to regard him as an enemy to my peace of mind, to picture him to myself as an incarnation of all the vices, to feel that to rid the river of his accursed presence was a sacred duty—I had conceived a positive hatred of him. Yet, as I poised the net handle above his skull I caught his eye, and it unmanned me as the eye of C. Marius unmanned the Gaul whom they sent to dispatch him. Bran-Newcome's eye was an honest eye, the eye of a decent, peaceable, hardworking stay-at-home. In it I read none of that extreme malevolence towards myself with which I had credited him. There was not even resentment in it. It was only the silly frightened eye of a fish out of water. He did not know who or what I was. Did he so much as connect me with his present inability to breathe? My estimate of Bran-Newcome's character changed as suddenly as it had been formed gradually. No; our relations had grown too personal, too intimate. I was taken with a kind of shame to think that I could meditate the assassination of this companion of so many good hours by the water. Even as the Gaul threw away his sword, so I threw away my net, and I cried aloud: "I cannot slay Bran-Newcome!" I laid him in the stream; he swam slowly away; and I have never seen him again.
I used to do silly things like that—in those
