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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
+
+[The Physician and Poet--Not the Jurist O. W. Holmes, Jr.]
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+
+Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
+
+Release Date: August 15, 2006 [EBook #2665]
+Last Updated: February 18, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROFESSOR AT BREAKFAST TABLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE
+
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.
+
+The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a
+quarter of a century since these papers were written. Statements which
+were true then are not necessarily true now. Thus, the speed of the
+trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of the year
+when the fastest time to that date was given must be very considerably
+altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page 49 of the
+“Autocrat.” No doubt many other statements and opinions might be more or
+less modified if I were writing today instead of having written before
+the war, when the world and I were both more than a score of years
+younger.
+
+These papers followed close upon the track of the “Autocrat.” They had
+to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected, which is
+a formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest. Paradise
+Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are enough
+to warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his arrow of the
+danger of missing when he looses “his fellow of the selfsame flight.”
+
+There is good reason why it should be so. The first juice that runs of
+itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and tastes
+of the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press the flow
+betrays the flavor of the skin. If there is any freshness in the
+original idea of the work, if there is any individuality in the method
+or style of a new author, or of an old author on a new track, it will
+have lost much of its first effect when repeated. Still, there have not
+been wanting readers who have preferred this second series of papers to
+the first. The new papers were more aggressive than the earlier ones,
+and for that reason found a heartier welcome in some quarters, and met
+with a sharper antagonism in others. It amuses me to look back on some
+of the attacks they called forth. Opinions which do not excite the
+faintest show of temper at this time from those who do not accept them
+were treated as if they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary. It
+required the exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.
+
+How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
+line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
+when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant! One day, in the time when
+I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of “Tom Jones,”
+ and glance at the title-page. There was one of those little engravings
+opposite, which bore the familiar name of “T. Uwins,” as I remember it,
+and under it the words “Mr. Partridge bore all this patiently.” How
+many times, when, after rough usage from ill-mannered critics, my own
+vocabulary of vituperation was simmering in such a lively way that it
+threatened to boil and lift its lid and so boil over, those words have
+calmed the small internal effervescence! There is very little in
+them and very little of them; and so there is not much in a linchpin
+considered by itself, but it often keeps a wheel from coming off and
+prevents what might be a catastrophe. The chief trouble in offering such
+papers as these to the readers of to-day is that their heresies
+have become so familiar among intelligent people that they have too
+commonplace an aspect. All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief
+bear so differently from the way in which they presented themselves when
+these papers were written that it is hard to recognize that we and our
+fellow-passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same
+unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.
+
+But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in
+these papers to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index
+Expurgatorius; and if they are medicated with a few questionable dogmas
+or antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher treatments,
+that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne, and the reader
+may nod over pages which, when they were first written, would have waked
+him into a paroxysm of protest and denunciation.
+
+November, 1882.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
+
+This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades,
+and if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten
+years. The first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps
+apologetic, in the expectation of attacks from various quarters. If the
+book is in some points in advance of public opinion, it is natural that
+the writer should try to smooth the way to the reception of his more or
+less aggressive ideas. He wishes to convince, not to offend,--to obtain
+a hearing for his thought, not to stir up angry opposition in those
+who do not accept it. There is commonly an anxious look about a first
+Preface. The author thinks he shall be misapprehended about this or that
+matter, that his well-meant expressions will probably be invidiously
+interpreted by those whom he looks upon as prejudiced critics, and if he
+deals with living questions that he will be attacked as a destructive
+by the conservatives and reproached for his timidity by the noisier
+radicals. The first Preface, therefore, is likely to be the weakest part
+of a work containing the thoughts of an honest writer.
+
+After a time the writer has cooled down from his excitement,--has got
+over his apprehensions, is pleased to find that his book is still read,
+and that he must write a new Preface. He comes smiling to his task. How
+many things have explained themselves in the ten or twenty or thirty
+years since he came before his untried public in those almost plaintive
+paragraphs in which he introduced himself to his readers,--for the
+Preface writer, no matter how fierce a combatant he may prove, comes on
+to the stage with his shield on his right arm and his sword in his left
+hand.
+
+The Professor at the Breakfast-Table came out in the “Atlantic Monthly”
+ and introduced itself without any formal Preface. A quarter of a century
+later the Preface of 1882, which the reader has just had laid before
+him, was written. There is no mark of worry, I think, in that. Old
+opponents had come up and shaken hands with the author they had attacked
+or denounced. Newspapers which had warned their subscribers against him
+were glad to get him as a contributor to their columns. A great change
+had come over the community with reference to their beliefs. Christian
+believers were united as never before in the feeling that, after all,
+their common object was to elevate the moral and religious standard of
+humanity. But within the special compartments of the great Christian
+fold the marks of division have pronounced themselves in the most
+unmistakable manner. As an example we may take the lines of
+cleavage which have shown themselves in the two great churches, the
+Congregational and the Presbyterian, and the very distinct fissure which
+is manifest in the transplanted Anglican church of this country. Recent
+circumstances have brought out the fact of the great change in the
+dogmatic communities which has been going on silently but surely.
+The licensing of a missionary, the transfer of a Professor from
+one department to another, the election of a Bishop,--each of these
+movements furnishes evidence that there is no such thing as an air-tight
+reservoir of doctrinal finalities.
+
+The folding-doors are wide open to every Protestant to enter all the
+privileged precincts and private apartments of the various exclusive
+religious organizations. We may demand the credentials of every
+creed and catechise all the catechisms. So we may discuss the gravest
+questions unblamed over our morning coffee-cups or our evening tea-cups.
+There is no rest for the Protestant until he gives up his legendary
+anthropology and all its dogmatic dependencies.
+
+It is only incidentally, however, that the Professor at the
+Breakfast-Table handles matters which are the subjects of religious
+controversy. The reader who is sensitive about having his fixed beliefs
+dealt with as if they were open to question had better skip the pages
+which look as if they would disturb his complacency. “Faith” is the most
+precious of possessions, and it dislikes being meddled with. It means,
+of course, self-trust,--that is, a belief in the value of our own
+opinion of a doctrine, of a church, of a religion, of a Being, a belief
+quite independent of any evidence that we can bring to convince a jury
+of our fellow beings. Its roots are thus inextricably entangled with
+those of self-love and bleed as mandrakes were said to, when pulled up
+as weeds. Some persons may even at this late day take offence at a few
+opinions expressed in the following pages, but most of these passages
+will be read without loss of temper by those who disagree with them, and
+by-and-by they may be found too timid and conservative for intelligent
+readers, if they are still read by any.
+
+BEVERLY FARM, MASS., June 18, 1891. O. W. H.
+
+
+
+
+THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.
+
+    What he said, what he heard, and what he saw.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
+statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a universal
+formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table. It would
+have had a grand effect. For this purpose I fixed my eyes on a certain
+divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few phrases, and
+then forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of being.--I will
+thank you for the sugar,--I said.--Man is a dependent creature.
+
+It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed the
+sugar to me.
+
+--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.
+
+The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram of
+the sugar question.
+
+You smile,--I said.--Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of great
+things?
+
+The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back with a
+pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches.--Life is a great bundle of
+great things,--he said.
+
+(NOW, THEN!) The great end of being, after all, is....
+
+Hold on!--said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be John,
+and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold on! the
+Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.
+
+Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
+pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs about
+the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing the bait
+and hook intended for flounders. On being drawn from the water, it
+exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a surface so
+full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the naturalists have
+not been able to count them without quarrelling about the number, and
+that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil, do not like to touch
+them, and especially to tread on them, unless they happen to have shoes
+on, to cover the thick white soles of their broad black feet.
+
+When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked round
+the table with curiosity to see what it meant. At the further end of it
+I saw a head, and a--a small portion of a little deformed body, mounted
+on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a fair level enough
+for him to get at his food. His whole appearance was so grotesque, I
+felt for a minute as if there was a showman behind him who would pull
+him down presently and put up Judy, or the hangman, or the Devil, or
+some other wooden personage of the famous spectacle. I contrived to lose
+the first of his sentence, but what I heard began so:
+
+--by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to come
+down from the tents on section and Independence days with their pails to
+get water to make egg-pop with. Born in Boston; went to school in Boston
+as long as the boys would let me.--The little man groaned, turned, as
+if to look around, and went on.--Ran away from school one day to see
+Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a logger-head. That was in flip
+days, when there were always two three loggerheads in the fire. I'm a
+Boston boy, I tell you,--born at North End, and mean to be buried on
+Copp's Hill, with the good old underground people,--the Worthylakes,
+and the rest of 'em. Yes,--up on the old hill, where they buried Captain
+Daniel Malcolm in a stone grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from
+the red-coats, in those old times when the world was frozen up tight
+and there was n't but one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil
+all,--and black enough it looked, I tell you! There 's where my bones
+shall lie, Sir, and rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy
+Yard opposite! You can't make me ashamed of the old place! Full crooked
+little streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em--
+
+--I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
+“John,”--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but thinking
+in a half-whisper, evidently.--I should think so; and got kinked up,
+turnin' so many corners.--The little man did not hear what was said, but
+went on,--
+
+--full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened, and
+kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free
+speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead men,--I
+don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their steeples!
+
+--How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black whiskers
+and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too massive, and
+a diamond pin so very large that the most trusting nature might confess
+an inward suggestion,--of course, nothing amounting to a suspicion. For
+this is a gentleman from a great city, and sits next to the landlady's
+daughter, who evidently believes in him, and is the object of his
+especial attention.
+
+How high?--said the little man.--As high as the first step of the stairs
+that lead to the New Jerusalem. Is n't that high enough?
+
+It is,--I said.--The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
+order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be
+so still. But who shall tune the pitch-pipe? Quis cus-(On the whole, as
+this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a foreign language,
+might not be familiar to all the boarders, I thought I would not finish
+it.)
+
+--Go to the Bible!--said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp-eyed,
+sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress, appearing as
+if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated itself as a bit of
+economy.
+
+You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
+commentary on what you say. “He who would bring back the wealth of the
+Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” What you bring away
+from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.--Benjamin
+Franklin! Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring me down the
+small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will find lying under
+the “Cruden's Concordance.” [The boy took a large bite, which left a
+very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-butter he held, and
+departed on his errand, with the portable fraction of his breakfast to
+sustain him on the way.]
+
+--Here it is. “Go to the Bible. A Dissertation, etc., etc. By J. J.
+Flournoy. Athens, Georgia, 1858.”
+
+Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have judiciously
+delivered. You may be interested, Madam, to know what are the
+conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia, has arrived.
+You shall hear, Madam. He has gone to the Bible, and he has come back
+from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing social evils, which, if
+it is the real specific, as it professes to be, is of great interest to
+humanity, and to the female part of humanity in particular. It is what
+he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the marrying of three wives, so that “good
+old men” may be solaced at once by the companionship of the wisdom of
+maturity, and of those less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities
+which are found at an earlier period of life. He has followed your
+precept, Madam; I hope you accept his conclusions.
+
+The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact, “all
+abroad,” after the delivery of this “counter” of mine, that I left her
+to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation, which I was
+beginning to get pretty well in hand.
+
+But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
+effect I had produced. First, she was a little stunned at having
+her argument knocked over. Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
+tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion. Thirdly.--I
+don't like to say what I thought. Something seemed to have pleased her
+fancy. Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into fashion, there
+would be three times as many chances to enjoy the luxury of saying,
+“No!” is more than I, can tell you. I may as well mention that B. F.
+came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet for “a lady,”--one of
+the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a secret he wished to be
+relieved of.
+
+--I continued.--If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in the
+faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the end of
+all reason. If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for truth with
+its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no presumption in
+favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of our inheriting
+it. Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair chance to become a
+convert to a better religion.
+
+The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in
+the mind by changing the word which stands for it.
+
+--I don't know what you mean by “depolarizing” an idea,--said the
+divinity-student.
+
+I will tell you,--I said.--When a given symbol which represents a
+thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes
+a change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron. It
+becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by strange forces
+which did not belong to it. The word, and consequently the idea it
+represents, is polarized.
+
+The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in print,
+consists entirely of polarized words. Borrow one of these from another
+language and religion, and you will find it leaves all its magnetism
+behind it. Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo mythology. Even a
+priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy Pundit would shut his
+ears and run away from you in horror, if you should say it aloud. What
+do you care for O'm? If you wanted to get the Pundit to look at his
+religion fairly, you must first depolarize this and all similar words
+for him. The argument for and against new translations of the Bible
+really turns on this. Skepticism is afraid to trust its truths in
+depolarized words, and so cries out against a new translation. I think,
+myself, if every idea our Book contains could be shelled out of its old
+symbol and put into a new, clean, unmagnetic word, we should have some
+chance of reading it as philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read
+it,--which we do not and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the
+“Gayatri” as a fair man and lover of truth should do. When society has
+once fairly dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it
+will perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.
+
+I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
+young fellow near me.
+
+A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.
+--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
+observers from two very different points of view. If you wish to get
+the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two
+observations from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer and
+midwinter, for instance. To get the parallax of heavenly truths, you
+must take an observation from the position of the laity as well as
+of the clergy. Teachers and students of theology get a certain look,
+certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a professional
+neckcloth, and habits of mind as professional as their externals. They
+are scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well enough what the “idols
+of the tribe” are. Of course they have their false gods, as all men that
+follow one exclusive calling are prone to do.--The clergy have played
+the part of the flywheel in our modern civilization. They have never
+suffered it to stop. They have often carried on its movement, when
+other moving powers failed, by the momentum stored in their vast body.
+Sometimes, too, they have kept it back by their vis inertia, when its
+wheels were like to grind the bones of some old canonized error
+into fertilizers for the soil that yields the bread of life. But the
+mainspring of the world's onward religious movement is not in them, nor
+in any one body of men, let me tell you. It is the people that makes
+the clergy, and not the clergy that makes the people. Of course, the
+profession reacts on its source with variable energy.--But there never
+was a guild of dealers or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp
+looking after.
+
+Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time
+since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in Harvard
+College yard.
+
+--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man.--The bonfire when Robert Calef's
+book was burned?
+
+The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
+burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
+President of the College and Minister of the Gospel. You remember the
+old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef, trader
+of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what a set of
+fools and worse than fools they were--
+
+Remember it?--said the little man.--I don't think I shall forget it,
+as long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what it
+wears. There was a ring on it.
+
+May I look at it?--I said.
+
+Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it
+falls off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.
+
+He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the table,
+and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being only a
+little above the level of the table, as he stood. With pain and labor,
+lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his sticks, he
+took a few steps from his place,--his motions and the deadbeat of the
+misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and ear the malformation
+which is called in learned language talipes varus, or inverted
+club-foot.
+
+Stop! stop!--I said,--let me come to you.
+
+The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with
+an ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair.
+I walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his right
+hand, with the ring upon it. The ring had been put on long ago, and
+could not pass the misshapen joint. It was one of those funeral rings
+which used to be given to relatives and friends after the decease of
+persons of any note or importance. Beneath a round fit of glass was a
+death's head. Engraved on one side of this, “L. B. AEt. 22,”--on the
+other, “Ob. 1692”
+
+My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man.--Hanged for a witch.
+It does n't seem a great while ago. I knew my grandmother, and loved
+her. Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief Justice Sewall
+hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.--That was Salem,
+though, and not Boston. No, not Boston. Robert Calef, the Boston
+merchant, it was that blew them all to--
+
+Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was
+getting red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.
+
+This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
+conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.
+
+--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
+its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of talking
+over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are plenty of
+praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above all, who has
+found out, by living into the pith and core of life, that all of the
+Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to
+the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of
+throbbing human life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness in
+which the soul's being consists,--an incandescent point in the filament
+connecting the negative pole of a past eternity with the positive pole
+of an eternity that is to come,--that all of the Deity which any human
+book can hold is to this larger Deity of the working battery of the
+universe only as the films in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad
+seams and curdled lumps of ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin
+placers,--Oh!--I was saying that a man who lives out-of-doors, among
+live people, gets some things into his head he might not find in the
+index of his “Body of Divinity.”
+
+I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
+their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the bottom
+of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street Church and
+look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch another such spire
+across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea, I say, is pretty
+nearly worn out. Now when a civilization or a civilized custom falls
+into senile dementia, there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it
+comes as plagues come, from a breath,--as fires come, from a spark.
+
+Here, look at medicine. Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
+prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long, “curing”
+ patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling, selling lies
+at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving unfortunate sick
+people a mess of things either too odious to swallow or too acrid to
+hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.
+
+--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
+country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,--and
+that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of
+eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded! I did not
+bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old folios
+in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the proprietor,
+of a “Wood and Bache,” and a shelf of peppered sheepskin reprints by
+Philadelphia Editors. Besides, many of the profession and I know
+a little something of each other, and you don't think I am such a
+simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the better heads
+among them would condemn as unfair and untrue? Now mark how the great
+plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and in what form it
+fell.
+
+A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy and
+incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler
+in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction
+(founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy. I am very fair, you
+see,--you can help yourself to either of these sets of phrases.
+
+All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general an
+effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a
+good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was
+produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist). Not
+that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the
+routinists and their employers, the “general practitioners,” who lived
+by selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers, had
+to recognize that people could get well, unpoisoned. These dumb cattle
+would not learn it of themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell
+on them.
+
+--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
+theology? I will tell you, then. It is Spiritualism. While some are
+crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are laughing
+at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with it as a
+mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism is quietly
+undermining the traditional ideas of the future state which have been
+and are still accepted,--not merely in those who believe in it, but in
+the general sentiment of the community, to a larger extent than most
+good people seem to be aware of. It need n't be true, to do this, any
+more than Homoeopathy need, to do its work. The Spiritualists have some
+pretty strong instincts to pry over, which no doubt have been roughly
+handled by theologians at different times. And the Nemesis of the pulpit
+comes, in a shape it little thought of, beginning with the snap of a
+toe-joint, and ending with such a crack of old beliefs that the roar
+of it is heard in all the ministers' studies of Christendom? Sir, you
+cannot have people of cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in
+common things, large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men,
+men of science, professing to be in communication with the spiritual
+world and keeping up constant intercourse with it, without its gradually
+reacting on the whole conception of that other life. It is the folly of
+the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom. Not only out of
+the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools and
+cheats, we may often get our truest lessons. For the fool's judgment is
+a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the cheat watches the clouds
+and sets his weathercock by them,--so that one shall often see by
+their pointing which way the winds of heaven are blowing, when the
+slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call the Temples of Wisdom
+are turning to all points of the compass.
+
+--Amen!--said the young fellow called John--Ten minutes by the watch.
+Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up their left
+foot!
+
+I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty seconds.
+His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant. I think it was
+simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a youthful playfulness,
+that led him to this outbreak. I have often noticed that even quiet
+horses, on a sharp November morning, when their coats are beginning to
+get the winter roughness, will give little sportive demi-kicks, with
+slight sudden elevation of the subsequent region of the body, and a
+sharp short whinny,--by no means intending to put their heels through
+the dasher, or to address the driver rudely, but feeling, to use a
+familiar word, frisky. This, I think, is the physiological condition
+of the young person, John. I noticed, however, what I should call a
+palpebral spasm, affecting the eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if
+it were intended for the facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to
+suspect a disposition to be satirical on his part.
+
+--Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, ex officio, as a
+Professor, a conservative. For I don't know any fruit that clings to
+its tree so faithfully, not even a “froze-'n'-thaw” winter-apple, as a
+Professor to the bough of which his chair is made. You can't shake him
+off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off. Hence, by a chain
+of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism generally.
+
+But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once
+find yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop
+your Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher
+than in the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of
+facts and swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you are
+in it.
+
+You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight in
+a profession. Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in, through
+India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and general knowledge
+will leak in, though a profession were covered with twenty thicknesses
+of sheepskin diplomas.
+
+By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and
+common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the
+people, Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with
+trip-hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming
+with a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down
+on the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of
+them--like Aaron's calf.
+
+If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up and
+keep all the soul's windows down,--to shut out the sun from the east and
+the wind from the west,--to let the rats run free in the cellar, and the
+moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the spiders weave their lace
+before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus is bred out of our neglect,
+and we begin to snore in its coma or rave in its delirium,--I, Sir, am
+a bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the barricades, my friends, rather than a
+conservative.
+
+--Were you born in Boston, Sir?--said the little man,--looking eager and
+excited.
+
+I was not,--I replied.
+
+It's a pity,--it's a pity,--said the little man;--it 's the place to be
+born in. But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you can come
+and live here. Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science and the
+American Union, was n't ashamed to be born here. Jim Otis, the father
+of American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod marshes awhile,
+but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough. Joe Warren, the
+first bloody ruffed-shirt of the Revolution, was as good as born here.
+Parson Charming strolled along this way from Newport, and stayed
+here. Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;--we'd have made a man of
+him,--poor, dear, good old Christian heathen! There he lies, as peaceful
+as a young baby, in the old burying-ground! I've stood on the slab
+many a time. Meant well,--meant well. Juggernaut. Parson Charming put
+a little oil on one linchpin, and slipped it out so softly, the first
+thing they knew about it was the wheel of that side was down. T'
+other fellow's at work now, but he makes more noise about it. When the
+linchpin comes out on his side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some
+think it will spoil the old cart, and they pretend to say that there are
+valuable things in it which may get hurt. Hope not,--hope not. But this
+is the great Macadamizing place,--always cracking up something.
+
+Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the diamond-pin,
+whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.
+
+The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's Turk
+used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if it went
+by cogwheels.--Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and foreign
+vermin included,--said the little man.
+
+This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
+application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if
+the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed. The little man uttered it with the
+distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to exclaim,
+E-chec! so that it must have been heard. The party supposed to be
+interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-bladeful
+of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt, interfered with
+the reply he would have made.
+
+--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
+pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
+suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders. I think our
+small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I undertake
+to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too magisterially.
+I won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when I have been in
+company with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have been guilty of
+the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly justified. But I
+maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good listener. If a man can tell
+me a fact which subtends an appreciable angle in the horizon of thought,
+I am as receptive as the contribution-box in a congregation of colored
+brethren. If, when I am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will
+begin a good story, I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before
+he has got to the fifth “says he,” and listen like a three-years' child,
+as the author of the “Old Sailor” says. I had rather hear one of those
+grand elemental laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious
+names, Sir or Madam,) glisten to one of those old playbills of our
+College days, in which “Tom and Jerry” (“Thomas and Jeremiah,” as the
+old Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be brought on
+the stage with whole force of the Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no
+such person, of course,) than say the best things I might by any chance
+find myself capable of saying. Of course, if I come across a real
+thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I enjoy
+the luxury of sitting still for a while as much as another.
+
+Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,--things he did not
+mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
+sometimes. Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
+thought. I can't answer for what will turn up. If I could, it would
+n't be talking, but “speaking my piece.” Better, I think, the hearty
+abandonment of one's self to the suggestions of the moment at the risk
+of an occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it escapes,
+but just one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of never
+saying a foolish thing.
+
+--What shall I do with this little man?--There is only one thing
+to do,--and that is to let him talk when he will. The day of the
+“Autocrat's” monologues is over.
+
+--My friend,--said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said,
+the boarders call “John,”--My friend,--I said, one morning, after
+breakfast,--can you give me any information respecting the deformed
+person who sits at the other end of the table?
+
+What! the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,--I said,
+--and double talipes varus,--I beg your pardon,--with two club-feet.
+
+Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?--said the
+young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you may
+have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge, when
+they show how they would punish an adversary, themselves protected by
+this rotating guard,--the middle knuckle, meantime, thumb-supported,
+fiercely prominent, death-threatening.
+
+It is,--said I.--But would you have the kindness to tell me if you know
+anything about this deformed person?
+
+About the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+My good friend,--said I,--I am sure, by your countenance, you would not
+hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by Nature
+to be spared by his fellows. Even in speaking of him to others, I could
+wish that you might not employ a term which implies contempt for what
+should inspire only pity.
+
+A fellah 's no business to be so crooked,--said the young man called
+John.
+
+Yes, yes,--I said, thoughtfully,--the strong hate the weak. It's
+all right. The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to
+the individual. Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down.
+Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail!--I understand
+the instinct, my friend,--it is cosmic,--it is planetary,--it is a
+conservative principle in creation.
+
+The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was speaking,
+until it became as blank of vivid significance as the countenance of a
+gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of eyes. He had not
+taken my meaning.
