“Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect calm; "but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition.”

“There are degrees of seriousness," replied Syme. "I have never doubted that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you thought what you said well worth saying, that you thought a paradox might wake men up to a neglected truth.”

“If we are calm," replied the policeman, "it is the calm of organized resistance.""Eh?" said Syme, staring."The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle," pursued the policeman. "The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.”

“Sunday is a fixed star," he said."You shall see him a falling star," said Syme, and put on his hat.The decision of his gesture drew the Professor vaguely to his feet."Have you any idea," he asked, with a sort of benevolent bewilderment, "exactly where you are going?""Yes," replied Syme shortly, "I am going to prevent this bomb being thrown in Paris.""Have you any conception how?" inquired the other."No," said Syme with equal decision.”

“Yes, he said in a voice indescribable, you are right. I am afraid of him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this man whom I fear until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If heaven were his throne and the earth his footstool, I swear that I would pull him down. How? asked the staring Professor. Why? Because I am afraid of him, said Syme; and no man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.”

“Who are you?' he asked suddenly.I'm not sure,' replied the other. 'I rather think I am your long-lost brother.'But I haven't got a brother,' objected Tommy.It only shows how very long-lost I was,' replied his remarkable relative. 'But I assure you that, before they managed to long-loose me, I used to live in this house myself.”

“I? What am I?" roared the President, and he rose slowly to an incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch above them and break. "You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now.”