saratoga, etc.; having got the date right the names of persons present would be incorrect, etc., and these he corrected in turn. A stranger hearing him would have feared the marring of a good story by too fastidious a conscientiousness in the narrator.

 

Superior to many of the settlers in elegance of manners and general intelligence, it was the weakness of the Virginian to imagine he was superior too in the essential art of being able to hold his hand and make his way in a new country, and especially such a country and at such a time. What a mistake that was! The times were out of joint. It was hard to say whether it were more dangerous to stand still or to move. If the emigrant stood still, he was consumed, by no slow degrees, by expenses; if he moved, ten to one he went off in a galloping consumption by a ruinous investment. Expenses then—necessary articles about three times as high, and extra articles still more extra-priced—were a different thing in the new country from what they were in the old. In the old country, a jolly