+
+Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink, as
+he answered,--Jest so. All right. A 1. Put her through. That's the way
+to talk. Did you speak to me, Sir?--Here the young man struck up that
+well-known song which I think they used to sing at Masonic
+festivals, beginning, “Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left you
+Chrononhotonthologos?”
+
+I beg your pardon,--I said;--all I meant was, that men, as temporary
+occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved or
+injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a natural
+dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as well as of
+the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon the abode
+spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future generations. This
+is the final cause of the underlying brute instinct which we have in
+common with the herds.
+
+--The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I
+thought I must try again.--It's a pity that families are kept up, where
+there are such hereditary infirmities. Still, let us treat this poor man
+fairly, and not call him names. Do you know what his name is?
+
+I know what the rest of 'em call him,--said the young fellow.--They call
+him Little Boston. There's no harm in that, is there?
+
+It is an honorable term,--I replied.--But why Little Boston, in a place
+where most are Bostonians?
+
+Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,--said the
+young fellow.
+
+“L. B. Ob. 1692.”--Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him. The
+ring he wears labels him well enough. There is stuff in the little man,
+or he would n't stick so manfully by this crooked, crotchety old town.
+Give him a chance.--You will drop the Sculpin, won't you?--I said to the
+young fellow.
+
+Drop him?--he answered,--I ha'n't took him up yet.
+
+No, no,--the term,--I said,--the term. Don't call him so any more, if
+you please. Call him Little Boston, if you like.
+
+All right,--said the young fellow.--I would n't be hard on the poor
+little--
+
+The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
+grammar. It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among the
+Romans,--as of those designating a person following the sea, or given to
+rural pursuits. It is classed by custom among the profane words; why, it
+is hard to say,--but it is largely used in the street by those who speak
+of their fellows in pity or in wrath.
+
+I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended
+fish to the little man from that day forward.
+
+--Here we are, then, at our boarding--house. First, myself, the
+Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right,
+looking down, where the “Autocrat” used to sit. At the further end sits
+the Landlady. At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-noor, or the
+gentleman with the diamond. Opposite me is a Venerable Gentleman with a
+bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little. The Divinity Student is
+my neighbor on the right,--and further down, that Young Fellow of whom
+I have repeatedly spoken. The Landlady's Daughter sits near the
+Koh-i-noor, as I said. The Poor Relation near the Landlady. At the right
+upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of whose name and history I have
+as yet learned nothing. Next the further left-hand corner, near the
+lower end of the table, sits the deformed person. The chair at his side,
+occupying that corner, is empty. I need not specially mention the other
+boarders, with the exception of Benjamin Franklin, the landlady's son,
+who sits near his mother. We are a tolerably assorted set,--difference
+enough and likeness enough; but still it seems to me there is something
+wanting. The Landlady's Daughter is the prima donna in the way of
+feminine attractions. I am not quite satisfied with this young lady. She
+wears more “jewelry,” as certain young ladies call their trinkets, than
+I care to see on a person in her position. Her voice is strident, her
+laugh too much like a giggle, and she has that foolish way of dancing
+and bobbing like a quill-float with a “minnum” biting the hook below it,
+which one sees and weeps over sometimes in persons of more pretensions.
+I can't help hoping we shall put something into that empty chair yet
+which will add the missing string to our social harp. I hear talk of a
+rare Miss who is expected. Something in the schoolgirl way, I believe.
+We shall see.
+
+--My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution which
+I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit of all
+concerned.
+
+Professor,--said he, one day,--don't you think your brain will run dry
+before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow? Let me
+tell you what happened to me once. I put a little money into a bank,
+and bought a check-book, so that I might draw it as I wanted, in sums
+to suit. Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a pen was as
+easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book seemed to be a
+dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all the synonymes of
+happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot. A check came back
+to me at last with these two words on it,--NO FUNDS. My check-book was a
+volume of waste-paper.
+
+Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank,
+you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's currency
+without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NO FUNDS,--and then
+where will you be, my boy? These little bits of paper mean your gold and
+your silver and your copper, Professor; and you will certainly break up
+and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to your metallic basis.
+
+There is something in that,--said I.--Only I rather think life can coin
+thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words. What if one
+shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that falls of a
+June evening on the leaves of his garden? Shall there be no more dew on
+those leaves thereafter? Marry, yea,--many drops, large and round and
+full of moonlight as those thou shalt have absterged!
+
+Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
+plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
+always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April, or
+rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against books as
+a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to decrepitude; with
+a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they are, as a limb which
+we call “asleep,” because it is so particularly awake, is of pricking
+points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps, not as yet tanned or
+ossified, to finger-touch of all outward agencies; knowing nothing of
+the filmy threads of this web of life in which we insects buzz awhile,
+waiting for the gray old spider to come along; contented enough with
+daily realities, but twirling on his finger the key of a private Bedlam
+of ideals; in knowledge feeding with the fox oftener than with the
+stork,--loving better the breadth of a fertilizing inundation than
+the depth of narrow artesian well; finding nothing too small for his
+contemplation in the markings of the grammatophora subtilissima, and
+nothing too large in the movement of the solar system towards the star
+Lambda of the constellation Hercules;--and the question is, whether
+there is anything left for me, the Professor, to suck out of creation,
+after my lively friend has had his straw in the bung-hole of the
+Universe!
+
+A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on, whether
+he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes. As to
+catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,--the
+gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,--the excretion of mental
+respiration,--that will depend on many things, as, on having a favorable
+intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting receptacle.--I sow
+more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel over the desert-sand
+along which my lonely consciousness paces day and night, than I shall
+throw into soil where it will germinate, in a year. All sorts of bodily
+and mental perturbations come between us and the due projection of our
+thought. The pulse-like “fits of easy and difficult transmission” seem
+to reach even the transparent medium through which our souls are
+seen. We know our humanity by its often intercepted rays, as we tell
+a revolving light from a star or meteor by its constantly recurring
+obscuration.
+
+An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he ever
+delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if he had
+told all he knew. Braham came forward once to sing one of his most
+famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the first
+line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they screamed it
+at him in a chorus of a thousand voices. Milton could not write to suit
+himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal equinox. One in the
+clothing-business, who, there is reason to suspect, may have inherited,
+by descent, the great poet's impressible temperament, let a customer
+slip through his fingers one day without fitting him with a new garment.
+“Ah!” said he to a friend of mine, who was standing by, “if it hadn't
+been for that confounded headache of mine this morning, I'd have had
+a coat on that man, in spite of himself, before he left-the store.” A
+passing throb, only,--but it deranged the nice mechanism required
+to persuade the accidental human being, X, into a given piece of
+broadcloth, A.
+
+We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
+transmission of our ideas with want of ideas. I suppose that a man's
+mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the universe
+for which it has special elective affinities. In fact, I look upon a
+library as a kind of mental chemist's shop filled with the crystals of
+all forms and hues which have come from the union of individual thought
+with local circumstances or universal principles.
+
+When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there
+is an end of his genius as a real solvent. No more effervescence and
+hissing tumult--as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting
+alkaline unbeliefs! No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets
+covered with lies! No more taking up of dull earths, and turning them,
+first into clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!
+
+I, the Professor, am very much like other men: I shall not find out when
+I have used up my affinities. What a blessed thing it is, that Nature,
+when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to
+make critics out of the chips that were left! Painful as the task is,
+they never fail to warn the author, in the most impressive manner,
+of the probabilities of failure in what he has undertaken. Sad as the
+necessity is to their delicate sensibilities, they never hesitate to
+advertise him of the decline of his powers, and to press upon him the
+propriety of retiring before he sinks into imbecility. Trusting to their
+kind offices, I shall endeavor to fulfil--
+
+--Bridget enters and begins clearing the table.
+
+--The following poem is my (The Professor's) only contribution to the
+great department of Ocean-Cable literature. As all the poets of this
+country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the
+premium offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Burns Centenary,
+(so called, according to our Benjamin Franklin, because there will
+be nary a cent for any of us,) poetry will be very scarce and dear.
+Consumers may, consequently, be glad to take the present article, which,
+by the aid of a Latin tutor--and a Professor of Chemistry, will be found
+intelligible to the educated classes.
+
+
+
+                       DE SAUTY
+
+              AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.
+
+              Professor.       Blue-Nose.
+
+     PROFESSOR.
+
+     Tell me, O Provincial! speak, Ceruleo-Nasal!
+     Lives there one De Sauty extant now among you,
+     Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
+     Holding talk with nations?
+
+     Is there a De Sauty, ambulant on Tellus,
+     Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in night-cap,
+     Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
+     Three times daily patent?
+
+     Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
+     Or is he a mythus,--ancient word for “humbug,”
+      --Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed
+     Romulus and Remus?
+
+     Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
+     Or a living product of galvanic action,
+     Like the status bred in Crosses flint-solution?
+     Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!
+
+
+     BLUE-NOSE.
+
+     Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger,
+     Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster!
+     Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me,
+     Thou shalt hear them answered.
+
+     When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
+     At the polar focus of the wire electric
+     Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us
+     Called himself “DE SAUTY.”
+
+     As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
+     Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia,
+     So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
+     Sucking in the current.
+
+     When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,
+     Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,
+     And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
+     Said, “All right!  DE SAUTY.”
+
+     From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading
+     Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples
+     Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
+     Of “All right!  DE SAUTY.”
+
+     When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger,
+     Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,
+     Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
+     Of disintegration.
+
+     Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
+     Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
+     Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
+     There was no De Sauty.
+
+     Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
+     C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor.  Flu.  Sil.  Potassa,
+     Calc.  Sod.  Phosph.  Mag.  Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum,(?)
+     Such as man is made of.
+
+     Born of stream galvanic, with it he had perished!
+     There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
+     Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
+     Cry, “All right!  DE SAUTY.”
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Back again!--A turtle--which means a tortoise--is fond of his shell;
+but if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out of it. So the boys
+say.
+
+It is a libel on the turtle. He grows to his shell, and his shell is in
+his body as much as his body is in his shell.--I don't think there
+is one of our boarders quite so testudineous as I am. Nothing but a
+combination of motives, more peremptory than the coal on the turtle's
+back, could have got me to leave the shelter of my carapace; and after
+memorable interviews, and kindest hospitalities, and grand sights, and
+huge influx of patriotic pride,--for every American owns all America,--
+
+          “Creation's heir,--the world, the world is”
+
+his, if anybody's,--I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey
+might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he were allowed to
+resume his skeleton.
+
+Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent Cleopatra, and Dying
+Warrior, whose classic outlines (reproduced in the calcined mineral of
+Lutetia) crown my loaded shelves! Welcome, ye triumphs of pictorial art
+(repeated by the magic graver) that look down upon me from the walls of
+my sacred cell! Vesalius, as Titian drew him, high-fronted, still-eyed,
+thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems a gentleman, with book and
+carelessly-held eyeglass, marking him a scholar; thou, too, Jan Kuyper,
+commonly called Jan Praktiseer, old man of a century and seven years
+besides, father of twenty sons and two daughters, cut in copper by
+Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on one of the Paris quais; and ye
+Three Trees of Rembrandt, black in shadow against the blaze of light;
+and thou Rosy Cottager of Sir Joshua, roses hinted by the peppery burin
+of Bartolozzi; ye, too, of lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely for
+unrenowned, Young Bull of Paulus Potter, and sleeping Cat of Cornelius
+Visscher; welcome once more to my eyes! The old books look out from
+the shelves, and I seem to read on their backs something asides their
+titles,--a kind of solemn greeting. The crimson carpet flushes warm
+under my feet. The arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair spins round
+with me, as if it were giddy with pleasure; the vast recumbent fauteuil
+stretches itself out under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine
+stretches in after-dinner laughter.
+
+The boarders were pleased to say that they were glad to get me back. One
+of them ventured a compliment, namely,--that I talked as if I believed
+what I said.--This was apparently considered something unusual, by its
+being mentioned.
+
+One who means to talk with entire sincerity,--I said,--always feels
+himself in danger of two things, namely,--an affectation of bluntness,
+like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in “Lear,” and actual rudeness.
+What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to
+give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two
+talkers as the time will let him. Life is short, and conversation apt
+to run to mere words. Mr. Hue I think it is, who tells us some very good
+stories about the way in which two Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up
+a long talk without saying a word which has any meaning in it. Something
+like this is occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall. The best
+Chinese talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time
+to time. Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery
+glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de
+Dantzic; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,--never a wave,
+and never a calm; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or
+a highly-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so gracefully,
+that we find meaning for the music they make as we find faces in the
+coals and fairy palaces in the clouds. There is something very odd,
+though, about this mechanical talk.
+
+You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine was
+detached a long way from the station you were approaching? Well, you
+have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if the
+locomotive were drawing them? Indeed, you would not have suspected that
+you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if you had not seen
+the engine running away from you on a side-track. Upon my conscience,
+I believe some of these pretty women detach their minds entirely,
+sometimes, from their talk,--and, what is more, that we never know the
+difference. Their lips let off the fluty syllables just as their fingers
+would sprinkle the music-drops from their pianos; unconscious habit
+turns the phrase of thought into words just as it does that of
+music into notes.--Well, they govern the world for all that, these
+sweet-lipped women,--because beauty is the index of a larger fact than
+wisdom.
+
+--The Bombazine wanted an explanation.
+
+Madam,--said I,--wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the
+promise of the future.
+
+--All this, however, is not what I was going to say. Here am I, suppose,
+seated--we will say at a dinner-table--alongside of an intelligent
+Englishman. We look in each other's faces,--we exchange a dozen words.
+One thing is settled: we mean not to offend each other,--to be perfectly
+courteous,--more than courteous; for we are the entertainer and the
+entertained, and cherish particularly amiable feelings, to each other.
+The claret is good; and if our blood reddens a little with its warm
+crimson, we are none the less kind for it.
+
+I don't think people that talk over their victuals are like to say
+anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with
+strong drink before they begin jabberin'.
+
+The Bombazine uttered this with a sugary sourness, as if the words had
+been steeped in a solution of acetate of lead.--The boys of my time used
+to call a hit like this a “side-winder.”
+
+--I must finish this woman.--
+
+Madam,--I said,--the Great Teacher seems to have been fond of talking as
+he sat at meat. Because this was a good while ago, in a far-off place,
+you forget what the true fact of it was,--that those were real
+dinners, where people were hungry and thirsty, and where you met a very
+miscellaneous company. Probably there was a great deal of loose talk
+among the guests; at any rate, there was always wine, we may believe.
+
+Whatever may be the hygienic advantages or disadvantages of wine,--and
+I for one, except for certain particular ends, believe in water, and,
+I blush to say it, in black tea,--there is no doubt about its being the
+grand specific against dull dinners. A score of people come together in
+all moods of mind and body. The problem is, in the space of one hour,
+more or less, to bring them all into the same condition of slightly
+exalted life. Food alone is enough for one person, perhaps,--talk,
+alone, for another; but the grand equalizer and fraternizer, which works
+up the radiators to their maximum radiation, and the absorbents to their
+maximum receptivity, is now just where it was when
+
+          The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed,
+
+--when six great vessels containing water, the whole amounting to more
+than a hogshead-full, were changed into the best of wine. I once wrote
+a song about wine, in which I spoke so warmly of it, that I was afraid
+some would think it was written inter pocula; whereas it was composed
+in the bosom of my family, under the most tranquillizing domestic
+influences.
+
+--The divinity-student turned towards me, looking mischievous.--Can you
+tell me,--he said,--who wrote a song for a temperance celebration once,
+of which the following is a verse?
+
+     Alas for the loved one, too gentle and fair
+     The joys of the banquet to chasten and share!
+     Her eye lost its light that his goblet might shine,
+     And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his wine!
+
+I did,--I answered.--What are you going to do about it?--I will tell you
+another line I wrote long ago:--
+
+     Don't be “consistent,”--but be simply true.
+
+The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that
+the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with many
+facets answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about them;
+secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to grind
+us down to a single flat surface. It is hard work to resist this
+grinding-down action.--Now give me a chance. Better eternal and
+universal abstinence than the brutalities of those days that made wives
+and mothers and daughters and sisters blush for those whom they should
+have honored, as they came reeling home from their debauches! Yet
+better even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon all
+our tables, let us praise it for its color and fragrance and social
+tendency, so far as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the closet and
+pretend not to know the use of a wine-glass at a public dinner! I think
+you will find that people who honestly mean to be true really contradict
+themselves much more rarely than those who try to be “consistent.” But
+a great many things we say can be made to appear contradictory, simply
+because they are partial views of a truth, and may often look unlike at
+first, as a front view of a face and its profile often do.
+
+Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I
+owe him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he
+has often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend the
+“Autocrat,”--which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by omitting the
+very word which gives it its significance,--the word fluid, intended to
+typify the mobility of the restricted will,--holds it up, I say, as if
+it attacked the reality of the self-determining principle, instead of
+illustrating its limitations by an image. Now I will not explain any
+farther, still less defend, and least of all attack, but simply quote
+a few lines from one of my friend's poems, printed more than ten years
+ago, and ask the distinguished gentleman where he has ever asserted more
+strongly or absolutely the independent will of the “subcreative centre,”
+ as my heretical friend has elsewhere called man.
+
+   --Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own
+     He rent a pillar from the eternal throne!
+   --Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
+     The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
+   --Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
+     Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!
+
+If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and the
+full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly consistent!
+
+Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation
+with the intelligent Englishman. We begin skirmishing with a few light
+ideas,--testing for thoughts,--as our electro-chemical friend, De Sauty,
+if there were such a person, would test for his current; trying a little
+litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-paper for alkalies,
+as chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging the lead, and looking
+at the shells and sands it brings up to find out whether we are like
+to keep in shallow water, or shall have to drop the deep-sea line;--in
+short, seeing what we have to deal with. If the Englishman gets his
+H's pretty well placed, he comes from one of the higher grades of the
+British social order, and we shall find him a good companion.
+
+But, after all, here is a great fact between us. We belong to two
+different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us, we
+are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall to
+talk through. Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior fellow,
+incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I would let out
+the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World folks. They are
+children to us in certain points of view. They are playing with toys we
+have done with for whole-generations.
+
+--------FOOTNOTE: The more I have observed and reflected, the more
+limited seems to me the field of action of the human will. Every act of
+choice involves a special relation between the ego and the conditions
+before it. But no man knows what forces are at work in the determination
+of his ego. The bias which decides his choice between two or more
+motives may come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he
+knows nothing at all. He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring
+of reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is
+self-determining. The Story of Elsie Yenner, written-soon after this
+book was published, illustrates the direction in which my thought was
+moving. 'The imaginary subject of the story obeyed her will, but her
+will Obeyed the mysterious antenatal poisoning influence.
+
+*****
+
+That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet and
+the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with, we have
+not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and constantly
+than they do. Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and masks, and
+lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases, which we laugh
+at honestly, without affectation, that are still used in the Old-World
+puppet-shows. I don't think we on our part ever understand the
+Englishman's concentrated loyalty and specialized reverence. But then we
+do think more of a man, as such, (barring some little difficulties about
+race and complexion which the Englishman will touch us on presently,)
+than any people that ever lived did think of him. Our reverence is a
+great deal wider, if it is less intense. We have caste among us, to some
+extent; it is true; but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog
+such as you often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his
+robust, hearty individuality.
+
+This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to me;
+it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans swim
+into each other's laps. The trouble is, it is so difficult to let out
+the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming to take a
+personal character. But I never enjoy the Englishman so much as when he
+talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the Peruvians. Then you
+get the real British flavor, which the cosmopolite Englishman loses.
+
+How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren
+interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each
+man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his opponent
+as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!
+
+--My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep. I follow
+a slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current of my
+own beneath it. Under both runs obscurely a consciousness belonging to a
+third train of reflections, independent of the two others. I will try to
+write out a Mental movement in three parts.
+
+A.--First voice, or Mental Soprano,--thought follows a woman talking.
+
+B.--Second voice, or Mental Barytone,--my running accompaniment.
+
+C.--Third voice, or Mental Basso,--low grumble of importunate
+self-repeating idea.
+
+A.--White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of
+apple-blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most
+delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers--
+
+B.--Deuse take her! What a fool she is! Hear her chatter! (Look out of
+window just here.--Two pages and a half of description, if it were
+all written out, in one tenth of a second.)--Go ahead, old lady! (Eye
+catches picture over fireplace.) There's that infernal family nose! Came
+over in the “Mayflower” on the first old fool's face. Why don't they
+wear a ring in it?
+
+C.--You 'll be late at lecture,--late at lecture,--late,--late--
+
+I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt
+through the superincumbent strata, thus:--The usual single or double
+currents shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with
+them, disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,--Oh,
+there! I knew there was something troubling me,--and the thought which
+had been working through comes up to the surface clear, definite, and
+articulates itself,--a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or an unpleasant
+recollection.
+
+The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in
+this, that they are both brimful. There is no space between consecutive
+thoughts, or between the never-ending series of actions. All pack tight,
+and mould their surfaces against each other, so that in the long run
+there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms of both thoughts
+and actions, just as you find that cylinders crowded all become
+hexagonal prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed into regular
+polyhedra.
+
+Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no
+man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by him.
+So, to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the layers of
+thought, we may consider the mind as it moves among thoughts or events,
+like a circus-rider whirling round with a great troop of horses. He can
+mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more or less completely, but he
+cannot stop it. So, as I said in another way at the beginning, he can
+stride two or three thoughts at once, but not break their steady walk,
+trot, or gallop. He can only take his foot from the saddle of one
+thought and put it on that of another.
+
+--What is the saddle of a thought? Why, a word, of course.--Twenty years
+after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to you through
+the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and round all that
+time without a rider.
+
+The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no
+such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving thought
+upon that of another.
+
+--I should like to ask,--said the divinity-student,--since we are
+getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are in
+contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always now to something?
+
+--I thought it best not to hear this question.
+
+--I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or elsewhere.
+One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an unfortunate
+truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,--as helpless,
+apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an Egyptian mummy.
+He then proceeds, with the air and method of a master, to take off the
+bandages. Nothing can be neater than the way in which he does it. But
+as he takes off layer after layer, the truth seems to grow smaller and
+smaller, and some of its outlines begin to look like something we have
+seen before. At last, when he has got them all off, and the truth struts
+out naked, we recognize it as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance
+whom we have known in the streets all our lives. The fact is, the
+philosopher has coaxed the truth into his study and put all those
+bandages on; or course it is not very hard for him to take them off.
+Still, a great many people like to watch the process,--he does it so
+neatly!
+
+Dear! dear! I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see how
+those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade are
+abused by my fellow-vertebrates,--perhaps by myself. How they spar for
+wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!
+
+--The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat
+fighting attitude.--Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!--he
+said,--and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the concave
+palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball.--You small boy
+there, hurry up that “Webster's Unabridged!”
+
+The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked
+the propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three words,
+of which the two last were “Webster's Unabridged,” and the first was an
+emphatic monosyllable.--Beg pardon,--he added,--forgot myself. But let
+us have an English dictionary, if we are to have any. I don't believe in
+clipping the coin of the realm, Sir! If I put a weathercock on my house,
+Sir, I want it to tell which way the wind blows up aloft,--off from the
+prairies to the ocean, or off from the ocean to the prairies, or any
+way it wants to blow! I don't want a weathercock with a winch in an old
+gentleman's study that he can take hold of and turn, so that the vane
+shall point west when the great wind overhead is blowing east with all
+its might, Sir! Wait till we give you a dictionary; Sir! It takes Boston
+to do that thing, Sir!
+
+--Some folks think water can't run down-hill anywhere out of Boston,
+--remarked the Koh-i-noor.
+
+I don't know what some folks think so well as I know what some fools
+say,--rejoined the Little Gentleman.--If importing most dry goods made
+the best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for 'em.--Mr.
+Webster could n't spell, Sir, or would n't spell, Sir,--at any rate, he
+did n't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the owners of
+some copyrights and the dignity of this noble language which we have
+inherited from our English fathers. Language!--the blood of the soul,
+Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which they grow! We know
+what a word is worth here in Boston. Young Sam Adams got up on the stage
+at Commencement, out at Cambridge there, with his gown on, the Governor
+and Council looking on in the name of his Majesty, King George the
+Second, and the girls looking down out of the galleries, and taught
+people how to spell a word that was n't in the Colonial dictionaries!
