One of us had made money!
On his way he had seen Brannan. Brannan, the pure-
minded, right-minded, shifty man of tact, man of brain,
man of heart, and man of word, who held New Altona in the
hollow of his hand. Brannan had made no money. Not he,
nor ever will. But Brannan could do much what he pleased
in this world, without money. For whenever Brannan
studied the rights and the wrongs of any enterprise, all
men knew that what Brannan decided about it was well-nigh
the eternal truth; and therefore all men of sense were
accustomed to place great confidence in his prophecies.
But, more than this, and better, Brannan was an
unconscious dog, who believed in the people. So, when he
knew what was the right and what was the wrong, he could
stand up before two or three thousand people and tell
them what was right and what was wrong, and tell them
with the same simplicity and freshness with which he
would talk to little Horace on his knee. Of the
thousands who heard him there would not be one in a
hundred who knew that this was eloquence. They were fain
to say, as they sat in their shops, talking, that Brannan
was not eloquent. Nay, they went so far as to regret
that Brannan was not eloquent! If he were only as
eloquent as Carker was or as Barker was, how excellent he
would be! But when, a month after, it was necessary for
them to do anything about the thing he had been speaking
of, they did what Brannan had told them to do;
forgetting, most likely, that he had ever told them,
and fancying that these were their own ideas, which, in
fact, had, from his liquid, ponderous, transparent, and
invisible common sense, distilled unconsciously into
their being.
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