Neither imbued with Alfred's taste nor influenced by the ties of blood, Quackinboss took a pleasure in poring over these documents which the young man could not feel. The Professor, to him, seemed the true type of intellectual power, and he had that bold recklessness of all consequences which appealed strongly to the Yankee. He was, as he phrased it, an “all-mighty smasher,” and would have been a rare man for Congress! All Alfred's eagerness to possess himself of his father's papers was soon exceeded by the zeal of Quackinboss, who, by degrees, abandoned gun and rod to follow out his new pursuit. If he could not estimate the value of deep scientific calculations and researches, he was fully alive to the sparkling wit and envenomed satire of the various attacks upon individuals; and so enamored was he of these effusions, that many of the verse ones he had committed to memory.
Poor Alfred! what a struggle was his, as Quackinboss would recite some lines of fearful malignity, asking him, the while “if all English literature could show such another ''tarnal screamer' as his own parent? Warn't he a 'right-down scarification'? Did n't he scald the hides of them old hogs in the House of Lords? Well, I 'm blest if Mr. Clay could a-done it better!” To the young man's mild suggestions that his father's fame would rest upon very different labors, Quackinboss would hastily offer rejoinder, “No, sir, chemicals is all very well, but human natur' is a grander study than acids and oxides. What goes on in a man's heart is a main sight harder reading than salts and sediments.”
The Colonel had learned in the course of his wanderings that a farmer who inhabited one of the lone islands off the coast was in possession of an old writing-desk of the Professor,--the pledge for a loan of three pounds sterling,--a sum so unusually large as to imply that the property was estimated as of value. It was some time before the weather admitted of a visit to the spot, but late of a summer's evening, as Alfred sat musingly on the door-sill of the cottage, Quackinboss was seen approaching with an old-fashioned writing-desk under his arm, while he called out, “Here it is; and without knowin' the con-tents, I 'd not swap the plunder for a raft of timber!”