+R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e, tance, Resistance! That was in '43, and
+it was a good many years before the Boston boys began spelling it with
+their muskets;--but when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the
+old bedridden women in the English almshouses heard every syllable! Yes,
+yes, yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys
+got the class so far along that it could spell those two hard words,
+Independence and Union! I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand
+lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language
+that is worth speaking. We know what language means too well here in
+Boston to play tricks with it. We never make a new word til we have made
+a new thing or a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould of this
+continent, we had to make a few. When, by God's permission, we abrogated
+the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or two. The
+cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,--this
+thirty-wasted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,--must throw a little spray
+over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new world's
+destiny!
+
+He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair
+human proportions. His feet must have been on the upper round of his
+high chair; that was the only way I could account for it.
+
+Puts her through fast-rate,--said the young fellow whom the boarders
+call John.
+
+The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said he
+remembered Sam Adams as Governor. An old man in a brown coat. Saw him
+take the Chair on Boston Common. Was a boy then, and remembers sitting
+on the fence in front of the old Hancock house. Recollects he had a
+glazed 'lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking down on to the Common.
+Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a great bunch off from the
+bushes in the Hancock front-yard.
+
+Them 'lection-buns are no go,--said the young man John, so called.--I
+know the trick. Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an' he
+downs the whole of it. In about an hour it swells up in his stomach as
+big as a football, and his feedin' 's spilt for that day. That's the way
+to stop off a young one from eatin' up all the 'lection dinner.
+
+Salem! Salem! not Boston,--shouted the little man.
+
+But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy
+Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the
+bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.
+
+The Little Gentleman was holding a fork in his left hand. He stabbed a
+boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it as if
+it ought to shriek. It did not,--but he sat as if watching it.
+
+--Language is a solemn thing,--I said.--It grows out of life,--out of
+its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness. Every language
+is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined.
+Because time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp angles of its
+cornices, shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time? Let me tell you
+what comes of meddling with things that can take care of themselves.--A
+friend of mine had a watch given him, when he was a boy,--a “bull's
+eye,” with a loose silver case that came off like an oyster-shell from
+its contents; you know them,--the cases that you hang on your thumb,
+while the core, or the real watch, lies in your hand as naked as a
+peeled apple. Well, he began with taking off the case, and so on from
+one liberty to another, until he got it fairly open, and there were the
+works, as good as if they were alive,--crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and
+all the rest. All right except one thing,--there was a confounded little
+hair had got tangled round the balance-wheel. So my young Solomon got a
+pair of tweezers, and caught hold of the hair very nicely, and pulled it
+right out, without touching any of the wheels,--when,--buzzzZZZ! and
+the watch had done up twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph
+time!--The English language was wound up to run some thousands of years,
+I trust; but if everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is
+a hair, our grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a
+hair-spring, and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down,
+as so many other dialects have done before it. I can't stand this
+meddling any better than you, Sir. But we have a great deal to be proud
+of in the lifelong labors of that old lexicographer, and we must n't
+be ungrateful. Besides, don't let us deceive ourselves,--the war of
+the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities, colleges, and
+especially of publishers. After all, it is likely that the language will
+shape itself by larger forces than phonography and dictionary-making.
+You may spade up the ocean as much as you like, and harrow it
+afterwards, if you can,--but the moon will still lead the tides, and the
+winds will form their surface.
+
+--Do you know Richardson's Dictionary?--I said to my neighbor the
+divinity-student.
+
+Haow?--said the divinity-student.--He colored, as he noticed on my face
+a twitch in one of the muscles which tuck up the corner of the mouth,
+(zygomaticus major,) and which I could not hold back from making a
+little movement on its own account.
+
+It was too late.--A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown colt.
+Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps, better,--but
+caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his earlier ways of
+life. Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue half their lives,
+return to the language of their childhood in their dying hours.
+Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large libraries, taken by
+surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes let slip a word they
+knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken since that time,--but it
+lay there under all their culture. That is one way you may know the
+country-boys after they have grown rich or celebrated; another is by the
+odd old family names, particularly those of the Hebrew prophets, which
+the good old people have saddled them with.
+
+--Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English
+dictionary,--said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as
+sitting at the right upper corner of the table.
+
+I turned and looked him full in the face,--for the pure, manly
+intonations arrested me. The voice was youthful, but full of
+character.--I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in the
+matter of voice.--Hear this.
+
+Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in
+her father's chaise in a street of this town of Boston. She overheard a
+little girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken with the tones of
+her voice. Nothing would satisfy her but she must have that little girl
+come and live in her father's house. So the child came, being then nine
+years old. Until her marriage she remained under the same roof with
+the young lady. Her children became successively inmates of the lady's
+dwelling; and now, seventy years, or thereabouts, since the young lady
+heard the child singing, one of that child's children and one of her
+grandchildren are with her in that home, where she, no longer young,
+except in heart, passes her peaceful days.--Three generations linked
+together by so light a breath of accident!
+
+I liked--the sound of this youth's voice, I said, and his look when I
+came to observe him a little more closely. His complexion had something
+better than the bloom and freshness which had first attracted me;--it
+had that diffused tone which is a sure index of wholesome, lusty life.
+A fine liberal style of nature seemed to be: hair crisped, moustache
+springing thick and dark, head firmly planted, lips finished, as is
+commonly sees them in gentlemen's families, a pupil well contracted, and
+a mouth that opened frankly with a white flash of teeth that looked as
+if they could serve him as they say Ethan Allen's used to serve their
+owner,--to draw nails with. This is the kind of fellow to walk a
+frigate's deck and bowl his broadsides into the “Gadlant Thudnder-bomb,”
+ or any forty-port-holed adventurer who would like to exchange a few tons
+of iron compliments.--I don't know what put this into my head, for it
+was not till some time afterward I learned the young fellow had been in
+the naval school at Annapolis. Something had happened to change his plan
+of life, and he was now studying engineering and architecture in Boston.
+
+When the youth made the short remark which drew my attention to him, the
+little deformed gentleman turned round and took a long look at him.
+
+Good for the Boston boy!--he said.
+
+I am not a Boston boy,--said the youth, smiling,--I am a Marylander.
+
+I don't care where you come from,--we'll make a Boston man of you,--said
+the little gentleman. Pray, what part of Maryland did you come from, and
+how shall I call you?
+
+The poor youth had to speak pretty loud, as he was at the right upper
+corner of the table, and the little gentleman next the lower left-hand
+corner. His face flushed a little, but he answered pleasantly, telling
+who he was, as if the little man's infirmity gave him a right to ask any
+questions he wanted to.
+
+Here is the place for you to sit,--said the little gentleman, pointing
+to the vacant chair next his own, at the corner.
+
+You're go'n' to have a young lady next you, if you wait till
+to-morrow,--said the landlady to him.
+
+He did not reply, but I had a fancy that he changed color. It can't be
+that he has susceptibilities with reference to a contingent young lady!
+It can't be that he has had experiences which make him sensitive! Nature
+could not be quite so cruel as to set a heart throbbing in that poor
+little cage of ribs! There is no use in wasting notes of admiration. I
+must ask the landlady about him.
+
+These are some of the facts she furnished.--Has not been long with her.
+Brought a sight of furniture,--could n't hardly get some of it upstairs.
+Has n't seemed particularly attentive to the ladies. The Bombazine
+(whom she calls Cousin something or other) has tried to enter into
+conversation with him, but retired with the impression that he was
+indifferent to ladies' society. Paid his bill the other day without
+saying a word about it. Paid it in gold,--had a great heap of
+twenty-dollar pieces. Hires her best room. Thinks he is a very nice
+little man, but lives dreadful lonely up in his chamber. Wants the care
+of some capable nuss. Never pitied anybody more in her life--never see a
+more interestin' person.
+
+--My intention was, when I began making these notes, to let them consist
+principally of conversations between myself and the other boarders. So
+they will, very probably; but my curiosity is excited about this little
+boarder of ours, and my reader must not be disappointed, if I sometimes
+interrupt a discussion to give an account of whatever fact or traits I
+may discover about him. It so happens that his room is next to mine, and
+I have the opportunity of observing many of his ways without any active
+movements of curiosity. That his room contains heavy furniture, that
+he is a restless little body and is apt to be up late, that he talks
+to himself, and keeps mainly to himself, is nearly all I have yet found
+out.
+
+One curious circumstance happened lately which I mention without drawing
+an absolute inference. Being at the studio of a sculptor with whom I am
+acquainted, the other day, I saw a remarkable cast of a left arm. On my
+asking where the model came from, he said it was taken direct from the
+arm of a deformed person, who had employed one of the Italian moulders
+to make the cast. It was a curious case, it should seem, of one
+beautiful limb upon a frame otherwise singularly imperfect--I have
+repeatedly noticed this little gentleman's use of his left arm. Can he
+have furnished the model I saw at the sculptor's?
+
+--So we are to have a new boarder to-morrow. I hope there will be
+something pretty and pleasing about her. A woman with a creamy
+voice, and finished in alto rilievo, would be a variety in the
+boarding-house,--a little more marrow and a little less sinew than our
+landlady and her daughter and the bombazine-clad female, all of whom are
+of the turkey-drumstick style of organization. I don't mean that these
+are our only female companions; but the rest being conversational
+non-combatants, mostly still, sad feeders, who take in their food as
+locomotives take in wood and water, and then wither away from the table
+like blossoms that never came to fruit, I have not yet referred to them
+as individuals.
+
+I wonder what kind of young person we shall see in that empty chair
+to-morrow!
+
+--I read this song to the boarders after breakfast the other morning. It
+was written for our fellows;--you know who they are, of course.
+
+
+
+                         THE BOYS.
+
+     Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
+     If there has, take him out, without making a noise!
+     Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
+     Old Time is a liar!  We're twenty to-night!
+
+     We're twenty!  We're twenty!  Who says we are more?
+     He's tipsy,--young jackanapes!--show him the door!
+     --“Gray temples at twenty?”--Yes! white, if we please;
+     Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there's nothing can freeze!
+
+     Was it snowing I spoke of?  Excuse the mistake!
+     Look close,--you will see not a sign of a flake;
+     We want some new garlands for those we have shed,
+     And these are white roses in place of the red!
+
+     We've a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told.
+     Of talking (in public) as if we were old;
+     That boy we call Doctor, (1) and this we call Judge (2)
+     --It's a neat little fiction,--of course it's all fudge.
+
+     That fellow's the Speaker, (3)--the one on the right;
+     Mr. Mayor, (4) my young one, how are you to-night?
+     That's our “Member of Congress," (5) we say when we chaff;
+     There's the “Reverend” (6) What's his name?--don't make me laugh!
+
+     That boy with the grave mathematical look(7)
+     Made believe he had written a wonderful book,
+     And the ROYAL SOCIETY thought it was true!
+     So they chose him right in; a good joke it was, too.
+
+     There's a boy,--we pretend,--with a three-decker-brain
+     That could harness a team with a logical chain:
+     When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire,
+     We called him “The Justice,”--but now he's “The Squire." (1)
+
+     And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith,(2)
+     Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith,
+     But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,
+     --Just read on his medal,--“My country,--of thee!”
+
+     You hear that boy laughing?--you think he's all fun,
+     But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
+     The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
+     And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all!(3)
+
+     Yes, we're boys,--always playing with tongue or with pen,
+     --And I sometimes have asked,--Shall we ever be men?
+     Shall we always be youthful and laughing and gay,
+     Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?
+
+     Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its gray!
+     The stars of its Winter, the dews of its May!
+     And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
+     Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys!
+
+     1 Francis Thomas.
+     2 George Tyler Bigelow.
+     3 Francis Boardman Crowninshield.
+     4 G. W. Richardson.
+     5 George Thomas Davis.
+     6 James Freeman Clarke.
+     7 Benjamin Peirce.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+[The Professor talks with the Reader. He tells a Young Girl's Story.]
+
+When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of
+mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the
+balance of creation was disturbed. The materials that go to the making
+of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate nature of
+one man's-worth of masculine constituents. These combined to make our
+first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the previous creation
+of our common father. All this, mythically, illustratively, and by no
+means doctrinally or polemically.
+
+The man implies the woman, you will understand. The excellent gentleman
+whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling matter a few
+weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of miracles at the present
+day. So do I. I believe, if you could find an uninhabited coral-reef
+island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with plenty of cocoa-palms
+and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome young fellow, like our
+Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched there a year afterwards, you
+would find him walking under the palm-trees arm in arm with a pretty
+woman.
+
+Where would she come from?
+
+Oh, that 's the miracle!
+
+--I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at
+the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear some
+fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a clairvoyant,
+seeing it all beforehand.
+
+--I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to
+the sun to ripen well.--How some of us fellows remember Joe and Harry,
+Baltimoreans, both! Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples, and his eyes
+like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the whiteness of the
+flesh of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the chandelier-drops rattling
+overhead, as we sat at our sparkling banquets in those gay times!
+Harry, champion, by acclamation, of the college heavy-weights,
+broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-jawed, six feet and trimmings,
+a little science, lots of pluck, good-natured as a steer in peace,
+formidable as a red-eyed bison in the crack of hand-to-hand battle! Who
+forgets the great muster-day, and the collision of the classic with the
+democratic forces? The huge butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten
+pounds,--good weight,--steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant. No words
+from Harry, the Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first;
+and do the talking, if there is any, afterwards. No words, but, in the
+place thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a
+spank like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of
+beeves down a sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth,
+so that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of
+those inglorious and inevitable Yankee clinches, followed by a general
+melee, which make our native fistic encounters so different from such
+admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an English fair,
+where everything was done decently and in order; and the fight began and
+ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting parson need hardly have
+hesitated to open it with a devout petition, and, after it was over,
+dismiss the ring with a benediction.
+
+I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day, though
+it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression. But all of us have a
+little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to men, just
+a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--so that we
+should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first heavy-heeled
+aggressor that came along. You can tell a portrait from an ideal head,
+I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the writer's invention.
+See whether this sounds true or not.
+
+Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and
+Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am talking
+of. With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little fellow, in velvet
+breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise, traditionary in
+English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-skinned racers, in great
+perfection. After the soldiers had come from the muster-field, and
+some of the companies were on the village-common, there was still some
+skirmishing between a few individuals who had not had the fight taken
+out of them. The little Yorkshire groom thought he must serve out
+somebody. So he threw himself into an approved scientific attitude, and,
+in brief, emphatic language, expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate
+any classical young gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate
+for his attentions. I don't suppose there were many of the college boys
+that would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know
+so much more of than Americans, for the most part. However, one of the
+Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the
+crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there, sparring
+away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow, as if it
+had been with his fist, and knocked him heels over head and senseless,
+so that he had to be carried off from the field. This ugly way of
+hitting is the great trick of the French gavate, which is not commonly
+thought able to stand its ground against English pugilistic science.
+These are old recollections, with not much to recommend them, except,
+perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a little something.
+
+The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember. He recalled
+to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you of. Both
+have been long dead. How often we see these great red-flaring flambeaux
+of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,--and the little,
+single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some white-faced and attenuated
+invalid shades with trembling fingers, flickering on while they go out
+one after another, until its glimmer is all that is left to us of the
+generation to which it belonged!
+
+I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some
+pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and
+match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.
+
+There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as accident
+could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she ought, of
+course, to be sitting. One of the “positive” blondes, as my friend,
+you may remember, used to call them. Tawny-haired, amber-eyed,
+full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond. Looks dreamy to me,
+not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her neck sets it off
+as a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not do. So in her dress,
+there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an artist had run his eye
+over her and given a hint or two like the finishing touch to a picture.
+I can't help being struck with her, for she is at once rounded and fine
+in feature, looks calm, as blondes are apt to, and as if she might run
+wild, if she were trifled with. It is just as I knew it would be,--and
+anybody can see that our young Marylander will be dead in love with her
+in a week.
+
+Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have the
+good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as nice as
+a three-volume novel.
+
+The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement
+of having such a charming neighbor next him. I judge so mainly by his
+silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if he
+were thinking of something that had happened, or that might happen, or
+that ought to happen,--or how beautiful her young life looked, or how
+hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which struck him silent,
+at any rate. I made several conversational openings for him, but he did
+not fire up as he often does. I even went so far as to indulge in, a
+fling at the State House, which, as we all know, is in truth a very
+imposing structure, covering less ground than St. Peter's, but of
+similar general effect. The little man looked up, but did not reply to
+my taunt. He said to the young lady, however, that the State House was
+the Parthenon of our Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she
+smiled, and he reddened a little,--so I thought. I don't think it right
+to watch persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all
+do it.
+
+I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of
+the table, to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort. A
+well-mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a
+cap, --pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,
+--features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye on
+the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her My record is
+a blank for some days after this. In the mean time I have contrived to
+make out the person and the story of our young lady, who, according to
+appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine for a boarding-house romance
+before a year is out. It is very curious that she should prove connected
+with a person many of us have heard of. Yet, curious as it is, I have
+been a hundred times struck with the circumstance that the most remote
+facts are constantly striking each other; just as vessels starting from
+ports thousands of miles apart pass close to each other in the naked
+breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a
+crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a
+cry mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some
+Gloucester fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls
+the name of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her
+lonely pillow,--a widow.
+
+Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
+spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack
+sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for
+them in the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and
+events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that,
+if there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar
+occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case
+for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence
+among the Comfortable Classes. There are about as many twins in the
+births of thought as of children. For the first time in your lives you
+learn some fact or come across some idea. Within an hour, a day, a week,
+that same fact or idea strikes you from another quarter. It seems as if
+it had passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from
+the blank wall that shuts in the world of thought. Yet no possible
+connection exists between the two channels by which the thought or the
+fact arrived. Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.
+
+One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
+pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table boarders,
+which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young
+fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short, in order to
+utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank
+interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a
+geode.
+
+               Aphorism by the Professor.
+
+In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food
+of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything
+at any hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods, and
+you might as well attempt to regulate the time of highwater to suit
+a fishing-party as to change these periods. The crucial experiment is
+this. Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the suspected individual just ten
+minutes before dinner. If this is eagerly accepted and devoured, the
+fact of youth is established. If the subject of the question starts back
+and expresses surprise and incredulity, as if you could not possibly be
+in earnest, the fact of maturity is no less clear.
+
+--Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table.--Young fellows
+being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare of the
+evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to impale a slice of
+meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork holding it beneath
+the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons that
+guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and
+kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find one,
+if it was not in its place.--Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting
+so many years to hear of this college trick, I should hear it mentioned
+a second time within the same twenty-four hours by a college youth of
+the present generation. Strange, but true. And so it has happened to me
+and to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by
+these twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.
+
+I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it
+as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow
+of subsoil in it.--The explanation is, of course, that in a great many
+thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest
+our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the
+enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness,
+until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts
+and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more pieces to
+make up a conscious life or a living body than you think for. Why,
+some of you were surprised when a friend of mine told you there
+were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle. How many “swimming
+glands”--solid, organized, regularly formed, rounded disks taking an
+active part in all your vital processes, part and parcel, each one of
+them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose are whirled along, like
+pebbles in a stream, with the blood which warms your frame and colors
+your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop
+of blood, under the microscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the
+globules, and then made a calculation. The counting by the micrometer
+took him a week.--You have, my full-grown friend, of these little
+couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on your vital errands
+day and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions, five hundred and
+seventy thousand millions. Errors excepted.--Did I hear some gentleman
+say, “Doubted? “--I am the Professor. I sit in my chair with a petard
+under it that will blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I
+do not know what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.
+
+Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and
+saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been
+waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible
+that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I
+have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? Listen,
+then. The number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates
+the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts
+accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences
+in the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in
+the world of outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now
+at our table, and proving to be the daughter of an old acquaintance some
+of us may remember, is the special example which led me through this
+labyrinth of reflections, and finally lands me at the commencement of
+this young girl's story, which, as I said, I have found the time and
+felt the interest to learn something of, and which I think I can tell
+without wronging the unconscious subject of my brief delineation. IRIS.
+
+You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd poem
+written by an old Latin tutor? He brought up at the verb amo, I love,
+as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living dictionary
+for him at the word filia, a daughter. The poor man was greatly
+perplexed in choosing a name for her. Lucretia and Virginia were the
+first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured stories of
+Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying, though he had
+read them a hundred times.
+
+--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one
+friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber. To them her wrongs
+briefly. Let them see to the wretch,--she will take care of herself.
+Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart. She
+slides from her seat, and falls dying. “Her husband and her father cry
+aloud.”--No, not Lucretia.
+
+-Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl. She engaged
+to a very promising young man. Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy to
+her,--must have her at any rate. Hires a lawyer to present the arguments
+in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter. There used to
+be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.--All right. There are two
+sides to everything. Audi alteram partem. The legal gentleman has no
+opinion,--he only states the evidence.--A doubtful case. Let the young
+lady be under the protection of the Honorable Decemvir until it can be
+looked up thoroughly.--Father thinks it best, on the whole, to give in.
+Will explain the matter, if the young lady and her maid will step this
+way. That is the explanation,--a stab with a butcher's knife, snatched
+from a stall, meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia.
+
+The old man thought over the story. Then he must have one look at the
+original. So he took down the first volume and read it over. When he
+came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she was engaged
+to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless shape and
+carried it through the street, and how all the women followed, wailing,
+and asking if that was what their daughters were coming to,--if that
+was what they were to get for being good girls,--he melted down into his
+accustomed tears of pity and grief, and, through them all, of delight at
+the charming Latin of the narrative. But it was impossible to call his
+child Virginia. He could never look at her without thinking she had a
+knife sticking in her bosom.
+
+Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one. She was a queen, and the
+founder of a great city. Her story had been immortalized by the greatest
+of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to “Virgilius Maro,” as he
+called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his memorable journey. So he
+took down his Virgil, it was the smooth-leafed, open-lettered quarto of
+Baskerville,--and began reading the loves and mishaps of Dido. It would
+n't do. A lady who had not learned discretion by experience, and came to
+an evil end. He shook his head, as he sadly repeated,
+
+    “--misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore;”
+
+but when he came to the lines,
+
+    “Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis
+     Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,”
+
+he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording
+angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone
+hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.
+
+“Iris shall be her name!”--he said. So her name was Iris.
+
+--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation. It is only a
+question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries. These
+all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in brick or
+stone and iron. I don't mean that you will see in the registry of deaths
+that this or that particular tutor died of well-marked, uncomplicated
+starvation. They may, even, in extreme cases, be carried off by a thin,
+watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very well in the returns, but
+means little to those who know that it is only debility settling on
+the head. Generally, however, they fade and waste away under various
+pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia, consumption, and so on, to put a decent
+appearance upon the case and keep up the credit of the family and the
+institution where they have passed through the successive stages of
+inanition.
+
+In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the
+process in question. You see they do get food and clothes and fuel, in
+appreciable quantities, such as they are. You will even notice rows of
+books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look as if
+they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the water of
+crystallization to scholars, and you can never get them away till
+the poor fellows effloresce into dust. Do not be deceived. The tutor
+breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcorated with milk watered to the
+verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and elastic, up to the
+moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless; his coal is a sullen,
+sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes, rather than burns, in
+the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too thin for winter and too
+thick for summer. The greedy lungs of fifty hot-blooded boys suck the
+oxygen from the air he breathes in his recitation-room. In short, he
+undergoes a process of gentle and gradual starvation.
+
+--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the old
+story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus. Her blood-name, which she
+gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain old English
+one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as recalling the mother
+of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well from the initial letter
+forwards and from the terminal letter backwards. The poor lady, seated
+with her companion at the chessboard of matrimony, had but just pushed
+forward her one little white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black
+Knight, that cares nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down
+upon her and swept her from the larger board of life.
+
+The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late
+companion, with her name and age and Eheu! upon it,--a smaller one
+at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and
+snowed on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have cherished
+tenderly.
+
+About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of
+water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved into
+a slight cough. Then he began to draw the buckle of his black trousers
+a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-ample waistcoat.
+His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts of color in his
+cheeks more vivid than of old. After a while his walks fatigued him,
+and he was tired, and breathed hard after going up a flight or two of
+stairs. Then came on other marks of inward trouble and general waste,
+which he spoke of to his physician as peculiar, and doubtless owing to
+accidental causes; to all which the doctor listened with deference, as
+if it had not been the old story that one in five or six of mankind in
+temperate climates tells, or has told for him, as if it were something
+new. As the doctor went out, he said to himself,--“On the rail at last.
+Accommodation train. A good many stops, but will get to the station
+by and by.” So the doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of
+Jupiter before it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader,
+as you will see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed,
+saying he would look in occasionally. After this, the Latin tutor began
+the usual course of “getting better,” until he got so much better that
+his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines
+showed at each side of his lips, and when he spoke; it was in a muffled
+whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the purest
+porcelain, --so much better, that he hoped--by spring--he--might be
+able--to--attend------to his class again.--But he was recommended not
+to expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and occasionally, not having
+anything to do, his bed. The unmarried sister with whom he lived took
+care of him; and the child, now old enough to be manageable and even
+useful in trifling offices, sat in the chamber, or played, about.
+
+Things could not go on so forever, of course. One morning his face
+was sunken and his hands were very, very cold. He was “better,” he
+whispered, but sadly and faintly. After a while he grew restless and
+seemed a little wandering. His mind ran on his classics, and fell back
+on the Latin grammar.
+
+“Iris!” he said,--“filiola mea!”--The child knew this meant my dear
+little daughter as well as if it had been English.--“Rainbow!” for he
+would translate her name at times,--“come to me,--veni”--and his lips
+went on automatically, and murmured, “vel venito!”--The child came and
+sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could not warm, but
+which shot its rays of cold all through her slender frame. But there she
+sat, looking steadily at him. Presently he opened his lips feebly, and
+whispered, “Moribundus.” She did not know what that meant, but she saw
+that there was something new and sad. So she began to cry; but presently
+remembering an old book that seemed to comfort him at times, got up and
+brought a Bible in the Latin version, called the Vulgate. “Open it,” he
+said,--“I will read, segnius irritant,--don't put the light out,--ah!
+hoeret lateri,--I am going,--vale, vale, vale, goodbye, good-bye,--the
+Lord take care of my child! Domine, audi--vel audito!” His face whitened
+suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes and mouth. He had taken his
+last degree.
+
+--Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very brilliant
+rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view. A limited wardrobe of
+man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good books, principally
+classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of the Pantheon, with
+some pieces of furniture which had seen service,--these, and a child's
+heart full of tearful recollections and strange doubts and questions,
+alternating with the cheap pleasures which are the anodynes of childish
+grief; such were the treasures she inherited.--No,--I forgot. With
+that kindly sentiment which all of us feel for old men's first
+children,--frost-flowers of the early winter season, the old tutor's
+students had remembered him at a time when he was laughing and crying
+with his new parental emotions, and running to the side of the plain
+crib in which his alter egg, as he used to say, was swinging, to hang
+over the little heap of stirring clothes, from which looked the minute,
+red, downy, still, round face, with unfixed eyes and working lips,--in
+that unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a smile, and
+which gives to the earliest moon-year or two of an infant's life the
+character of a first old age, to counterpoise that second childhood
+which there is one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by. The boys
+had remembered the old man and young father at that tender period of his
+hard, dry life. There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with
+classical figures, and bearing on a shield the graver words, Ex dono
+pupillorum. The handle on its side showed what use the boys had meant it
+for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of feeling, in
+the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its destination. Out of this
+silver vessel, after a long, desperate, strangling cry, which marked
+her first great lesson in the realities of life, the child took the blue
+milk, such as poor tutors and their children get, tempered with
+water, and sweetened a little, so as to bring it nearer the standard
+established by the touching indulgence and partiality of Nature,--who
+had mingled an extra allowance of sugar in the blameless food of the
+child at its mother's breast, as compared with that of its infant
+brothers and sisters of the bovine race.
+
+But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rainwater. An air-plant
+will grow by feeding on the winds. Nay, those huge forests that
+overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from the
+air-currents with which they are always battling. The oak is but a
+foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that holds
+the future vegetable world in solution. The storm that tears its leaves
+has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the tornado clad in the
+spoils of a hundred hurricanes.
+
+Poor little Iris! What had she in common with the great oak in the
+shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like
+that,--this was all. The blue milk ran into her veins and filled them
+with thin, pure blood. Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge, such as
+the white rosebud shows before it opens. The doctor who had attended
+her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to “raise”
+ her,--“delicate child,”--hoped she was not consumptive,--thought there
+was a fair chance she would take after her father.
+
+A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white neckcloth,
+sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two years and eleven
+months, after having fully indorsed all the doctrines of the particular
+persuasion to which he not only belonged himself, but thought it very
+shameful that everybody else did not belong. What with foreboding looks
+and dreary death-bed stories, it was a wonder the child made out to live
+through it. It saddened her early years, of course,--it distressed
+her tender soul with thoughts which, as they cannot be fully taken in,
+should be sparingly used as instruments of torture to break down the
+natural cheerfulness of a healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse,
+to cheat a dying one out of the kind illusions with which the Father of
+All has strewed its downward path.
+
+The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might
+have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have
+been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with the
+best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the curious
+students of science.
+
+Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late Latin
+tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the future mother
+of his child. The deceased tutoress was a tranquil, smooth woman, easily
+nourished, as such people are,--a quality which is inestimable in a
+tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the daughter inherited enough
+vitality from the mother to live through childhood and infancy and fight
+her way towards womanhood, in spite of the tendencies she derived from
+her other parent.
+
+--Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary
+descent of qualities. Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five. It
+seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at another
+blended,--that occasionally, the force of two natures is represented in
+the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than either original
+line of living movement,--that sometimes there is a loss of vitality
+hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward impulse of variable
+intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.
+
+So it was with this child. She had glanced off from her parental
+probabilities at an unexpected angle. Instead of taking to classical
+learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties like
+her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the direction
+of Art. As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to sketch outlines
+of objects round her with a certain air and spirit. Very extraordinary
+horses, but their legs looked as if they could move. Birds unknown to
+Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush. Men with impossible legs,
+which did yet seem to have a vital connection with their most improbable
+bodies. By-and-by the doctor, on his beast,--an old man with a face
+looking as if Time had kneaded it like dough with his knuckles, with a
+rhubarb tint and flavor pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all
+their appurtenances. A dreadful old man! Be sure she did not forget
+those saddle-bags that held the detestable bottles out of which he used
+to shake those loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that
+find heaven in strawberries and peaches, are--Well, I suppose I had
+better stop. Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him
+coming. On the next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat
+and white cravat, as he looked when he came and entertained her with
+stories concerning the death of various little children about her age,
+to encourage her, as that wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting Admiral
+Byng. Then she would take her pencil, and with a few scratches there
+would be the outline of a child, in which you might notice how one
+sudden sweep gave the chubby cheek, and two dots darted at the paper
+looked like real eyes.
+
+By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on
+the leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her
+companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy,
+with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and
+children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and
+heads thrown back in ecstasy. This was at about twelve years old, as the
+dates of these drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years before
+she came among us. Soon after this time, the ideal figures began to take
+the place of portraits and caricatures, and a new feature appeared in
+her drawing-books in the form of fragments of verse and short poems.
+
+It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an old
+spinster and go to a village school. Her books bore testimony to this;
+for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a sense of
+weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of blessedness
+or other, which began to be painful. She might have gone through this
+flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided into a sober,
+human berry, but for the intervention of friendly assistance and
+counsel.
+
+In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition, somewhat
+past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of cultivated
+tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character, and of more
+than common accomplishments. The gentleman in black broadcloth and white
+neckerchief only echoed the common voice about her, when he called her,
+after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof, an excellent cup of tea,
+with certain elegancies and luxuries he was unaccustomed to, “The Model
+of all the Virtues.”
+
+She deserved this title as well as almost any woman. She did really
+bristle with moral excellences. Mention any good thing she had not done;
+I should like to see you try! There was no handle of weakness to take
+hold of her by; she was as unseizable, except in her totality, as a
+billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial table, where she had
+been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue of Fortune, she glanced
+from every human contact, and “caromed” from one relation to another,
+and rebounded from the stuffed cushion of temptation, with such exact
+and perfect angular movements, that the Enemy's corps of Reporters had
+long given up taking notes of her conduct, as there was no chance for
+their master.
+
+What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a slightly
+self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius running like
+a glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her virgin nature! One
+of the lady-patroness's peculiar virtues was calmness. She was resolute
+and strenuous, but still. You could depend on her for every duty; she
+was as true as steel. She was kind-hearted and serviceable in all
+the relations of life. She had more sense, more knowledge, more
+conversation, as well as more goodness, than all the partners you have
+waltzed with this winter put together.
+
+Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered
+himself to her in marriage. It was a great wonder. I am very anxious
+to vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of Nature by
+accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.
+
+You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of presenting
+to the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand. There are states of
+mind in which a contact of this kind has a depressing effect on the
+vital powers that makes us insensible to all the virtues and graces of
+the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing organs. When they touch
+us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as if our electricity had been
+drained by a powerful negative battery, carried about by an overgrown
+human torpedo.
+
+“The Model of all the Virtues” had a pair of searching eyes as clear as
+Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry. Her
+features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-smile, but
+never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the riotous tumult
+of a laugh,--which, I take it, is the mob-law of the features;--and
+propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act. She carried the
+brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious, steady hand,
+and an eye always on them, to see that they did not spill. Then she was
+an admirable judge of character. Her mind was a perfect laboratory of
+tests and reagents; every syllable you put into breath went into
+her intellectual eudiometer, and all your thoughts were recorded on
+litmus-paper. I think there has rarely been a more admirable woman.
+Of course, Miss Iris was immensely and passionately attached
+to her.--Well,--these are two highly oxygenated adverbs,
+--grateful,--suppose we say,--yes,--grateful, dutiful, obedient to her
+wishes for the most part,--perhaps not quite up to the concert pitch of
+such a perfect orchestra of the virtues.
+
+We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it
+much. People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than
+is good for them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable
+subjects for biographies. But we don't always care most for those
+flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium.
+
+This immaculate woman,--why could n't she have a fault or two? Is n't
+there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome aureole of
+saintly perfection? Does n't she carry a lump of opium in her pocket? Is
+n't her cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its legitimate use would
+require? It would be such a comfort!
+
+Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such words
+escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind. Whether at the
+bottom of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive
+presence, it is hard to say, until we know more about her. Iris sits
+between the Little Gentleman and the “Model of all the Virtues,” as the
+black-coated personage called her.--I will watch them all.
+
+--Here I stop for the present. What the Professor said has had to make
+way this time for what he saw and heard.
+
+-And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle souls
+who love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with something
+like a smile upon the reader's lips, at a meeting where these musical
+friends had gathered. Whether they were written with smiles or not, you
+can guess better after you have read them.
+
+
+                    THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.
+
+     In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen
+     With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,
+     At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right,
+     Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night.
+
+     Ah me! how I remember the evening when it came!
+     What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame,
+     When the wondrous boa was opened that had come from over seas,
+     With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of ivory keys!
+
+     Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy,
+     For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy,
+     Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal way,
+     But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, “Now, Mary, play.”
+
+     For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm;
+     She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm,
+     In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills,
+     Or caroling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.
+
+     So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please,
+     Sat down to the new “Clementi,” and struck the glittering keys.
+     Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye grew dim,
+     As, floating from lip and finger, arose the “Vesper Hymn.”
+
+     --Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red,
+     (Wedded since, and a widow,--something like ten years dead,)
+     Hearing a gush of music such as none before,
+     Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door.
+
+     Just as the “Jubilate” in threaded whisper dies,
+     --“Open it! open it, lady!” the little maiden cries,
+     (For she thought 't was a singing creature caged in a box she heard,)
+     “Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the bird!”
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+I don't know whether our literary or professional people are more
+amiable than they are in other places, but certainly quarrelling is out
+of fashion among them. This could never be, if they were in the habit of
+secret anonymous puffing of each other. That is the kind of underground
+machinery which manufactures false reputations and genuine hatreds. On
+the other hand, I should like to know if we are not at liberty to have
+a good time together, and say the pleasantest things we can think of to
+each other, when any of us reaches his thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth
+or eightieth birthday.
+
+We don't have “scenes,” I warrant you, on these occasions. No “surprise”
+ parties! You understand these, of course. In the rural districts, where
+scenic tragedy and melodrama cannot be had, as in the city, at the
+expense of a quarter and a white pocket-handkerchief, emotional
+excitement has to be sought in the dramas of real life. Christenings,
+weddings, and funerals, especially the latter, are the main dependence;
+but babies, brides, and deceased citizens cannot be had at a day's
+notice. Now, then, for a surprise-party!
+
+A bag of flour, a barrel of potatoes, some strings of onions, a basket
+of apples, a big cake and many little cakes, a jug of lemonade, a purse
+stuffed with bills of the more modest denominations, may, perhaps,
+do well enough for the properties in one of these private theatrical
+exhibitions. The minister of the parish, a tender-hearted, quiet,
+hard-working man, living on a small salary, with many children,
+sometimes pinched to feed and clothe them, praying fervently every day
+to be blest in his “basket and store,” but sometimes fearing he asks
+amiss, to judge by the small returns, has the first role,--not,
+however, by his own choice, but forced upon him. The minister's wife,
+a sharp-eyed, unsentimental body, is first lady; the remaining parts by
+the rest of the family. If they only had a playbill, it would run thus:
+
+                     ON TUESDAY NEXT
+                    WILL BE PRESENTED
+                   THE AFFECTING SCENE
+                         CALLED
+
+                   THE SURPRISE-PARTY
+
+                           OR
+
+                  THE OVERCOME FAMILY;
+
+WITH THE FOLLOWING STRONG CAST OF CHARACTERS.
+
+     The Rev.  Mr. Overcome, by the Clergyman of this Parish.
+     Mrs.  Overcome, by his estimable lady.
+     Masters Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Overcome,
+     Misses Dorcas, Tabitha, Rachel, and Hannah, Overcome, by their
+     interesting children.
+     Peggy, by the female help.
+
+The poor man is really grateful;--it is a most welcome and unexpected
+relief. He tries to express his thanks,--his voice falters,--he
+chokes,--and bursts into tears. That is the great effect of the evening.
+The sharp-sighted lady cries a little with one eye, and counts the
+strings of onions, and the rest of the things, with the other. The
+children stand ready for a spring at the apples. The female help weeps
+after the noisy fashion of untutored handmaids.
+
+Now this is all very well as charity, but do let the kind visitors
+remember they get their money's worth. If you pay a quarter for dry
+crying, done by a second-rate actor, how much ought you to pay for real
+hot, wet tears, out of the honest eyes of a gentleman who is not acting,
+but sobbing in earnest?
+
+All I meant to say, when I began, was, that this was not a
+surprise-party where I read these few lines that follow:
+
+     We will not speak of years to-night;
+     For what have years to bring,
+     But larger floods of love and light
+     And sweeter songs to sing?
+
+     We will not drown in wordy praise
+     The kindly thoughts that rise;
+     If friendship owns one tender phrase,
+     He reads it in our eyes.
+
+     We need not waste our schoolboy art
+     To gild this notch of time;
+     Forgive me, if my wayward heart
+     Has throbbed in artless rhyme.
+
+     Enough for him the silent grasp
+     That knits us hand in hand,
+     And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
+     That locks our circling band.
+
+     Strength to his hours of manly toil!
+     Peace to his starlit dreams!
+     Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
+     The music-haunted streams!
+
+     Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
+     The sunshine on his lips,
+     And faith, that sees the ring of light
+     Round Nature's last eclipse!
+
+--One of our boarders has been talking in such strong language that I am
+almost afraid to report it. However, as he seems to be really honest and
+is so very sincere in his local prejudices, I don't believe anybody will
+be very angry with him.
+
+It is here, Sir! right here!--said the little deformed gentleman,--in
+this old new city of Boston,--this remote provincial corner of a
+provincial nation, that the Battle of the Standard is fighting, and was
+fighting before we were born, and will be fighting when we are dead
+and gone,--please God! The battle goes on everywhere throughout
+civilization; but here, here, here is the broad white flag flying which
+proclaims, first of all, peace and good-will to men, and, next to
+that, the absolute, unconditional spiritual liberty of each individual
+immortal soul! The three-hilled city against the seven-hilled city! That
+is it, Sir,--nothing less than that; and if you know what that means, I
+don't think you'll ask for anything more. I swear to you, Sir, I believe
+that these two centres of civilization are just exactly the two points
+that close the circuit in the battery of our planetary intelligence! And
+I believe there are spiritual eyes looking out from Uranus and
+unseen Neptune,--ay, Sir, from the systems of Sirius and Arcturus and
+Aldebaran, and as far as that faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent
+in the distance that we call the nebula of Orion,--looking on, Sir, with
+what organs I know not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery
+fusion, the accidents and hindrances of humanity or man himself,
+Sir,--the stupendous abortion, the illustrious failure that he is,
+if the three-hilled city does not ride down and trample out the
+seven-hilled city!
+
+--Steam 's up!--said the young man John, so called, in a low tone.
+--Three hundred and sixty-five tons to the square inch. Let him blow her
+off, or he'll bu'st his b'iler.
+
+The divinity-student took it calmly, only whispering that he thought
+there was a little confusion of images between a galvanic battery and a
+charge of cavalry.
+
+But the Koh-i-noor--the gentleman, you remember, with a very large
+diamond in his shirt-front laughed his scornful laugh, and made as if to
+speak.
+
+Sail in, Metropolis!--said that same young man John, by name. And then,
+in a lower lane, not meaning to be heard,--Now, then, Ma'am Allen!
+
+But he was heard,--and the Koh-i-noor's face turned so white with rage,
+that his blue-black moustache and beard looked fearful, seen against
+it. He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he would have
+thrown it or its contents at the speaker. The young Marylander fixed
+his clear, steady eye upon him, and laid his hand on his arm, carelessly
+almost, but the Jewel found it was held so that he could not move it.
+It was of no use. The youth was his master in muscle, and in that deadly
+Indian hug in which men wrestle with their eyes;--over in five seconds,
+but breaks one of their two backs, and is good for threescore years and
+ten;--one trial enough,--settles the whole matter,--just as when
+two feathered songsters of the barnyard, game and dunghill, come
+together,-after a jump or two at each other, and a few sharp kicks,
+there is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous, Monsieur, with the beaten
+party in all the social relations for all the rest of his days.
+
+I cannot philosophically account for the Koh-i-noor's wrath. For though
+a cosmetic is sold, bearing the name of the lady to whom reference
+was made by the young person John, yet, as it is publicly asserted in
+respectable prints that this cosmetic is not a dye, I see no reason why
+he should have felt offended by any suggestion that he was indebted to
+it or its authoress.
+
+I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to which
+the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural. Nature is fertile in
+variety. I saw an albiness in London once, for sixpence, (including the
+inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked as if she had been
+boiled in milk. A young Hottentot of my acquaintance had his hair all in
+little pellets of the size of marrow-fat peas. One of my own classmates
+has undergone a singular change of late years,--his hair losing its
+original tint, and getting a remarkable discolored look; and another
+has ceased to cultivate any hair at all over the vertex or crown of the
+head. So I am perfectly willing to believe that the purple-black of
+the Koh-i-noor's moustache and whiskers is constitutional and not
+pigmentary. But I can't think why he got so angry.
+
+The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
+threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it was
+all over by the time the other end of the table found out there was a
+disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be seen
+resting on his axe at the instant you hear the last blow he struck.
+So you will please to observe that the Little Gentleman was not,
+interrupted during the time implied by these ex-post-facto remarks of
+mine, but for some ten or fifteen seconds only.
+
+He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started again.
+The “Sir” of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself more than
+anybody else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he were talking
+with some imaginary opponent.
+
+--America, Sir,--he exclaimed,--is the only place where man is
+full-grown!
+
+He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round
+of his high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his
+little figure to the view of the boarders.
+
+It was next to impossible to keep from laughing. The commentary was so
+strange an illustration of the text! I thought it was time to put in
+a word; for I have lived in foreign parts, and am more or less
+cosmopolitan.
+
+I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have in
+England,--I said.--An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion and
+politics. Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr. Channing did,
+and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.
+
+Sir,--said he,--it is n't what a man thinks or says; but when and where
+and to whom he thinks and says it. A man with a flint and steel striking
+sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking them over a
+tinder-box is another. The free Englishman is born under protest; he
+lives and dies under protest,--a tolerated, but not a welcome fact. Is
+not freethinker a term of reproach in England? The same idea in the
+soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and still holds it
+antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to whom it is
+congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except as an element
+blended with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like the drawing of
+his breath or the beating of his heart, is a very different thing. You
+may teach a quadruped to walk on his hind legs, but he is always wanting
+to be on all fours. Nothing that can be taught a growing youth is like
+the atmospheric knowledge he breathes from his infancy upwards. The
+American baby sucks in freedom with the milk of the breast at which he
+hangs.
+
+--That's a good joke,--said the young fellow John,--considerin' it
+commonly belongs to a female Paddy.
+
+I thought--I will not be certain--that the Little Gentleman winked, as
+if he had been hit somewhere--as I have no doubt Dr. Darwin did when the
+wooden-spoon suggestion upset his theory about why, etc. If he winked,
+however, he did not dodge.
+
+A lively comment!--he said.--But Rome, in her great founder, sucked the
+blood of empire out of the dugs of a brute, Sir! The Milesian wet-nurse
+is only a convenient vessel through which the American infant gets the
+life-blood of this virgin soil, Sir, that is making man over again, on
+the sunset pattern! You don't think what we are doing and going to
+do here. Why, Sir, while commentators are bothering themselves with
+interpretation of prophecies, we have got the new heavens and the new
+earth over us and under us! Was there ever anything in Italy, I should
+like to know, like a Boston sunset?
+
+--This time there was a laugh, and the little man himself almost smiled.
+
+Yes,--Boston sunsets;--perhaps they're as good in some other places,
+but I know 'em best here. Anyhow, the American skies are different from
+anything they see in the Old World. Yes, and the rocks are different,
+and the soil is different, and everything that comes out of the soil,
+from grass up to Indians, is different. And now that the provisional
+races are dying out--
+
+--What do you mean by the provisional races, Sir?--said the
+divinity-student, interrupting him.
+
+Why, the aboriginal bipeds, to be sure,--he answered,--the red-crayon
+sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colors for the real
+manhood were ready.
+
+I hope they will come to something yet,--said the divinity-student.
+
+Irreclaimable, Sir,--irreclaimable!--said the Little Gentleman.--Cheaper
+to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones. When you can
+get the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can make an enlightened
+commonwealth of Indians. A provisional race, Sir,--nothing more.
+Exhaled carbonic acid for the use of vegetation, kept down the bears and
+catamounts, enjoyed themselves in scalping and being scalped, and then
+passed away or are passing away, according to the programme.
+
+Well, Sir, these races dying out, the white man has to acclimate
+himself. It takes him a good while; but he will come all right
+by-and-by, Sir,--as sound as a woodchuck,--as sound as a musquash!
+
+A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of
+'em for wash-basins! A new race, and a whole new world for the new-born
+human soul to work in! And Boston is the brain of it, and has been any
+time these hundred years! That's all I claim for Boston,--that it is the
+thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the planet.
+
+--And the grand emporium of modesty,--said the divinity-student, a
+little mischievously.
+
+Oh, don't talk to me of modesty!--answered the Little Gentleman,--I 'm
+past that! There is n't a thing that was ever said or done in Boston,
+from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical lie it
+tore into tatters and flung into the dock, that was n't thought very
+indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the entrails of
+commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into colics as often
+as this revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of thinking come over
+it.--No, Sir,--show me any other place that is, or was since the
+megalosaurus has died out, where wealth and social influence are so
+fairly divided between the stationary and the progressive classes! Show
+me any other place where every other drawing-room is not a chamber of
+the Inquisition, with papas and mammas for inquisitors,--and the cold
+shoulder, instead of the “dry pan and the gradual fire,” the punishment
+of “heresy”!
+
+--We think Baltimore is a pretty civilized kind of a village,--said the
+young Marylander, good-naturedly.--But I suppose you can't forgive it
+for always keeping a little ahead of Boston in point of numbers,--tell
+the truth now. Are we not the centre of something?
+
+Ah, indeed, to be sure you are. You are the gastronomic metropolis
+of the Union. Why don't you put a canvas-back-duck on the top of the
+Washington column? Why don't you get that lady off from Battle Monument
+and plant a terrapin in her place? Why will you ask for other glories
+when you have soft crabs? No, Sir,--you live too well to think as hard
+as we do in Boston. Logic comes to us with the salt-fish of Cape Ann;
+rhetoric is born of the beans of Beverly; but you--if you open your
+mouths to speak, Nature stops them with a fat oyster, or offers a slice
+of the breast of your divine bird, and silences all your aspirations.
+
+And what of Philadelphia?--said the Marylander.
+
+Oh, Philadelphia?--Waterworks,--killed by the Croton and Cochituate;
+--Ben Franklin,--borrowed from Boston;--David Rittenhouse,--made an
+orrery;--Benjamin Rush,--made a medical system;--both interesting to
+antiquarians;--great Red-river raft of medical students,--spontaneous
+generation of professors to match;--more widely known through the
+Moyamensing hose-company, and the Wistar parties;-for geological section
+of social strata, go to The Club.--Good place to live in,--first-rate
+market,--tip-top peaches.--What do we know about Philadelphia, except
+that the engine-companies are always shooting each other?
+
+And what do you say to New York?--asked the Koh-i-noor.
+
+A great city, Sir,--replied the Little Gentleman,--a very opulent,
+splendid city. A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and of
+permanence for much that is respectable. A great money-centre. San
+Francisco with the mines above-ground,--and some of 'em under the
+sidewalks. I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York,
+in all our cities. It makes 'em all look paltry and petty. Has many
+elements of civilization. May stop where Venice did, though, for
+aught we know.--The order of its development is just this:--Wealth;
+architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture. Printing, as a mechanical
+art,--just as Nicholas Jepson and the Aldi, who were scholars too, made
+Venice renowned for it. Journalism, which is the accident of business
+and crowded populations, in great perfection. Venice got as far as
+Titian and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto,--great colorists, mark you,
+magnificent on the flesh-and-blood side of Art,--but look over to
+Florence and see who lie in Santa Crocea, and ask out of whose loins
+Dante sprung!
+
+Oh, yes, to be sure, Venice built her Ducal Palace, and her Church of
+St. Mark, and her Casa d' Or, and the rest of her golden houses; and
+Venice had great pictures and good music; and Venice had a Golden Book,
+in which all the large tax-payers had their names written;--but all that
+did not make Venice the brain of Italy.
+
+I tell you what, Sir,--with all these magnificent appliances of
+civilization, it is time we began to hear something from the djinnis
+donee whose names are on the Golden Book of our sumptuous, splendid,
+marble-placed Venice,--something in the higher walks of literature,
+--something in the councils of the nation. Plenty of Art, I grant you,
+Sir; now, then, for vast libraries, and for mighty scholars and thinkers
+and statesmen,--five for every Boston one, as the population is to
+ours,--ten to one more properly, in virtue of centralizing attraction as
+the alleged metropolis, and not call our people provincials, and have to
+come begging to us to write the lives of Hendrik Hudson and Gouverneur
+Morris!
+
+--The Little Gentleman was on his hobby, exalting his own city at the
+expense of every other place. I have my doubts if he had been in
+either of the cities he had been talking about. I was just going to say
+something to sober him down, if I could, when the young Marylander spoke
+up.
+
+Come, now,--he said,--what's the use of these comparisons? Did n't I
+hear this gentleman saying, the other day, that every American owns all
+America? If you have really got more brains in Boston than other folks,
+as you seem to think, who hates you for it, except a pack of scribbling
+fools? If I like Broadway better than Washington Street, what then? I
+own them both, as much as anybody owns either. I am an American,--and
+wherever I look up and see the stars and stripes overhead, that is home
+to me!
+
+He spoke, and looked up as if he heard the emblazoned folds crackling
+over him in the breeze. We all looked up involuntarily, as if we should
+see the national flag by so doing. The sight of the dingy ceiling and
+the gas-fixture depending therefrom dispelled the illusion.
+
+Bravo! bravo!--said the venerable gentleman on the other side of the
+table.--Those are the sentiments of Washington's Farewell Address.
+Nothing better than that since the last chapter in Revelations.
+Five-and-forty years ago there used to be Washington societies, and
+little boys used to walk in processions, each little boy having a copy
+of the Address, bound in red, hung round his neck by a ribbon. Why don't
+they now? Why don't they now? I saw enough of hating each other in the
+old Federal times; now let's love each other, I say,--let's love each
+other, and not try to make it out that there is n't any place fit to
+live in except the one we happen to be born in.
+
+It dwarfs the mind, I think,--said I,--to feed it on any localism. The
+full stature of manhood is shrivelled--
+
+The color burst up into my cheeks. What was I saying,--I, who would not
+for the world have pained our unfortunate little boarder by an allusion?
+
+I will go,--he said,--and made a movement with his left arm to let
+himself down from his high chair.
+
+No,--no,--he does n't mean it,--you must not go,--said a kind voice next
+him; and a soft, white hand was laid upon his arm.
+
+Iris, my dear!--exclaimed another voice, as of a female, in accents
+that might be considered a strong atmospheric solution of duty with very
+little flavor of grace.
+
+She did not move for this address, and there was a tableau that lasted
+some seconds. For the young girl, in the glory of half-blown womanhood,
+and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature covered with
+Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's eyes.
+
+Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his life.
+Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that reached
+into her soul as these did. It was not that they were in themselves
+supernaturally bright,--but there was the sad fire in them that flames
+up from the soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman without hope,
+but, alas! not without emotion. To him it seemed as if those amber gates
+had been translucent as the brown water of a mountain brook, and through
+them he had seen dimly into a virgin wilderness, only waiting for the
+sunrise of a great passion for all its buds to blow and all its bowers
+to ring with melody.
+
+That is my image, of course,--not his. It was not a simile that was
+in his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,--it was a pang of
+wordless passion, and then a silent, inward moan.
+
+A lady's wish,--he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,--makes
+slaves of us all.--And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and
+never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures
+without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged
+pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well;
+and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always
+hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching
+for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be
+ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked
+in pell-mell,--misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves,
+but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it
+warmed with their contact:--John Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in
+England--saying, that with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the
+handsomest man in all the land in any woman's good graces; Cadenus--old
+and savage--leading captive Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line
+of a ballad, “And a winning tongue had he,”--as much as to say, it is
+n't looks, after all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over,--just
+as of old when it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our
+grandmother to listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.
+
+Ah, dear me! We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club, subjugating
+man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of it, and the
+second by our handling of it,--we rehearse it, I say, by our own
+hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the exercise is
+easy. But when we come to real life, the poker is in the fore, and, ten
+to one, if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to hold;--lucky for
+us, if it is not white-hot, and we do not have to leave the skin of our
+hands sticking to it when we fling it down or drop it with a loud or
+silent cry!
+
+--I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human character
+and feeling I am winding. I meant to tell my thoughts, and to throw in
+a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured themselves for
+me from day to day. Chance has thrown together at the table with me a
+number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean not only to look
+on them, but, if I can, through them. You can get any man's or woman's
+secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your own, if you will only look
+patiently on them long enough. Nature is always applying her reagents
+to character, if you will take the pains to watch her. Our studies
+of character, to change the image, are very much like the surveyor's
+triangulation of a geographical province. We get a base-line in
+organization, always; then we get an angle by sighting some distant
+object to which the passions or aspirations of the subject of our
+observation are tending; then another;--and so we construct our first
+triangle. Once fix a man's ideals, and for the most part the rest is
+easy. A wants to die worth half a million. Good. B (female) wants to
+catch him,--and outlive him. All right. Minor details at our leisure.
+
+What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all your
+misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of acts of
+consciousness which make up your past life? What should you most dislike
+to tell your nearest friend?--Be so good as to pause for a brief space,
+and shut the volume you hold with your finger between the pages.--Oh,
+that is it!
+
+What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my
+soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants
+came back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy
+bills!
+
+At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of those
+stately upright cabinet desks and cases of drawers which were not rare
+in prosperous families during the last century. It had held the clothes
+and the books and the papers of generation after generation. The hands
+that opened its drawers had grown withered, shrivelled, and at last been
+folded in death. The children that played with the lower handles had
+got tall enough to open the desk, to reach the upper shelves behind the
+folding-doors,--grown bent after a while,--and then followed those
+who had gone before, and left the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new
+generation.
+
+A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being a
+quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for by the
+smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk. Prying about
+with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a spring, on pressing
+which, a secret drawer flew from its hiding-place. It had never been
+opened but by the maker. The mahogany shavings and dust were lying in it
+as when the artisan closed it,--and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if
+that day finished.
+
+Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which no
+hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you
+seem to have suspected? What does it hold?--A sin?--I hope not. What a
+strange thing an old dead sin laid away in a secret drawer of the soul
+is! Must it some time or other be moistened with tears, until it comes
+to life again and begins to stir in our consciousness,--as the dry
+wheel-animalcule, looking like a grain of dust, becomes alive, if it is
+wet with a drop of water?
+
+Or is it a passion? There are plenty of withered men and women walking
+about the streets who have the secret drawer in their hearts, which,
+if it were opened, would show as fresh as it was when they were in the
+flush of youth and its first trembling emotions.
+
+What it held will, perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and
+gone, and same curious eye lights on an old yellow letter with the
+fossil footprints of the extinct passion trodden thick all over it.
+
+There is not a boarder at our table, I firmly believe, excepting the
+young girl, who has not a story of the heart to tell, if one could only
+get the secret drawer open. Even this arid female, whose armor of black
+bombazine looks stronger against the shafts of love than any cuirass of
+triple brass, has had her sentimental history, if I am not mistaken. I
+will tell you my reason for suspecting it.
+
+Like many other old women, she shows a great nervousness and
+restlessness whenever I venture to express any opinion upon a class of
+subjects which can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of men
+as their strictly private property,--not even to the clergy, or the
+newspapers commonly called “religious.” Now, although it would be a
+great luxury to me to obtain my opinions by contract, ready-made, from a
+professional man, and although I have a constitutional kindly feeling
+to all sorts of good people which would make me happy to agree with all
+their beliefs, if that were possible, still I must have an idea, now and
+then, as to the meaning of life; and though the only condition of peace
+in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least, not to express them,
+with reference to such subjects, I can't afford to pay quite so much as
+that even for peace.
+
+I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on the
+shores of Sir Isaac Newton's Ocean of Truth, that salt, fish, which have
+been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and dried, are
+the only proper and allowable food for reasonable people. I maintain, on
+the other hand, that there are a number of live fish still swimming in
+it, and that every one of us has a right to see if he cannot catch some
+of them. Sometimes I please myself with the idea that I have landed
+an actual living fish, small, perhaps, but with rosy gills and silvery
+scales. Then I find the consumers of nothing but the salted and dried
+article insist that it is poisonous, simply because it is alive, and cry
+out to people not to touch it. I have not found, however, that people
+mind them much.
+
+The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer. I try every
+questionable proposition on her. If she winces, I must be prepared for
+an outcry from the other old women. I frightened her, the other day, by
+saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-reliance, which,
+if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a
+paradox as it sounds at first. So she sent me a book to read which was
+to cure me of that error. It was an old book, and looked as if it had
+not been opened for a long time. What should drop out of it, one day,
+but a small heart-shaped paper, containing a lock of that straight,
+coarse, brown hair which sets off the sharp faces of so many
+thin-flanked, large-handed bumpkins! I read upon the paper the name
+“Hiram.”--Love! love! love!--everywhere! everywhere!--under diamonds and
+housemaids' “jewelry,”--lifting the marrowy camel's-hair, and rustling
+even the black bombazine!--No, no,--I think she never was pretty, but
+she was young once, and wore bright ginghams, and, perhaps, gay merinos.
+We shall find that the poor little crooked man has been in love, or is
+in love, or will be in love before we have done with him, for aught that
+I know!
+
+Romance! Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the
+seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background,
+where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some
+upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-out
+passions? You look on the black bombazine and high-necked decorum of
+your neighbor, and no more think of the real life that underlies this
+despoiled and dismantled womanhood than you think of a stone trilobite
+as having once been full of the juices and the nervous thrills of
+throbbing and self-conscious being. There is a wild creature under that
+long yellow pin which serves as brooch for the bombazine cuirass,--a
+wild creature, which I venture to say would leap in his cage, if
+I should stir him, quiet as you think him. A heart which has been
+domesticated by matrimony and maternity is as tranquil as a tame
+bullfinch; but a wild heart which has never been fairly broken in
+flutters fiercely long after you think time has tamed it down,--like
+that purple finch I had the other day, which could not be approached
+without such palpitations and frantic flings against the bars of his
+cage, that I had to send him back and get a little orthodox canary
+which had learned to be quiet and never mind the wires or his keeper's
+handling. I will tell you my wicked, but half involuntary experiment on
+the wild heart under the faded bombazine.
+
+Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special
+weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not touch
+the infirm spot? I confess the most frightful tendency to do just this
+thing. If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself imitating it.
+If another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that, go before him,
+limping.
+
+I could never meet an Irish gentleman--if it had been the Duke of
+Wellington himself--without stumbling upon the word “Paddy,”--which I
+use rarely in my common talk.
+
+I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate
+depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing instinct,
+which, under different circumstances, might have made a Fijian
+anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I was
+not answerable. It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact like
+endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted. A thin film of
+politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of thought
+from the stream of conversation. After a time one begins to soak through
+and mingle with the other.
+
+We were talking about names, one day.--Was there ever anything,--I
+said,--like the Yankee for inventing the most uncouth, pretentious,
+detestable appellations,--inventing or finding them,--since the time of
+Praise-God Barebones? I heard a country-boy once talking of another whom
+he called Elpit, as I understood him. Elbridge is common enough, but
+this sounded oddly. It seems the boy was christened Lord Pitt,--and
+called for convenience, as above. I have heard a charming little
+girl, belonging to an intelligent family in the country, called Anges
+invariably; doubtless intended for Agnes. Names are cheap. How can a
+man name an innocent new-born child, that never did him any harm,
+Hiram?--The poor relation, or whatever she is, in bombazine, turned
+toward me, but I was stupid, and went on.--To think of a man going
+through life saddled with such an abominable name as that!--The poor
+relation grew very uneasy.--I continued; for I never thought of all this
+till afterwards.--I knew one young fellow, a good many years ago, by the
+name of Hiram--What's got into you, Cousin,--said our landlady,--to look
+so?--There! you 've upset your teacup!
+
+It suddenly occurred to me what I had been doing, and I saw the
+poor woman had her hand at her throat; she was half-choking with the
+“hysteric ball,”--a very odd symptom, as you know, which nervous women
+often complain of. What business had I to be trying experiments on this
+forlorn old soul? I had a great deal better be watching that young girl.
+
+Ah, the young girl! I am sure that she can hide nothing from me. Her
+skin is so transparent that one can almost count her heart-beats by the
+flushes they send into her cheeks. She does not seem to be shy, either.
+I think she does not know enough of danger to be timid. She seems to
+me like one of those birds that travellers tell of, found in remote,
+uninhabited islands, who, having never received any wrong at the hand
+of man, show no alarm at and hardly any particular consciousness of his
+presence.
+
+The first thing will be to see how she and our little deformed gentleman
+get along together; for, as I have told you, they sit side by side. The
+next thing will be to keep an eye on the duenna,--the “Model” and
+so forth, as the white-neck-cloth called her. The intention of that
+estimable lady is, I understand, to launch her and leave her. I suppose
+there is no help for it, and I don't doubt this young lady knows how to
+take care of herself, but I do not like to see young girls turned loose
+in boarding-houses. Look here now! There is that jewel of his race,
+whom I have called for convenience the Koh-i-noor, (you understand it
+is quite out of the question for me to use the family names of our
+boarders, unless I want to get into trouble,)--I say, the gentleman with
+the diamond is looking very often and very intently, it seems to me,
+down toward the farther corner of the table, where sits our amber-eyed
+blonde. The landlady's daughter does not look pleased, it seems to me,
+at this, nor at those other attentions which the gentleman referred to
+has, as I have learned, pressed upon the newly-arrived young person. The
+landlady made a communication to me, within a few days after the arrival
+of Miss Iris, which I will repeat to the best of my remembrance.
+
+He, (the person I have been speaking of,)--she said,--seemed to
+be kinder hankerin' round after that young woman. It had hurt her
+daughter's feelin's a good deal, that the gentleman she was a-keepin'
+company with should be offerin' tickets and tryin' to send presents to
+them that he'd never know'd till jest a little spell ago,--and he as
+good as merried, so fur as solemn promises went, to as respectable a
+young lady, if she did say so, as any there was round, whosomever they
+might be.
+
+Tickets! presents!--said I.--What tickets, what presents has he had the
+impertinence to be offering to that young lady?
+
+Tickets to the Museum,--said the landlady. There is them that's glad
+enough to go to the Museum, when tickets is given 'em; but some of 'em
+ha'n't had a ticket sence Cenderilla was played,--and now he must be
+offerin' 'em to this ridiculous young paintress, or whatever she is,
+that's come to make more mischief than her board's worth. But it a'n't
+her fault,--said the landlady, relenting;--and that aunt of hers, or
+whatever she is, served him right enough.
+
+Why, what did she do?
+
+Do? Why, she took it up in the tongs and dropped it out o' winder.
+
+Dropped? dropped what?--I said.
+
+Why, the soap,--said the landlady.
+
+It appeared that the Koh-i-noor, to ingratiate himself, had sent an
+elegant package of perfumed soap, directed to Miss Iris, as a delicate
+expression of a lively sentiment of admiration, and that, after having
+met with the unfortunate treatment referred to, it was picked up by
+Master Benjamin Franklin, who appropriated it, rejoicing, and indulged
+in most unheard-of and inordinate ablutions in consequence, so that his
+hands were a frequent subject of maternal congratulation, and he smelt
+like a civet-cat for weeks after his great acquisition.
+
+After watching daily for a time, I think I can see clearly into the
+relation which is growing up between the little gentleman and the young
+lady. She shows a tenderness to him that I can't help being interested
+in. If he was her crippled child, instead of being more than old enough
+to be her father, she could not treat him more kindly. The landlady's
+daughter said, the other day, she believed that girl was settin' her cap
+for the Little Gentleman.
+
+Some of them young folks is very artful,--said her mother,--and there is
+them that would merry Lazarus, if he'd only picked up crumbs enough.
+I don't think, though, this is one of that sort; she's kinder
+childlike,--said the landlady,--and maybe never had any dolls to play
+with; for they say her folks was poor before Ma'am undertook to see to
+her teachin' and board her and clothe her.
+
+I could not help overhearing this conversation. “Board her and clothe
+her!”--speaking of such a young creature! Oh, dear!--Yes,--she must
+be fed,--just like Bridget, maid-of-all-work at this establishment.
+Somebody must pay for it. Somebody has a right to watch her and see how
+much it takes to “keep” her, and growl at her, if she has too good an
+appetite. Somebody has a right to keep an eye on her and take care that
+she does not dress too prettily. No mother to see her own youth over
+again in these fresh features and rising reliefs of half-sculptured
+womanhood, and, seeing its loveliness, forget her lessons of
+neutral-tinted propriety, and open the cases that hold her own ornaments
+to find for her a necklace or a bracelet or a pair of ear-rings,--those
+golden lamps that light up the deep, shadowy dimples on the cheeks of
+young beauties,--swinging in a semi-barbaric splendor that carries the
+wild fancy to Abyssinian queens and musky Odalisques! I don't believe
+any woman has utterly given up the great firm of Mundus & Co., so long
+as she wears ear-rings.
+
+I think Iris loves to hear the Little Gentleman talk. She smiles
+sometimes at his vehement statements, but never laughs at him. When he
+speaks to her, she keeps her eye always steadily upon him. This may be
+only natural good-breeding, so to speak, but it is worth noticing.
+I have often observed that vulgar persons, and public audiences of
+inferior collective intelligence, have this in common: the least thing
+draws off their minds, when you are speaking to them. I love this
+young creature's rapt attention to her diminutive neighbor while he is
+speaking.
+
+He is evidently pleased with it. For a day or two after she came, he
+was silent and seemed nervous and excited. Now he is fond of getting the
+talk into his own hands, and is obviously conscious that he has at least
+one interested listener. Once or twice I have seen marks of special
+attention to personal adornment, a ruffled shirt-bosom, one day, and
+a diamond pin in it,--not so very large as the Koh-i-noor's, but more
+lustrous. I mentioned the death's-head ring he wears on his right hand.
+I was attracted by a very handsome red stone, a ruby or carbuncle or
+something of the sort, to notice his left hand, the other day. It is
+a handsome hand, and confirms my suspicion that the cast mentioned was
+taken from his arm. After all, this is just what I should expect. It is
+not very uncommon to see the upper limbs, or one of them, running away
+with the whole strength, and, therefore, with the whole beauty, which
+we should never have noticed, if it had been divided equally between all
+four extremities. If it is so, of course he is proud of his one strong
+and beautiful arm; that is human nature. I am afraid he can hardly help
+betraying his favoritism, as people who have any one showy point are apt
+to do,--especially dentists with handsome teeth, who always smile back
+to their last molars.
+
+Sitting, as he does, next to the young girl, and next but one to the
+calm lady who has her in charge, he cannot help seeing their relations
+to each other.
+
+That is an admirable woman, Sir,--he said to me one day, as we sat alone
+at the table after breakfast,--an admirable woman, Sir,--and I hate her.
+
+Of course, I begged an explanation.
+
+An admirable woman, Sir, because she does good things, and even kind
+things,--takes care of this--this--young lady--we have here, talks like
+a sensible person, and always looks as if she was doing her duty with
+all her might. I hate her because her voice sounds as if it never
+trembled and her eyes look as if she never knew what it was to cry.
+Besides, she looks at me, Sir, stares at me, as if she wanted to get
+an image of me for some gallery in her brain,--and we don't love to be
+looked at in this way, we that have--I hate her,--I hate her,--her eyes
+kill me,--it is like being stabbed with icicles to be looked at so,--the
+sooner she goes home, the better. I don't want a woman to weigh me in
+a balance; there are men enough for that sort of work. The judicial
+character is n't captivating in females, Sir. A woman fascinates a man
+quite as often by what she overlooks as by what she sees. Love prefers
+twilight to daylight; and a man doesn't think much of, nor care much
+for, a woman outside of his household, unless he can couple the idea
+of love, past, present, or future, with her. I don't believe the Devil
+would give half as much for the services of a sinner as he would for
+those of one of these folks that are always doing virtuous acts in a
+way to make them unpleasing.--That young girl wants a tender nature to
+cherish her and give her a chance to put out her leaves,--sunshine, and
+not east winds.
+
+He was silent,--and sat looking at his handsome left hand with the red
+stone ring upon it.--Is he going to fall in love with Iris?
+
+Here are some lines I read to the boarders the other day:--
+
+           THE CROOKED FOOTPATH
+
+     Ah, here it is! the sliding rail
+     That marks the old remembered spot,
+     --The gap that struck our schoolboy trail,
+     --The crooked path across the lot.
+
+     It left the road by school and church,
+     A pencilled shadow, nothing more,
+     That parted from the silver birch
+     And ended at the farmhouse door.
+
+     No line or compass traced its plan;
+     With frequent bends to left or right,
+     In aimless, wayward curves it ran,
+     But always kept the door in sight.
+
+     The gabled porch, with woodbine green,
+     --The broken millstone at the sill,
+     --Though many a rood might stretch between,
+     The truant child could see them still.
+
+     No rocks, across the pathway lie,
+     --No fallen trunk is o'er it thrown,
+     --And yet it winds, we know not why,
+     And turns as if for tree or stone.
+
+     Perhaps some lover trod the way
+     With shaking knees and leaping heart,
+     --And so it often runs astray
+     With sinuous sweep or sudden start.
+
+     Or one, perchance, with clouded brain
+     From some unholy banquet reeled,
+     --And since, our devious steps maintain
+     His track across the trodden field.
+
+     Nay, deem not thus,--no earthborn will
+     Could ever trace a faultless line;
+     Our truest steps are human still,
+     --To walk unswerving were divine!
+
+     Truants from love, we dream of wrath;
+     --Oh, rather let us trust the more!
+     Through all the wanderings of the path,
+     We still can see our Father's door!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Professor finds a Fly in his Teacup.
+
+I have a long theological talk to relate, which must be dull reading to
+some of my young and vivacious friends. I don't know, however, that any
+of them have entered into a contract to read all that I write, or that I
+have promised always to write to please them. What if I should sometimes
+write to please myself?
+
+Now you must know that there are a great many things which interest me,
+to some of which this or that particular class of readers may be totally
+indifferent. I love Nature, and human nature, its thoughts, affections,
+dreams, aspirations, delusions,--Art in all its forms,--virtu in all
+its eccentricities,--old stories from black-letter volumes and yellow
+manuscripts, and new projects out of hot brains not yet imbedded in the
+snows of age. I love the generous impulses of the reformer; but not less
+does my imagination feed itself upon the old litanies, so often warmed
+by the human breath upon which they were wafted to Heaven that they glow
+through our frames like our own heart's blood. I hope I love good men
+and women; I know that they never speak a word to me, even if it be of
+question or blame, that I do not take pleasantly, if it is expressed
+with a reasonable amount of human kindness.
+
+I have before me at this time a beautiful and affecting letter, which
+I have hesitated to answer, though the postmark upon it gave its
+direction, and the name is one which is known to all, in some of its
+representatives. It contains no reproach, only a delicately-hinted fear.
+Speak gently, as this dear lady has spoken, and there is no heart so
+insensible that it does not answer to the appeal, no intellect so
+virile that it does not own a certain deference to the claims of age, of
+childhood, of sensitive and timid natures, when they plead with it not
+to look at those sacred things by the broad daylight which they see in
+mystic shadow. How grateful would it be to make perpetual peace with
+these pleading saints and their confessors, by the simple act
+that silences all complainings! Sleep, sleep, sleep! says the
+Arch-Enchantress of them all,--and pours her dark and potent anodyne,
+distilled over the fires that consumed her foes,--its large, round drops
+changing, as we look, into the beads of her convert's rosary! Silence!
+the pride of reason! cries another, whose whole life is spent in
+reasoning down reason.
+
+I hope I love good people, not for their sake, but for my own. And most
+assuredly, if any deed of wrong or word of bitterness led me into an act
+of disrespect towards that enlightened and excellent class of men who
+make it their calling to teach goodness and their duty to practise it,
+I should feel that I had done myself an injury rather than them. Go
+and talk with any professional man holding any of the medieval creeds,
+choosing one who wears upon his features the mark of inward and outward
+health, who looks cheerful, intelligent, and kindly, and see how all
+your prejudices melt away in his presence! It is impossible to come into
+intimate relations with a large, sweet nature, such as you may often
+find in this class, without longing to be at one with it in all its
+modes of being and believing. But does it not occur to you that one may
+love truth as he sees it, and his race as he views it, better than even
+the sympathy and approbation of many good men whom he honors,--better
+than sleeping to the sound of the Miserere or listening to the
+repetition of an effete Confession of Faith?
+
+The three learned professions have but recently emerged from a state
+of quasi-barbarism. None of them like too well to be told of it, but it
+must be sounded in their ears whenever they put on airs. When a man has
+taken an overdose of laudanum, the doctors tell us to place him between
+two persons who shall make him walk up and down incessantly; and if he
+still cannot be kept from going to sleep, they say that a lash or two
+over his back is of great assistance.
+
+So we must keep the doctors awake by telling them that they have not yet
+shaken off astrology and the doctrine of signatures, as is shown by the
+form of their prescriptions, and their use of nitrate of silver, which
+turns epileptics into Ethiopians. If that is not enough, they must be
+given over to the scourgers, who like their task and get good fees for
+it. A few score years ago, sick people were made to swallow burnt
+toads and powdered earthworms and the expressed juice of wood-lice. The
+physician of Charles I. and II. prescribed abominations not to be named.
+Barbarism, as bad as that of Congo or Ashantee. Traces of this barbarism
+linger even in the greatly improved medical science of our century. So
+while the solemn farce of over-drugging is going on, the world over,
+the harlequin pseudo-science jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with
+half-a-dozen somersets, and begins laying about him.
+
+In 1817, perhaps you remember, the law of wager by battle was
+unrepealed, and the rascally murderous, and worse than murderous, clown,
+Abraham Thornton, put on his gauntlet in open court and defied the
+appellant to lift the other which he threw down. It was not until the
+reign of George II. that the statutes against witchcraft were repealed.
+As for the English Court of Chancery, we know that its antiquated abuses
+form one of the staples of common proverbs and popular literature.
+So the laws and the lawyers have to be watched perpetually by public
+opinion as much as the doctors do.
+
+I don't think the other profession is an exception. When the Reverend
+Mr. Cauvin and his associates burned my distinguished scientific
+brother,--he was burned with green fagots, which made it rather slow and
+painful,--it appears to me they were in a state of religious barbarism.
+The dogmas of such people about the Father of Mankind and his creatures
+are of no more account in my opinion than those of a council of Aztecs.
+If a man picks your pocket, do you not consider him thereby disqualified
+to pronounce any authoritative opinion on matters of ethics? If a man
+hangs my ancient female relatives for sorcery, as they did in this
+neighborhood a little while ago, or burns my instructor for not
+believing as he does, I care no more for his religious edicts than I
+should for those of any other barbarian.
+
+Of course, a barbarian may hold many true opinions; but when the ideas
+of the healing art, of the administration of justice, of Christian love,
+could not exclude systematic poisoning, judicial duelling, and murder
+for opinion's sake, I do not see how we can trust the verdict of
+that time relating to any subject which involves the primal instincts
+violated in these abominations and absurdities.--What if we are even now
+in a state of semi-barbarism?
+
+     [Note: This physician believes we “are even now in a state
+     of semi-barbarism”: invasive procedures for the prolongation
+     of death rather than prolongation of life; “faith” as slimly
+     based as medieval faith in minute differences between
+     control and treated groups; statistical manipulation to
+     prove a prejudice.  Medicine has a good deal to answer for!
+     D.W.]
+
+Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table about such things.--I
+am not so sure of that. Religion and government appear to me the two
+subjects which of all others should belong to the common talk of people
+who enjoy the blessings of freedom. Think, one moment. The earth is a
+great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its axis, receives
+fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same number worked
+up more or less completely. There must be somewhere a population of
+two hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred times as many,
+earth-born intelligences. Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge
+of the boundless ocean of existence where it comes on soundings. In
+this view, I do not see anything so fit to talk about, or half so
+interesting, as that which relates to the innumerable majority of our
+fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who are hundreds of thousands to one
+of the live-living, and with whom we all potentially belong, though we
+have got tangled for the present in some parcels of fibrine, albumen,
+and phosphates, that keep us on the minority side of the house. In
+point of fact, it is one of the many results of Spiritualism to make
+the permanent destiny of the race a matter of common reflection and
+discourse, and a vehicle for the prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age
+doctrines on the subject. I cannot help thinking, when I remember how
+many conversations my friend and myself have sported, that it would be
+very extraordinary, if there were no mention of that class of subjects
+which involves all that we have and all that we hope, not merely for
+ourselves, but for the dear people whom we love best,--noble men, pure
+and lovely women, ingenuous children, about the destiny of nine tenths
+of whom you know the opinions that would have been taught by those
+old man-roasting, woman-strangling dogmatists.--However, I fought this
+matter with one of our boarders the other day, and I am going to report
+the conversation.
+
+The divinity-student came down, one morning, looking rather more serious
+than usual. He said little at breakfast-time, but lingered after the
+others, so that I, who am apt to be long at the table, found myself
+alone with him.
+
+When the rest were all gone, he turned his chair round towards mine, and
+began.
+
+I am afraid,--he said,--you express yourself a little too freely on a
+most important class of subjects. Is there not danger in introducing
+discussions or allusions relating to matters of religion into common
+discourse?
+
+Danger to what?--I asked.
+
+Danger to truth,--he replied, after a slight pause.
+
+I didn't know Truth was such an invalid,' I said.--How long is it since
+she could only take the air in a close carriage, with a gentleman in
+a black coat on the box? Let me tell you a story, adapted to young
+persons, but which won't hurt older ones.
+
+--There was a very little boy who had one of those balloons you may have
+seen, which are filled with light gas, and are held by a string to keep
+them from running off in aeronautic voyages on their own account. This
+little boy had a naughty brother, who said to him, one day,--Brother,
+pull down your balloon, so that I can look at it and take hold of it.
+Then the little boy pulled it down. Now the naughty brother had a sharp
+pin in his hand, and he thrust it into the balloon, and all the gas
+oozed out, so that there was nothing left but a shrivelled skin.
+
+One evening, the little boy's father called him to the window to see the
+moon, which pleased him very much; but presently he said,--Father, do
+not pull the string and bring down the moon, for my naughty brother will
+prick it, and then it will all shrivel up and we shall not see it any
+more.
+
+Then his father laughed, and told him how the moon had been shining a
+good while, and would shine a good while longer, and that all we could
+do was to keep our windows clean, never letting the dust get too thick
+on them, and especially to keep our eyes open, but that we could not
+pull the moon down with a string, nor prick it with a pin.--Mind you
+this, too, the moon is no man's private property, but is seen from a
+good many parlor-windows.
+
+--Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay,
+you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and
+full at evening. Does not Mr. Bryant say, that Truth gets well if she is
+run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if she scratches
+her finger? [Would that this was so:--error, superstition, mysticism,
+authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a tenacity that survives
+inexplicably. D.W.] I never heard that a mathematician was alarmed for
+the safety of a demonstrated proposition. I think, generally, that fear
+of open discussion implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great
+sensitiveness to the expression of individual opinion is a mark of
+weakness.
+
+--I am not so much afraid for truth,--said the divinity-student,--as for
+the conceptions of truth in the minds of persons not accustomed to judge
+wisely the opinions uttered before them.
+
+Would you, then, banish all allusions to matters of this nature from the
+society of people who come together habitually?
+
+I would be very careful in introducing them,--said the divinity-student.
+
+Yes, but friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be
+picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of doctrines
+these people do not approve. Some of your friends stop little children
+in the street, and give them books, which their parents, who have had
+them baptized into the Christian fold and give them what they consider
+proper religious instruction, do not think fit for them. One would
+say it was fair enough to talk about matters thus forced upon people's
+attention.
+
+The divinity-student could not deny that this was what might be called
+opening the subject to the discussion of intelligent people.
+
+But,--he said,--the greatest objection is this, that persons who have
+not made a professional study of theology are not competent to speak on
+such subjects. Suppose a minister were to undertake to express opinions
+on medical subjects, for instance, would you not think he was going
+beyond his province?
+
+I laughed,--for I remembered John Wesley's “sulphur and supplication,”
+ and so many other cases where ministers had meddled with
+medicine,--sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general rule,
+with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose way of
+admitting evidence,--that I could not help being amused.
+
+I beg your pardon,--I said,--I do not wish to be impolite, but I was
+thinking of their certificates to patent medicines. Let us look at this
+matter.
+
+If a minister had attended lectures on the theory and practice of
+medicine, delivered by those who had studied it most deeply, for thirty
+or forty years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a year,--if
+he had been constantly reading and hearing read the most approved
+text-books on the subject,--if he had seen medicine actually practised
+according to different methods, daily, for the same length of time,--I
+should think, that if a person of average understanding, he was entitled
+to express an opinion on the subject of medicine, or else that his
+instructors were a set of ignorant and incompetent charlatans.
+
+If, before a medical practitioner would allow me to enjoy the full
+privileges of the healing art, he expected me to affirm my belief in a
+considerable number of medical doctrines, drugs, and formulae, I should
+think that he thereby implied my right to discuss the same, and my
+ability to do so, if I knew how to express myself in English.
+
+Suppose, for instance, the Medical Society should refuse to give us an
+opiate, or to set a broken limb, until we had signed our belief in a
+certain number of propositions,--of which we will say this is the first:
+
+I. All men's teeth are naturally in a state of total decay or caries,
+and, therefore, no man can bite until every one of them is extracted and
+a new set is inserted according to the principles of dentistry adopted
+by this Society.
+
+I, for one, should want to discuss that before signing my name to it,
+and I should say this:--Why, no, that is n't true. There are a good many
+bad teeth, we all know, but a great many more good ones. You must n't
+trust the dentists; they are all the time looking at the people who have
+bad teeth, and such as are suffering from toothache. The idea that
+you must pull out every one of every nice young man and young woman's
+natural teeth! Poh, poh! Nobody believes that. This tooth must be
+straightened, that must be filled with gold, and this other perhaps
+extracted, but it must be a very rare case, if they are all so bad as to
+require extraction; and if they are, don't blame the poor soul for it!
+Don't tell us, as some old dentists used to, that everybody not only
+always has every tooth in his head good for nothing, but that he ought
+to have his head cut off as a punishment for that misfortune! No, I
+can't sign Number One. Give us Number Two.
+
+II. We hold that no man can be well who does not agree with our views
+of the efficacy of calomel, and who does not take the doses of it
+prescribed in our tables, as there directed.
+
+To which I demur, questioning why it should be so, and get for answer
+the two following:
+
+III. Every man who does not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed
+by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of disease
+from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is simultaneously
+affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia, and Atrophy; with
+Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with Cachexia, Carcinoma, and
+Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet, to Xerophthahnia and Zona,
+with all possible and incompatible diseases which are necessary to make
+up a totally morbid state; and he will certainly die, if he does not
+take freely of our prepared calomel, to be obtained only of one of our
+authorized agents.
+
+IV. No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does not
+give in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named and the
+following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his mouth to
+certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry, to examine
+whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set inserted
+according to our regulations.
+
+Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha'n't have any rhubarb,
+if we don't sign their articles, and that, if, after signing them, we
+express doubts (in public), about any of them, they will cut us off
+from our jalap and squills,--but then to ask a fellow not to discuss the
+propositions before he signs them is what I should call boiling it down
+a little too strong!
+
+If we understand them, why can't we discuss them? If we can't understand
+them, because we have n't taken a medical degree, what the Father of
+Lies do they ask us to sign them for?
+
+Just so with the graver profession. Every now and then some of its
+members seem to lose common sense and common humanity. The laymen have
+to keep setting the divines right constantly. Science, for instance,--in
+other words, knowledge,--is not the enemy of religion; for, if so,
+then religion would mean ignorance: But it is often the antagonist of
+school-divinity.
+
+Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines.
+Come down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant
+prelate, tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-third
+of October, four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ.
+Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-eight years
+B. C. Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a
+tortoise. One statement is as near the truth as the other.
+
+Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral surgery.
+I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more picture to
+his four stages of Cruelty. Those wretched fools, reverend divines and
+others, who were strangling men and women for imaginary crimes a little
+more than a century ago among us, were set right by a layman, and very
+angry it made them to have him meddle.
+
+The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their
+clergyman,--a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain mechanical
+processes as Babbage's calculating machine. The commentary of the laymen
+on the preaching and practising of Jonathan Edwards was, that, after
+twenty-three years of endurance, they turned him out by a vote of twenty
+to one, and passed a resolve that he should never preach for them again.
+A man's logical and analytical adjustments are of little consequence,
+compared to his primary relations with Nature and truth: and people have
+sense enough to find it out in the long ran; they know what “logic” is
+worth.
+
+In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and
+Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many
+men can do this. But common sense and common humanity were unfortunately
+left out from their premises, and a layman had to supply them. A hundred
+more years and many of the barbarisms still lingering among us will, of
+course, have disappeared like witch-hanging. But people are sensitive
+now, as they were then. You will see by this extract that the Rev.
+Cotton Mather did not like intermeddling with his business very well.
+
+“Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions,” he says,
+“and God will smite thro' the loins of those that rise up against them.
+I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds among us know to be
+true. The Godly Minister of a certain Town in Connecticut, when he had
+occasion to be absent on a Lord's Day from his Flock, employ'd an honest
+Neighbour of some small Talents for a Mechanick, to read a Sermon out
+of some good Book unto 'em. This Honest, whom they ever counted also a
+Pious Man, had so much conceit of his Talents, that instead of Reading
+a Sermon appointed, he to the Surprize of the People, fell to preaching
+one of his own. For his Text he took these Words, 'Despise not
+Prophecyings'; and in his Preachment he betook himself to bewail the
+Envy of the Clergy in the Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord's
+People to be Prophets, and call forth Private Brethren publickly to
+prophesie. While he was thus in the midst of his Exercise, God smote him
+with horrible Madness; he was taken ravingly distracted; the People
+were forc'd with violent Hands to carry him home. I will not mention
+his Name: He was reputed a Pious Man.”--This is one of Cotton Mather's
+“Remarkable Judgments of God, on Several Sorts of Offenders,”--and the
+next cases referred to are the Judgments on the “Abominable Sacrilege”
+ of not paying the Ministers' Salaries.
+
+This sort of thing does n't do here and now, you see, my young friend!
+We talk about our free institutions;--they are nothing but a coarse
+outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought. The
+President of the United States is only the engine driver of our
+broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a seat
+in the first-class cars behind him.
+
+--There is something in what you say,--replied the divinity-student;
+--and yet it seems to me there are places and times where disputed
+doctrines of religion should not be introduced. You would not attack a
+church dogma--say Total Depravity--in a lyceum-lecture, for instance?
+
+Certainly not; I should choose another place,--I answered.--But, mind
+you, at this table I think it is very different. I shall express my
+ideas on any subject I like. The laws of the lecture-room, to which my
+friends and myself are always amenable, do not hold here. I shall not
+often give arguments, but frequently opinions,--I trust with courtesy
+and propriety, but, at any rate, with such natural forms of expression
+as it has pleased the Almighty to bestow upon me.
+
+A man's opinions, look you, are generally of much more value than his
+arguments. These last are made by his brain, and perhaps he does not
+believe the proposition they tend to prove,--as is often the case with
+paid lawyers; but opinions are formed by our whole nature,--brain,
+heart, instinct, brute life, everything all our experience has shaped
+for us by contact with the whole circle of our being.
+
+--There is one thing more,--said the divinity-student,--that I wished
+to speak of; I mean that idea of yours, expressed some time since, of
+depolarizing the text of sacred books in order to judge them fairly. May
+I ask why you do not try the experiment yourself?
+
+Certainly,--I replied,--if it gives you any pleasure to ask foolish
+questions. I think the ocean telegraph-wire ought to be laid and will be
+laid, but I don't know that you have any right to ask me to go and
+lay it. But, for that matter, I have heard a good deal of Scripture
+depolarized in and out of the pulpit. I heard the Rev. Mr. F. once
+depolarize the story of the Prodigal Son in Park-Street Church. Many
+years afterwards, I heard him repeat the same or a similar depolarized
+version in Rome, New York. I heard an admirable depolarization of the
+story of the young man who “had great possessions” from the Rev. Mr. H.
+in another pulpit, and felt that I had never half understood it before.
+All paraphrases are more or less perfect depolarizations. But I tell you
+this: the faith of our Christian community is not robust enough to
+bear the turning of our most sacred language into its depolarized
+equivalents. You have only to look back to Dr. Channing's famous
+Baltimore discourse and remember the shrieks of blasphemy with which
+it was greeted, to satisfy yourself on this point. Time, time only, can
+gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by
+spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified. Man is an idolater or
+symbol-worshipper by nature, which, of course, is no fault of his; but
+sooner or later all his local and temporary symbols must be ground to
+powder, like the golden calf,--word-images as well as metal and wooden
+ones. Rough work, iconoclasm,--but the only way to get at truth. It is,
+indeed, as that quaint and rare old discourse, “A Summons for
+Sleepers,” hath it, “no doubt a thankless office, and a verie unthriftie
+occupation; veritas odium parit, truth never goeth without a scratcht
+face; he that will be busie with voe vobis, let him looke shortly for
+coram nobas.”
+
+The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think
+what we like and say what we think.
+
+--Think what we like!--said the divinity-student;--think what we like!
+What! against all human and divine authority?
+
+Against all human versions of its own or any other authority. At our own
+peril always, if we do not like the right,--but not at the risk of being
+hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on green fagots
+for ecclesiastical treason! Nay, we have got so far, that the very word
+heresy has fallen into comparative disuse among us.
+
+And now, my young friend, let-us shake hands and stop our discussion,
+which we will not make a quarrel. I trust you know, or will learn, a
+great many things in your profession which we common scholars do not
+know; but mark this: when the common people of New England stop talking
+politics and theology, it will be because they have got an Emperor to
+teach them the one, and a Pope to teach them the other!
+
+That was the end of my long conference with the divinity-student.
+The next morning we got talking a little on the same subject, very
+good-naturedly, as people return to a matter they have talked out.
+
+You must look to yourself,--said the divinity-student,--if your
+democratic notions get into print. You will be fired into from all
+quarters.
+
+If it were only a bullet, with the marksman's name on it!--I said.--I
+can't stop to pick out the peep-shot of the anonymous scribblers.
+
+Right, Sir! right!--said the Little Gentleman. The scamps! I know the
+fellows. They can't give fifty cents to one of the Antipodes, but they
+must have it jingled along through everybody's palms all the way, till
+it reaches him,--and forty cents of it gets spilt, like the water out of
+the fire-buckets passed along a “lane” at a fire;--but when it comes
+to anonymous defamation, putting lies into people's mouths, and
+then advertising those people through the country as the authors of
+them,--oh, then it is that they let not their left hand know what their
+right hand doeth!
+
+I don't like Ehud's style of doing business, Sir. He comes along with
+a very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his “secret errand unto thee,” and
+his “message from God unto thee,” and then pulls out his hidden knife
+with that unsuspected hand of his,--(the Little Gentleman lifted his
+clenched left hand with the blood-red jewel on the ring-finger,)--and
+runs it, blade and haft, into a man's stomach! Don't meddle with these
+fellows, Sir. They are read mostly by persons whom you would not reach,
+if you were to write ever so much. Let 'em alone. A man whose opinions
+are not attacked is beneath contempt.
+
+I hope so,--I said.--I got three pamphlets and innumerable squibs flung
+at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in former years.
+When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the professional
+public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance of poison from
+one young mother's chamber to another's,--for doing which humble office
+I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though nothing else good
+should ever come of my life,--I had to bear the sneers of those whose
+position I had assailed, and, as I believe, have at last demolished, so
+that nothing but the ghosts of dead women stir among the ruins.--What
+would you do, if the folks without names kept at you, trying to get a
+San Benito on to your shoulders that would fit you?--Would you stand
+still in fly-time, or would you give a kick now and then?
+
+Let 'em bite!--said the Little Gentleman,--let 'em bite! It makes 'em
+hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as ever and
+twice as savage. Do you know what meddling with the folks without names,
+as you call 'em, is like?--It is like riding at the quintaan. You run
+full tilt at the board, but the board is on a pivot, with a bag of sand
+on an arm that balances it. The board gives way as soon as you touch
+it; and before you have got by, the bag of sand comes round whack on the
+back of your neck. “Ananias,” for instance, pitches into your lecture,
+we will say, in some paper taken by the people in your kitchen. Your
+servants get saucy and negligent. If their newspaper calls you names,
+they need not be so particular about shutting doors softly or boiling
+potatoes. So you lose your temper, and come out in an article which you
+think is going to finish “Ananias,” proving him a booby who doesn't know
+enough to understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells
+lies. Now you think you 've got him! Not so fast. “Ananias” keeps still
+and winks to “Shimei,” and “Shimei” comes out in the paper which they
+take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow.
+If you meddle with “Shimei,” he steps out, and next week appears
+“Rab-shakeh,” an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out
+what good sense there was in Hezekiah's “Answer him not.”--No, no,--keep
+your temper.--So saying, the Little Gentleman doubled his left fist and
+looked at it as if he should like to hit something or somebody a most
+pernicious punch with it.
+
+Good!--said I.--Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at, after
+seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.
+
+--Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious sects,
+about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to deal and
+to live with.
+
+--There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among
+the men, in every denomination.
+
+--The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:
+
+     1.  The comfortably rich.
+     2.  The decently comfortable.
+     3.  The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.
+     4.  The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.
+
+--The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't
+clinch.
+
+--The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute
+were two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.
+
+--Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people.
+
+--Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a
+greater. A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the
+belief of a large one.
+
+The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth while
+all this was going on. She broke out in speech at this point.
+
+I hate to hear folks talk so. I don't see that you are any better than a
+heathen.
+
+I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,--I said.--Dying
+for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than scolding for
+it; and the history of heathen races is full of instances where men have
+laid down their lives for the love of their kind, of their country, of
+truth, nay, even for simple manhood's sake, or to show their obedience
+or fidelity. What would not such beings have done for the souls of men,
+for the Christian commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had lived
+in days of larger light? Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates
+drinking his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's camp, or that
+old New England divine sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling
+over his conceit of certain poor women, who had been burned to death in
+his own town, going “roaring out of one fire into another”?
+
+I don't believe he said any such thing,--replied the Poor Relation.
+
+It is hard to believe,--said I,--but it is true for all that. In another
+hundred years it will be as incredible that men talked as we sometimes
+hear them now.
+
+Pectus est quod facit theologum. The heart makes the theologian. Every
+race, every civilization, either has a new revelation of its own or a
+new interpretation of an old one. Democratic America, has a different
+humanity from feudal Europe, and so must have a new divinity. See,
+for one moment, how intelligence reacts on our faiths. The Bible was a
+divining-book to our ancestors, and is so still in the hands of some of
+the vulgar. The Puritans went to the Old Testament for their laws; the
+Mormons go to it for their patriarchal institution. Every generation
+dissolves something new and precipitates something once held in solution
+from that great storehouse of temporary and permanent truths.
+
+You may observe this: that the conversation of intelligent men of the
+stricter sects is strangely in advance of the formula that belong to
+their organizations. So true is this, that I have doubts whether a large
+proportion of them would not have been rather pleased than offended,
+if they could have overheard our talk. For, look you, I think there is
+hardly a professional teacher who will not in private conversation allow
+a large part of what we have said, though it may frighten him in print;
+and I know well what an under-current of secret sympathy gives vitality
+to those poor words of mine which sometimes get a hearing.
+
+I don't mind the exclamation of any old stager who drinks Madeira
+worth from two to six Bibles a bottle, and burns, according to his own
+premises, a dozen souls a year in the cigars with which he muddles his
+brains. But as for the good and true and intelligent men whom we see all
+around us, laborious, self-denying, hopeful, helpful,--men who know
+that the active mind of the century is tending more and more to the two
+poles, Rome and Reason, the sovereign church or the free soul, authority
+or personality, God in us or God in our masters, and that, though a man
+may by accident stand half-way between these two points, he must look
+one way or the other,--I don't believe they would take offence at
+anything I have reported of our late conversation.
+
+But supposing any one do take offence at first sight, let him look over
+these notes again, and see whether he is quite sure he does not agree
+with most of these things that were said amongst us. If he agrees with
+most of them, let him be patient with an opinion he does not accept, or
+an expression or illustration a little too vivacious. I don't know that
+I shall report any more conversations on these topics; but I do insist
+on the right to express a civil opinion on this class of subjects
+without giving offence, just when and where I please,--unless, as in
+the lecture-room, there is an implied contract to keep clear of doubtful
+matters. You did n't think a man could sit at a breakfast-table doing
+nothing but making puns every morning for a year or two, and never give
+a thought to the two thousand of his fellow-creatures who are passing
+into another state during every hour that he sits talking and laughing.
+Of course, the one matter that a real human being cares for is what is
+going to become of them and of him. And the plain truth is, that a good
+many people are saying one thing about it and believing another.
+
+--How do I know that? Why, I have known and loved to talk with good
+people, all the way from Rome to Geneva in doctrine, as long as I can
+remember. Besides, the real religion of the world comes from women much
+more than from men,--from mothers most of all, who carry the key of
+our souls in their bosoms. It is in their hearts that the “sentimental”
+ religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its source. The
+sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the sentiment of the
+paramount obligation of the parent to the child as having called it into
+existence, enhanced just in proportion to the power and knowledge of
+the one and the weakness and ignorance of the other,--these are the
+“sentiments” that have kept our soulless systems from driving men off to
+die in holes like those that riddle the sides of the hill opposite
+the Monastery of St. Saba, where the miserable victims of a
+falsely-interpreted religion starved and withered in their delusion.
+
+I have looked on the face of a saintly woman this very day, whose creed
+many dread and hate, but whose life is lovely and noble beyond all
+praise. When I remember the bitter words I have heard spoken against her
+faith, by men who have an Inquisition which excommunicates those who ask
+to leave their communion in peace, and an Index Expurgatorius on which
+this article may possibly have the honor of figuring,--and, far worse
+than these, the reluctant, pharisaical confession, that it might
+perhaps be possible that one who so believed should be accepted of the
+Creator,--and then recall the sweet peace and love that show through
+all her looks, the price of untold sacrifices and labors, and again
+recollect how thousands of women, filled with the same spirit, die,
+without a murmur, to earthly life, die to their own names even, that
+they may know nothing but their holy duties,--while men are torturing
+and denouncing their fellows, and while we can hear day and night the
+clinking of the hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the
+“Prometheus,” to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast
+of human nature,--I have been ready to believe that we have even now a
+new revelation, and the name of its Messiah is WOMAN!
+
+--I should be sorry,--I remarked, a day or two afterwards, to the
+divinity-student,--if anything I said tended in any way to foster any
+jealousy between the professions, or to throw disrespect upon that one
+on whose counsel and sympathies almost all of us lean in our moments
+of trial. But we are false to our new conditions of life, if we do not
+resolutely maintain our religious as well as our political freedom,
+in the face of any and all supposed monopolies. Certain men will, of
+course, say two things, if we do not take their views: first, that we
+don't know anything about these matters; and, secondly, that we are not
+so good as they are. They have a polarized phraseology for saying these
+things, but it comes to precisely that. To which it may be answered, in
+the first place, that we have good authority for saying that even babes
+and sucklings know something; and, in the second, that, if there is a
+mote or so to be removed from our premises, the courts and councils of
+the last few years have found beams enough in some other quarters to
+build a church that would hold all the good people in Boston and have
+sticks enough left to make a bonfire for all the heretics.
+
+As to that terrible depolarizing process of mine, of which we were
+talking the other day, I will give you a specimen of one way of managing
+it, if you like. I don't believe it will hurt you or anybody. Besides, I
+had a great deal rather finish our talk with pleasant images and gentle
+words than with sharp sayings, which will only afford a text, if anybody
+repeats them, for endless relays of attacks from Messrs. Ananias,
+Shimei, and Rabshakeh.
+
+[I must leave such gentry, if any of them show themselves, in the hands
+of my clerical friends, many of whom are ready to stand up for the
+rights of the laity,--and to those blessed souls, the good women, to
+whom this version of the story of a mother's hidden hopes and tender
+anxieties is dedicated by their peaceful and loving servant.]
+
+
+
+               A MOTHER'S SECRET.
+
+     How sweet the sacred legend--if unblamed
+     In my slight verse such holy things are named
+     --Of Mary's secret hours of hidden joy,
+     Silent, but pondering on her wondrous boy!
+     Ave, Maria!  Pardon, if I wrong
+     Those heavenly words that shame my earthly song!
+
+     The choral host had closed the angel's strain
+     Sung to the midnight watch on Bethlehem's plain;
+     And now the shepherds, hastening on their way,
+     Sought the still hamlet where the Infant lay.
+     They passed the fields that gleaning Ruth toiled O'er,
+     They saw afar the ruined threshing-floor
+     Where Moab's daughter, homeless and forlorn,
+     Found Boaz slumbering by his heaps of corn;
+     And some remembered how the holy scribe,
+     Skilled in the lore of every jealous tribe,
+     Traced the warm blood of Jesse's royal son
+     To that fair alien, bravely wooed and won.
+     So fared they on to seek the promised sign
+     That marked the anointed heir of David's line.
+
+     At last, by forms of earthly semblance led,
+     They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed.
+     No pomp was there, no glory shone around
+     On the coarse straw that strewed the reeking ground;
+     One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed,
+     In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid!
+
+     The wondering shepherds told their breathless tale
+     Of the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale;
+     Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed;
+     Told how the shining multitude proclaimed
+     “Joy, joy to earth!  Behold the hallowed morn!
+     In David's city Christ the Lord is born!
+     'Glory to God!' let angels shout on high,
+     'Good-will to men!' the listening Earth reply!”
+
+     They spoke with hurried words and accents wild;
+     Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child.
+     No trembling word the mother's joy revealed,
+     One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed;
+     Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart,
+     But kept their words to ponder in her heart.
+
+     Twelve years had passed; the boy was fair and tall,
+     Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all.
+     The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fill
+     Their balanced urns beside the mountain-rill,
+     The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun,
+     Spoke in soft words of Joseph's quiet son.
+     No voice had reached the Galilean vale
+     Of star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds' tale;
+     In the meek, studious child they only saw
+     The future Rabbi, learned in Israel's law.
+
+     So grew the boy; and now the feast was near,
+     When at the holy place the tribes appear.
+     Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen
+     Beyond the hills that girt the village-green,
+     Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands,
+     Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering bands,
+     A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast,
+     Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering West.
+
+     Then Joseph spake: “Thy boy hath largely grown;
+     Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown;
+     Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest
+     Goes he not with us to the holy feast?”
+
+     And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white;
+     Till eve she spun; she spun till morning light.
+     The thread was twined; its parting meshes through
+     From hand to hand her restless shuttle flew,
+     Till the full web was wound upon the beam,
+     Love's curious toil,--a vest without a seam!
+
+     They reach the holy place, fulfil the days
+     To solemn feasting given, and grateful praise.
+     At last they turn, and far Moriah's height
+     Melts in the southern sky and fades from sight.
+     All day the dusky caravan has flowed
+     In devious trails along the winding road,
+     (For many a step their homeward path attends,
+     And all the sons of Abraham are as friends.)
+     Evening has come,--the hour of rest and joy;
+     Hush! hush!--that whisper,-“Where is Mary's boy?”
+
+     O weary hour!  O aching days that passed
+     Filled with strange fears, each wilder than the last:
+     The soldier's lance,--the fierce centurion's sword,
+     The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman lord,
+     The midnight crypt that suck's the captive's breath,
+     The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death!
+
+     Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light,
+     Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night,
+     Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth,
+     Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.
+
+     At last, in desperate mood, they sought once more
+     The Temple's porches, searched in vain before;
+     They found him seated with the ancient men,
+     The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen,
+     Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near;
+     Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear,
+     Lost in half-envious wonder and surprise
+     That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.
+
+     And Mary said,--as one who, tried too long,
+     Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong,
+     “What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast done?
+     Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son!”
+      Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone,
+     Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown;
+     Then turned with them and left the holy hill,
+     To all their mild commands obedient still.
+
+     The tale was told to Nazareth's sober men,
+     And Nazareth's matrons told it oft again;
+     The maids retold it at the fountain's side;
+     The youthful shepherds doubted or denied;
+     It passed around among the listening friends,
+     With all that fancy adds and fiction fends,
+     Till newer marvels dimmed the young renown
+     Of Joseph's son, who talked the Rabbis down.
+
+     But Mary, faithful to its lightest word,
+     Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard,
+     Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil,
+     And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.
+
+     Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall;
+     A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back.
+Bloated some, I expect.
+
+This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which the
+Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.
+
+Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part to
+continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and particularly
+unpleasant world. This is so much a matter of course, that I was
+surprised to see the divinity-student change color. He took a look at
+a small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting forward over the
+chapped sideboard. The image it returned to him had the color of a
+very young pea somewhat overboiled. The scenery of a long tragic drama
+flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-train whishes by a
+station: the gradual dismantling process of disease; friends looking on,
+sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over their own stomachs of iron and
+lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive, but calculating their crop, and
+thinking how soon it will be ripe, so that they can go to your neighbor,
+who is good for a year or so longer; doctors assiduous, but giving
+themselves a mental shake, as they go out of your door, which throws off
+your particular grief as a duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers;
+undertakers solemn, but happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who
+plants, but never looks for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter,
+who puts your name on the slab which has been waiting for you ever since
+the birds or beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then
+the grass and the dandelions and the buttercups,---Earth saying to the
+mortal body, with her sweet symbolism, “You have scarred my bosom,
+but you are forgiven”; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating
+consciousness without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived
+of as an upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than
+life-size, so far as it could be said to have any size at all,
+wandering about and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good
+old-fashioned solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist,--in
+fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the
+sitting posture.
+
+And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen
+images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian
+were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the formless
+and position to the placeless. Neither did his thoughts spread
+themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them. They came
+confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--sometimes a
+part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes connected fragments,
+and sometimes only single severed stones.
+
+They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance.
+On the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I have
+said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass turned
+him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to him as
+if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut not yet
+half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground archives. He
+coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the direction in which his
+downward path was tending. It was an honest little cough enough, so far
+as appearances went. But coughs are ungrateful things. You find one out
+in the cold, take it up and nurse it and make everything of it, dress it
+up warm, give it all sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry
+it round in your bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog. And by-and-by
+its little bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing!--you
+find it is a wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in
+the breast where he has been nestling so long.--The Poor Relation said
+that somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a
+bad way.--The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by
+cherry-pictorial.
+
+Whiskey's the fellah,--said the young man John.--Make it into punch,
+cold at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time. I'll come up 'n' show you how
+to mix it. Have n't any of you seen the wonderful fat man exhibitin'
+down in Hanover Street?
+
+Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy
+exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place where
+the fat man was exhibitin'. Tried to get in at half-price, but the man
+at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten year old.
+
+It is n't two years,--said the young man John, since that fat fellah
+was exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton. Whiskey--that's what did
+it,--real Burbon's the stuff. Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little
+shavin' of lemon-skin in it,--skin, mind you, none o' your juice; take
+it off thin,--shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls wear on
+the sides of their foreheads.
+
+But I am a teetotaller,--said the divinity-student in a subdued
+tone;--not noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young
+fellow had just drawn.
+
+He took up his hat and went out.
+
+I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,--I said.--I
+don't believe he will jump off one of the bridges, for he has too much
+principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for he looks
+as if his mind were made up to something.
+
+I followed him at a reasonable distance. He walked doggedly along,
+looking neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street,
+and made for a well-known Life-Insurance Office. Luckily, the doctor was
+there and overhauled him on the spot. There was nothing the matter with
+him, he said, and he could have his life insured as a sound one. He came
+out in good spirits, and told me this soon after.
+
+This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of
+well-bred and ill-bred people.
+
+I began,--The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not
+like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable.
+Good-breeding is surface-Christianity. Every look, movement, tone,
+expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is
+habitually excluded from conversational intercourse. This is the reason
+why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than others.
+
+--I thought you were a great champion of equality,--said the discreet
+and severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin Tutor's
+daughter.
+
+I go politically for equality,--I said,--and socially for the quality.
+
+Who are the “quality,”--said the Model, etc., in a community like ours?
+
+I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,--I said.
+--Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which
+exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define. The great
+gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters and
+mistresses; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a republic;
+mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex-presidents are
+nothing to them. How well we know this, and how seldom it finds a
+distinct expression! Now I tell you truly, I believe in man as man, and
+I disbelieve in all distinctions except such as follow the natural lines
+of cleavage in a society which has crystallized according to its own
+true laws. But the essence of equality is to be able to say the truth;
+and there is nothing more curious than these truths relating to the
+stratification of society.
+
+Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality,
+there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this of
+social position,--as you see by the circumstances that the core of all
+the great social orders the world has seen has been, and is still, for
+the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies arranged in a
+regular scale of precedence among themselves, but superior as a body to
+all else.
+
+Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting
+farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can
+prevent this subdivision of society into classes from taking place
+everywhere,--in the great centres of our republic as much as in
+old European monarchies. Only there position is more absolutely
+hereditary,--here it is more completely elective.
+
+--Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and who
+are the electors?--said the Model.
+
+Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken; there never is a formal vote.
+The women settle it mostly; and they know wonderfully well what is
+presentable, and what can't stand the blaze of the chandeliers and the
+critical eye and ear of people trained to know a staring shade in a
+ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an ill-bred tone, an angular movement,
+everything that betrays a coarse fibre and cheap training. As a general
+thing, you do not get elegance short of two or three removes from the
+soil, out of which our best blood doubtless comes,--quite as good, no
+doubt, as if it came from those old prize-fighters with iron pots on
+their heads, to whom some great people are so fond of tracing their
+descent through a line of small artisans and petty shopkeepers whose
+veins have held “base” fluid enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima!
+
+Does not money go everywhere?--said the Model.
+
+Almost. And with good reason. For though there are numerous exceptions,
+rich people are, as I said, commonly altogether the most agreeable
+companions. The influence of a fine house, graceful furniture, good
+libraries, well-ordered tables, trim servants, and, above all, a
+position so secure that one becomes unconscious of it, gives a harmony
+and refinement to the character and manners which we feel, if we cannot
+explain their charm. Yet we can get at the reason of it by thinking a
+little.
+
+All these appliances are to shield the sensibility from disagreeable
+contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial influences.
+In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow delicate, just as
+the hands grow white and soft when saved from toil and incased in soft
+gloves. The whole nature becomes subdued into suavity. I confess I like
+the quality ladies better than the common kind even of literary ones.
+They have n't read the last book, perhaps, but they attend better to you
+when you are talking to them. If they are never learned, they make up
+for it in tact and elegance. Besides, I think, on the whole, there is
+less self-assertion in diamonds than in dogmas. I don't know where
+you will find a sweeter portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor
+play-girl of King Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when
+she went before her lord. I have no doubt she was a more gracious and
+agreeable person than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story
+of Sisera. The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something that
+you know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
+
+Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality. The highest
+fashion is intensely alive,--not alive necessarily to the truest
+and best things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in all its
+extremities and to the farthest point of its surface, so that the
+feather in its bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a fighting-cock,
+and the rosette on its slipper as clean-cut and pimpant (pronounce it
+English fashion,--it is a good word) as a dahlia. As a general rule,
+that society where flattery is acted is much more agreeable than that
+where it is spoken. Don't you see why? Attention and deference don't
+require you to make fine speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness
+(lies) and returning all the compliments paid you. This is one reason.
+
+--A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,--said the
+Model.
+
+[My reflection. Oh! oh! no wonder you did n't get married. Served you
+right.] My remark. Surely, Madam,--if you mean by flattery telling
+people boldly to their faces that they are this or that, which they are
+not. But a woman who does not carry about with her wherever she goes
+a halo of good feeling and desire to make everybody contented,--an
+atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of at least six feet radius,
+which wraps every human being upon whom she voluntarily bestows her
+presence, and so flatters him with the comfortable thought that she
+is rather glad he is alive than otherwise, isn't worth the trouble of
+talking to, as a woman; she may do well enough to hold discussions with.
+
+--I don't think the Model exactly liked this. She said,--a little
+spitefully, I thought,--that a sensible man might stand a little praise,
+but would of course soon get sick of it, if he were in the habit of
+getting much.
+
+Oh, yes,--I replied,--just as men get sick of tobacco. It is notorious
+how apt they are to get tired of that vegetable.
+
+--That 's so!--said the young fellow John,--I've got tired of my cigars
+and burnt 'em all up.
+
+I am heartily glad to hear it,--said the Model,--I wish they were all
+disposed of in the same way.
+
+So do I,--said the young fellow John.
+
+Can't you get your friends to unite with you in committing those odious
+instruments of debauchery to the flames in which you have consumed your
+own?
+
+I wish I could,--said the young fellow John.
+
+It would be a noble sacrifice,--said the Model, and every American woman
+would be grateful to you. Let us burn them all in a heap out in the
+yard.
+
+That a'n't my way,--said the young fellow John;--I burn 'em one 't'
+time,--little end in my mouth and big end outside.
+
+--I watched for the effect of this sudden change of programme, when it
+should reach the calm stillness of the Model's interior apprehension,
+as a boy watches for the splash of a stone which he has dropped into
+a well. But before it had fairly reached the water, poor Iris, who had
+followed the conversation with a certain interest until it turned this
+sharp corner, (for she seems rather to fancy the young fellow John,)
+laughed out such a clear, loud laugh, that it started us all off, as the
+locust-cry of some full-throated soprano drags a multitudinous chorus
+after it. It was plain that some dam or other had broken in the soul of
+this young girl, and she was squaring up old scores of laughter, out of
+which she had been cheated, with a grand flood of merriment that
+swept all before it. So we had a great laugh all round, in which the
+Model--who, if she had as many virtues as there are spokes to a wheel,
+all compacted with a personality as round and complete as its tire, yet
+wanted that one little addition of grace, which seems so small, and
+is as important as the linchpin in trundling over the rough ways of
+life--had not the tact to join. She seemed to be “stuffy” about it, as
+the young fellow John said. In fact, I was afraid the joke would have
+cost us both our new lady-boarders. It had no effect, however, except,
+perhaps, to hasten the departure of the elder of the two, who could, on
+the whole, be spared.
+
+--I had meant to make this note of our conversation a text for a few
+axioms on the matter of breeding. But it so happened, that, exactly at
+this point of my record, a very distinguished philosopher, whom several
+of our boarders and myself go to hear, and whom no doubt many of my
+readers follow habitually, treated this matter of manners. Up to this
+point, if I have been so fortunate as to coincide with him in opinion,
+and so unfortunate as to try to express what he has more felicitously
+said, nobody is to blame; for what has been given thus far was all
+written before the lecture was delivered. But what shall I do now? He
+told us it was childish to lay down rules for deportment,--but he could
+not help laying down a few.
+
+Thus,--Nothing so vulgar as to be in a hurry. True, but hard of
+application. People with short legs step quickly, because legs are
+pendulums, and swing more times in a minute the shorter they are.
+Generally a natural rhythm runs through the whole organization: quick
+pulse, fast breathing, hasty speech, rapid trains of thought, excitable
+temper. Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks
+of good-breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or, at least, they
+must work their limbs or features.
+
+Talking of one's own ails and grievances.--Bad enough, but not so bad
+as insulting the person you talk with by remarking on his ill-looks, or
+appealing to notice any of his personal peculiarities.
+
+Apologizing.--A very desperate habit,--one that is rarely cured. Apology
+is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing
+a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his apology. It is
+mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your small failures of so
+much consequence that you must make a talk about them.
+
+Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait, and
+eyes that do not wander,--shyness of personalities, except in certain
+intimate communions,--to be light in hand in conversation, to have
+ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without them,--to
+belong to the company you are in, and not to yourself,--to have nothing
+in your dress or furniture so fine that you cannot afford to spoil it
+and get another like it, yet to preserve the harmonies, throughout
+your person and--dwelling: I should say that this was a fair capital of
+manners to begin with.
+
+Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an
+overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our
+generic humanity. It is just here that the very highest society asserts
+its superior breeding. Among truly elegant people of the highest ton,
+you will find more real equality in social intercourse than in a country
+village. As nuns drop their birth-names and become Sister Margaret and
+Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop their personal distinctions
+and become brothers and sisters of conversational charity. Nor are
+fashionable people without their heroism. I believe there are men who
+have shown as much self-devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to
+the supper-table as ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized
+his name. There are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing
+can hold back from their errands of mercy. They find out the red-handed,
+gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his
+corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the green
+herb. They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary apparition saddens
+the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-room. I have known one
+of these angels ask, of her own accord, that a desolate middle-aged man,
+whom nobody seemed to know, should be presented to her by the hostess.
+He wore no shirt-collar,--he had on black gloves,--and was flourishing a
+red bandanna handkerchief! Match me this, ye proud children of poverty,
+who boast of your paltry sacrifices for each other! Virtue in humble
+life! What is that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in
+pearls and diamonds? As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before
+the social mendicant,--the white billows of her beauty heaving under
+the foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them,--I should
+have wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private
+demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness and
+vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.
+
+I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which
+political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of
+our fellow-citizens. It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
+knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always been
+what might be called in general terms a gentleman. But what if at some
+future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on whom that
+lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be bestowed? This may
+happen,--how soon the future only knows. Think of this miserable man
+of coming political possibilities,--an unpresentable boor sucked into
+office by one of those eddies in the flow of popular sentiment which
+carry straws and chips into the public harbor, while the prostrate
+trunks of the monarchs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream
+to the gulf of political oblivion! Think of him, I say, and of the
+concentrated gaze of good society through its thousand eyes, all
+confluent, as it were, in one great burning-glass of ice that shrivels
+its wretched object in fiery torture, itself cold as the glacier of an
+unsunned cavern! No,--there will be angels of good-breeding then as
+now, to shield the victim of free institutions from himself and from his
+torturers. I can fancy a lovely woman playfully withdrawing the knife
+which he would abuse by making it an instrument for the conveyance
+of food,--or, failing in this kind artifice, sacrificing herself by
+imitating his use of that implement; how much harder than to plunge it
+into her bosom, like Lucretia! I can see her studying in his provincial
+dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western
+or Southern barbarisms. She has learned that haow means what; that
+think-in' is the same thing as thinking, or she has found out the
+meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no single-tongued
+phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson and
+at its embouchure, and elsewhere,--what they say when they think they
+say first, (fe-eest,--fe as in the French le),--or that cheer
+means chair,--or that urritation means irritation,--and so of other
+enormities. Nothing surprises her. The highest breeding, you know,
+comes round to the Indian standard,--to take everything coolly,--nil
+admirari,--if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for the
+same thing.
+
+If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to foot to
+see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not grown a
+little older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice, or if your
+complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then convey the fact
+to you, in the style in which the Poor Relation addressed the
+divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like. I hate the sight of
+the wretches. Don't for mercy's sake think I hate them; the distinction
+is one my friend or I drew long ago. No matter where you find such
+people; they are clowns.
+
+The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a
+lady as her Irish servant, whose pretty “saving your presence,” when she
+has to say something which offends her natural sense of good manners,
+has a hint in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood of old
+Milesian kings, which very likely runs in her veins,--thinned by two
+hundred years of potato, which, being an underground fruit, tends to
+drag down the generations that are made of it to the earth from which
+it came, and, filling their veins with starch, turn them into a kind of
+human vegetable.
+
+I say, if you like such people, go with them. But I am going to make a
+practical application of the example at the beginning of this particular
+record, which some young people who are going to choose professional
+advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for. If you are making
+choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if possible, with a cheerful
+and serene countenance. A physician is not--at least, ought not to
+be--an executioner; and a sentence of death on his face is as bad as a
+warrant for execution signed by the Governor. As a general rule, no man
+has a right to tell another by word or look that he is going to die. It
+may be necessary in some extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last
+extreme of impertinence which one human being can offer to another. “You
+have killed me,” said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told
+him he was incurable. He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead
+in six' weeks. If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone,
+persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought to
+know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of hope of
+recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long as life
+is comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of heaven, or at
+least of rest, when life has become a burden which the bearer is ready
+to let fall.
+
+Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death. The chance
+of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a certain
+time is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse people. As
+you go down the social scale, you reach a point at length where the
+common talk in sick rooms is of churchyards and sepulchres, and a kind
+of perpetual vivisection is forever carried on, upon the person of the
+miserable sufferer.
+
+And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer the
+one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body. If you can get
+along with people who carry a certificate in their faces that their
+goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your children
+cannot. And whatever offends one of these little ones cannot be right in
+the eyes of Him who loved them so well.
+
+After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably select
+gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then all will be
+right.
+
+This repetition of the above words,--gentleman and lady,--which could
+not be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are made of
+them by those who ought to know what they mean. Thus, at a marriage
+ceremony, once, of two very excellent persons who had been at service,
+instead of, Do you take this man, etc.? and, Do you take this woman?
+how do you think the officiating clergyman put the questions? It was, Do
+you, Miss So and So, take this GENTLEMAN? and, Do you, Mr. This or That,
+take this LADY?! What would any English duchess, ay, or the Queen of
+England herself, have thought, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had
+called her and her bridegroom anything but plain woman and man at such a
+time?
+
+I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she
+happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered these
+monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the ludicrous
+surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized
+upon many of the persons who were present,--had guessed what a sudden
+flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby,
+perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,--so inherent in
+their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion
+cannot exclude its impertinences,--the good man would have given his
+marriage-fee twice over to recall that superb and full-blown vulgarism.
+Any persons whom it could please could have no better notion of what the
+words referred to signify than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.
+
+MAN! Sir! WOMAN! Sir! Gentility is a fine thing, not to be undervalued,
+as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes before that.
+
+         “When Adam delved and Eve span,
+          Who was then the gentleman?”
+
+The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from the
+finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat is below
+a certain level. Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and all the graceful
+ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the surface, the elegances
+and suavities of life die out one by one as we sink through the social
+scale. Fortunately, the virtues are more tenacious of life, and last
+pretty well until we get down to the mud of absolute pauperism, where
+they do not flourish greatly.
+
+--I had almost forgotten about our boarders. As the Model of all the
+Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is the reason
+we are not all very sorry. Surely we all like good persons. She is a
+good person. Therefore we like her.--Only we don't.
+
+This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the principle
+which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit and embodied
+in the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably immortal, this
+syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had occasion to
+construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as I have done for
+the Model. “Pious and painefull.” Why has that excellent old phrase gone
+out of use? Simply because these good painefull or painstaking persons
+proved to be such nuisances in the long run, that the word “painefull”
+ came, before people thought of it, to mean pain-giving instead of
+painstaking.
+
+--So, the old fellah's off to-morrah,--said the young man John.
+
+Old fellow?--said I,--whom do you mean?
+
+Why, the one that came with our little beauty, the old fellah in
+petticoats.
+
+--Now that means something,--said I to myself.--These rough young
+rascals very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with
+their eyes shut. A real woman does a great many things without knowing
+why she does them; but these pattern machines mix up their intellects
+with everything they do, just like men. They can't help it, no doubt;
+but we can't help getting sick of them, either. Intellect is to a
+woman's nature what her watch-spring skirt is to her dress; it ought
+to underlie her silks and embroideries, but not to show itself too
+staringly on the outside.--You don't know, perhaps, but I will tell
+you; the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart
+the reddest. Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place
+it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and
+color of its birthplace.
+
+The young man John did not hear my soliloquy, of course, but sent up one
+more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a statement,
+that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives no visits, as
+is commonly supposed, from virtuous people.
+
+Why, I ask again, (of my reader,) should a person who never did anybody
+any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and intelligent, nay,
+a particularly enlightened and exemplary member of society, fail to
+inspire interest, love, and devotion? Because of the reversed current in
+the flow of thought and emotion. The red heart sends all its instincts
+up to the white brain to be analyzed, chilled, blanched, and so become
+pure reason, which is just exactly what we do not want of woman as
+woman. The current should run the other-way. The nice, calm, cold
+thought, which in women shapes itself so rapidly that they hardly know
+it as thought, should always travel to the lips via the heart. It does
+so in those women whom all love and admire. It travels the wrong way in
+the Model. That is the reason why the Little Gentleman said “I hate her,
+I hate her.” That is the reason why the young man John called her
+the “old fellah,” and banished her to the company of the great
+Unpresentable. That is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her
+to pieces with scalpel and forceps. That is the reason why the young
+girl whom she has befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and
+respect, rather than with the devotion and passionate fondness which lie
+sleeping beneath the calmness of her amber eyes. I can see her, as
+she sits between this estimable and most correct of personages and the
+misshapen, crotchety, often violent and explosive little man on the
+other side of her, leaning and swaying towards him as she speaks, and
+looking into his sad eyes as if she found some fountain in them at which
+her soul could quiet its thirst.
+
+Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and high
+culture. It is not
+
+    “The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
+     Zephyr with Aurora playing,”
+
+when the two meet
+
+    “--on beds of violets blue,
+     And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,”
+
+that claim such women as their offspring. It is rather the east wind, as
+it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a clear-eyed wintry
+noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England ice-quarry.--Don't throw
+up your cap now, and hurrah as if this were giving up everything, and
+turning against the best growth of our latitudes,--the daughters of
+the soil. The brain-women never interest us like the heart women; white
+roses please less than red. But our Northern seasons have a narrow green
+streak of spring, as well as a broad white zone of winter,--they have
+a glowing band of summer and a golden stripe of autumn in their
+many-colored wardrobe; and women are born to us that wear all these hues
+of earth and heaven in their souls. Our ice-eyed brain-women are really
+admirable, if we only ask of them just what they can give, and no more.
+Only compare them, talking or writing, with one of those babbling,
+chattering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know enough even to
+keep out of print, and who are interesting to us only as specimens of
+arrest of development for our psychological cabinets.
+
+Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues! We can spare you now. A little clear
+perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way. Go! be
+useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable, talk pure
+reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of an achromatic
+understanding. Goodbye! Where is my Beranger? I must read a verse or two
+of “Fretillon.”
+
+Fair play for all. But don't claim incompatible qualities for anybody.
+Justice is a very rare virtue in our community. Everything that public
+sentiment cares about is put into a Papin's digester, and boiled under
+high pressure till all is turned into one homogeneous pulp, and the very
+bones give up their jelly. What are all the strongest epithets of our
+dictionary to us now? The critics and politicians, and especially
+the philanthropists, have chewed them, till they are mere wads of
+syllable-fibre, without a suggestion of their old pungency and power.
+
+Justice! A good man respects the rights even of brute matter and
+arbitrary symbols. If he writes the same word twice in succession,
+by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not the
+first-comer the prior right? This act of abstract justice, which I trust
+many of my readers, like myself, have often performed, is a curious
+anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute wickedness of human
+dispositions. Why doesn't a man always strike out the first of the two
+words, to gratify his diabolical love of injustice?
+
+So, I say, we owe a genuine, substantial tribute of respect to these
+filtered intellects which have left their womanhood on the strainer.
+They are so clear that it is a pleasure at times to look at the world
+of thought through them. But the rose and purple tints of richer natures
+they cannot give us, and it is not just to them to ask it.
+
+Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way one
+would hardly at first think of. It loves vitality above all things,
+sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept under by the
+laws of good-breeding,--but still it loves abundant life, opulent and
+showy organizations,--the spherical rather than the plane trigonometry
+of female architecture,--plenty of red blood, flashing eyes, tropical
+voices, and forms that bear the splendors of dress without growing pale
+beneath their lustre. Among these you will find the most delicious women
+you will ever meet,--women whom dress and flattery and the round of city
+gayeties cannot spoil,--talking with whom, you forget their diamonds
+and laces,--and around whom all the nice details of elegance, which
+the cold-blooded beauty next them is scanning so nicely, blend in one
+harmonious whole, too perfect to be disturbed by the petulant sparkle of
+a jewel, or the yellow glare of a bangle, or the gay toss of a feather.
+
+There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion or
+wealth. Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and loyalty,
+I think I love ease and independence better than the golden slavery of
+perpetual matinees and soirees, or the pleasures of accumulation.
+
+But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the
+frivolous class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff
+about. Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and
+social intercourse. What business has a man who knows nothing about the
+beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to talk about fashion to
+a set of people who, if one of the quality left a card at their doors,
+would contrive to keep it on the very top of their heap of the names
+of their two-story acquaintances, till it was as yellow as the Codex
+Vaticanus?
+
+Wealth, too,--what an endless repetition of the same foolish
+trivialities about it! Take the single fact of its alleged uncertain
+tenure and transitory character. In old times, when men were all the
+time fighting and robbing each other,--in those tropical countries where
+the Sabeans and the Chaldeans stole all a man's cattle and camels, and
+there were frightful tornadoes and rains of fire from heaven, it was
+true enough that riches took wings to themselves not unfrequently in a
+very unexpected way. But, with common prudence in investments, it is
+not so now. In fact, there is nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the
+whole, as money. A man's learning dies with him; even his virtues fade
+out of remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his
+children live and keep his memory green.
+
+I do not think there is much courage or originality in giving utterance
+to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by conventional
+trumpery. The only distinction which it is necessary to point out to
+feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the breadth and depth of
+that significance which gives to fashion and fortune their tremendous
+power, we do not indorse the extravagances which often disgrace the one,
+nor the meanness which often degrades the other.
+
+A remark which seems to contradict a universally current opinion is not
+generally to be taken “neat,” but watered with the ideas of common-sense
+and commonplace people. So, if any of my young friends should be tempted
+to waste their substance on white kids and “all-rounds,” or to insist on
+becoming millionaires at once, by anything I have said, I will give them
+references to some of the class referred to, well known to the public as
+providers of literary diluents, who will weaken any truth so that
+there is not an old woman in the land who cannot take it with perfect
+impunity.
+
+I am afraid some of the blessed saints in diamonds will think I mean to
+flatter them. I hope not;--if I do, set it down as a weakness. But there
+is so much foolish talk about wealth and fashion, (which, of course,
+draw a good many heartless and essentially vulgar people into the glare
+of their candelabra, but which have a real respectability and meaning,
+if we will only look at them stereoscopically, with both eyes instead of
+one,) that I thought it a duty to speak a few words for them. Why can't
+somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says,
+and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?
+
+Lest my parish should suppose we have forgotten graver matters in these
+lesser topics, I beg them to drop these trifles and read the following
+lesson for the day.
+
+          THE TWO STREAMS.
+
+     Behold the rocky wall
+     That down its sloping sides
+     Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
+     In rushing river-tides!
+
+     Yon stream, whose sources run
+     Turned by a pebble's edge,
+     Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
+     Through the cleft mountain-ledge.
+
+     The slender rill had strayed,
+     But for the slanting stone,
+     To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
+     Of foam-flecked Oregon.
+
+     So from the heights of Will
+     Life's parting stream descends,
+     And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
+     Each widening torrent bends,
+
+     From the same cradle's side,
+     From the same mother's knee,
+     --One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
+     One to the Peaceful Sea!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Our landlady's daughter is a young lady of some pretensions to
+gentility. She wears her bonnet well back on her head, which is known
+by all to be a mark of high breeding. She wears her trains very long,
+as the great ladies do in Europe. To be sure, their dresses are so made
+only to sweep the tapestried floors of chateaux and palaces; as those
+odious aristocrats of the other side do not go draggling through the mud
+in silks and satins, but, forsooth, must ride in coaches when they
+are in full dress. It is true, that, considering various habits of the
+American people, also the little accidents which the best-kept sidewalks
+are liable to, a lady who has swept a mile of them is not exactly in
+such a condition that one would care to be her neighbor. But then there
+is no need of being so hard on these slight weaknesses of the poor, dear
+women as our little deformed gentleman was the other day.
+
+--There are no such women as the Boston women, Sir,--he said. Forty-two
+degrees, north latitude, Rome, Sir, Boston, Sir! They had grand women in
+old Rome, Sir,--and the women bore such men--children as never the world
+saw before. And so it was here, Sir. I tell you, the revolution the
+Boston boys started had to run in woman's milk before it ran in man's
+blood, Sir!
+
+But confound the make-believe women we have turned loose in our
+streets!--where do they come from? Not out of Boston parlors, I trust.
+Why, there is n't a beast or a bird that would drag its tail through the
+dirt in the way these creatures do their dresses. Because a queen or
+a duchess wears long robes on great occasions, a maid-of-all-work or a
+factory-girl thinks she must make herself a nuisance by trailing through
+the street, picking up and carrying about with her pah!--that's what
+I call getting vulgarity into your bones and marrow. Making believe be
+what you are not is the essence of vulgarity. Show over dirt is the
+one attribute of vulgar people. If any man can walk behind one of these
+women and see what she rakes up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he
+has got a tough stomach. I wouldn't let one of 'em into my room without
+serving 'em as David served Saul at the cave in the wilderness,--cut off
+his skirts, Sir! cut off his skirts!
+
+I suggested, that I had seen some pretty stylish ladies who offended in
+the way he condemned.
+
+Stylish women, I don't doubt,--said the Little Gentleman.--Don't tell me
+that a true lady ever sacrifices the duty of keeping all about her sweet
+and clean to the wish of making a vulgar show. I won't believe it of a
+lady. There are some things that no fashion has any right to touch, and
+cleanliness is one of those things. If a woman wishes to show that her
+husband or her father has got money, which she wants and means to spend,
+but doesn't know how, let her buy a yard or two of silk and pin it to
+her dress when she goes out to walk, but let her unpin it before she
+goes into the house;--there may be poor women that will think it worth
+disinfecting. It is an insult to a respectable laundress to carry such
+things into a house for her to deal with. I don't like the Bloomers any
+too well,--in fact, I never saw but one, and she--or he, or it--had a
+mob of boys after her, or whatever you call the creature, as if she had
+been a----
+
+The Little Gentleman stopped short,--flushed somewhat, and looked round
+with that involuntary, suspicious glance which the subjects of any
+bodily misfortune are very apt to cast round them. His eye wandered
+over the company, none of whom, excepting myself and one other, had,
+probably, noticed the movement. They fell at last on Iris,--his next
+neighbor, you remember.
+
+--We know in a moment, on looking suddenly at a person, if that person's
+eyes have been fixed on us.
+
+Sometimes we are conscious of it before we turn so as to see the person.
+Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice, of love, leak
+out in this way. There is no need of Mrs. Felix Lorraine's reflection
+in the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting evil for us behind our
+backs. We know it, as we know by the ominous stillness of a child that
+some mischief or other is going-on. A young girl betrays, in a moment,
+that her eyes have been feeding on the face where you find them fixed,
+and not merely brushing over it with their pencils of blue or brown
+light.
+
+A certain involuntary adjustment assimilates us, you may also observe,
+to that upon which we look. Roses redden the cheeks of her who stoops to
+gather them, and buttercups turn little people's chins yellow. When we
+look at a vast landscape, our chests expand as if we would enlarge to
+fill it. When we examine a minute object, we naturally contract, not
+only our foreheads, but all our dimensions. If I see two men wrestling,
+I wrestle too, with my limbs and features. When a country-fellow comes
+upon the stage, you will see twenty faces in the boxes putting on the
+bumpkin expression. There is no need of multiplying instances to reach
+this generalization; every person and thing we look upon puts its
+special mark upon us. If this is repeated often enough, we get a
+permanent resemblance to it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took
+from it. Husband and wife come to look alike at last, as has often been
+noticed. It is a common saying of a jockey, that he is “all horse”; and
+I have often fancied that milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an
+angular movement of the arm, that remind one of a pump and the working
+of its handle.
+
+All this came in by accident, just because I happened to mention that
+the Little Gentleman found that Iris had been looking at him with her
+soul in her eyes, when his glance rested on her after wandering round
+the company. What he thought, it is hard to say; but the shadow of
+suspicion faded off from his face, and he looked calmly into the amber
+eyes, resting his cheek upon the hand that wore the red jewel.
+
+--If it were a possible thing,--women are such strange creatures! Is
+there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them? Just
+see how they marry! A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood is like
+one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd, fantastic root
+that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above and bifurcated
+below, will always contrive to make a man--such as he is--out of it. I
+should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a Gorilla,
+that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
+
+--A child,--yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child! Do you
+know how Art brings all ages together? There is no age to the angels
+and ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he shares
+their youth until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim. The youthful
+painter talks of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a brother, and
+the veteran forgets that Raphael died at an age to which his own is of
+patriarchal antiquity.
+
+But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom
+Nature has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain. Pity, I suppose.
+They say that leads to love.
+
+--I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and
+determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was
+going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were
+drifting. I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I can
+look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent feebleness
+of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very hard to cheat,
+is only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine, knowing that all is in
+readiness and the slow-match burning quietly down to the powder. He will
+leave it by-and-by, and then it will take care of itself.
+
+One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a house
+and the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the building is
+on fire. Hark! There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive, crisp, not loud,
+but very knowing little creeping crackle that is tolerably intelligible.
+There is a whiff of something floating about, suggestive of toasting
+shingles. Also a sharp pyroligneous-acid pungency in the air that stings
+one's eyes. Let us get up and see what is going on.--Oh,--oh,--oh! do
+you know what has got hold of you? It is the great red dragon that is
+born of the little red eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing
+red manes, and his thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red
+eyes glaring at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues
+lapping the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath
+warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber sweat
+that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap. Run for your life! leap!
+or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing but a coroner
+would take for the wreck of a human being!
+
+If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away
+comparison, I shall be much obliged to him. All I intended to say was,
+that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know that
+they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among them. I
+don't pretend to say or know what it is that brings these two persons
+together;--and when I say together, I only mean that there is an evident
+affinity of some kind or other which makes their commonest intercourse
+strangely significant, as that each seems to understand a look or a
+word of the other. When the young girl laid her hand on the Little
+Gentleman's arm,--which so greatly shocked the Model, you may
+remember,--I saw that she had learned the lion-tamer's secret. She
+masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind of awe of him, as the man
+who goes into the cage has of the monster that he makes a baby of.
+
+One of two things must happen. The first is love, downright love, on
+the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man. You may
+laugh, if you like. But women are apt to love the men who they think
+have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love like one that has
+thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth and beauty, and seen
+it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the parched lips of him
+whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of human longing and
+disappointment? What would become of him, if this fresh soul should
+stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the flamingo drops out
+of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in the marshes of Cagliari,
+with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a kindling of strange fires in
+the shadowy waters that hold her burning image?
+
+--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not of course. I should think the
+chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her than
+she to marry him.
+
+There is one other thing that might happen. If the interest he awakes in
+her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in it, she will
+glance off from him into some great passion or other. All excitements
+run to love in women of a certain--let us not say age, but youth. An
+electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a
+bar of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned
+into a love-magnet by a tingling current of life running round her. I
+should like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted,
+and watch if she did not turn so as to point north and south,--as she
+would, if the love-currents are like those of the earth our mother.
+
+Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's “Boy of Windermere”? This
+boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud, mimicking the
+hooting of the owls, who would answer him
+
+               “with quivering peals,
+     And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
+     Redoubled and redoubled.”
+
+When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for
+their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant
+waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with
+new force upon his perceptions.--Read the sonnet, if you please;--it
+is Wordsworth all over,--trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid
+in description, prolix in detail, true metaphysically, but immensely
+suggestive of “imagination,” to use a mild term, when related as an
+actual fact of a sprightly youngster. All I want of it is to enforce the
+principle, that, when the door of the soul is once opened to a guest,
+there is no knowing who will come in next.
+
+--Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and
+characters. Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in the
+drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but there is
+a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin of her
+drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run riot
+in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to read her
+thoughts. This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at it honorably.
+
+I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman's
+chamber. How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only guess.
+His hours are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in the night,
+I see the light through cracks in his window-shutters on the wall of the
+house opposite. If the times of witchcraft were not over, I should be
+afraid to be so close a neighbor to a place from which there come such
+strange noises. Sometimes it is the dragging of something heavy over the
+floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,--it sounds so like what people
+that kill other people have to do now and then. Occasionally I hear very
+sweet strains of music,--whether of a wind or stringed instrument, or a
+human voice, strange as it may seem, I have often tried to find out, but
+through the partition I could not be quite sure. If I have not heard
+a woman cry and moan, and then again laugh as though she would die
+laughing, I have heard sounds so like them that--I am a fool to confess
+it--I have covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy
+in my dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that
+so-called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,--a
+sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,--a young woman
+in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,--not a
+neck-lace, but a dull-stain.
+
+Of course you don't suppose that I have any foolish superstitions about
+the matter,--I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take all that
+nonsense out of any man's head! It is not our beliefs that frighten us
+half so much as our fancies. A man not only believes, but knows he runs
+a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but it does n't worry him
+much. On the other hand, carry that man across a pasture a little way
+from some dreary country-village, and show him an old house where there
+were strange deaths a good many years ago, and there are rumors of ugly
+spots on the walls,--the old man hung himself in the garret, that is
+certain, and ever since the country-people have called it “the haunted
+house,”--the owners have n't been able to let it since the last tenants
+left on account of the noises,--so it has fallen into sad decay, and the
+moss grows on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have
+turned black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear,
+and the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking,
+--take the man who did n't mind the real risk of the cars to that old
+house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there
+alone,--how do you think he will like it? He doesn't believe one word
+of ghosts,--but then he knows, that, whether waking or sleeping, his
+imagination will people the haunted chambers with ghostly images. It is
+not what we believe, as I said before, that frightens us commonly,
+but what we conceive. A principle that reaches a good way if I am not
+mistaken. I say, then, that, if these odd sounds coming from the Little
+Gentleman's chamber sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get
+to sleep, it is not because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or
+mysterious way. The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head
+was one that was founded on the landlady's story of his having a pile
+of gold; it was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of
+sweating gold was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews
+odious and afford a pretext for plundering them. As for the sound like a
+woman laughing and crying, I never said it was a woman's voice; for, in
+the first place, I could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly, he may
+have an organ, or some queer instrument or other, with what they call
+the vox humana stop. If he moves his bed round to get away from the
+window, or for any such reason, there is nothing very frightful in that
+simple operation. Most of our foolish conceits explain themselves in
+some such simple way. And, yet, for all that, I confess, that, when I
+woke up the other evening, and heard, first a sweet complaining cry, and
+then footsteps, and then the dragging sound,--nothing but his bed, I am
+quite sure,--I felt a stirring in the roots of my hair as the feasters
+did in Keats's terrible poem of “Lamia.”
+
+There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie
+awake and get listening for sounds. Just keep your ears open any time
+after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a dark
+night. What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises you will
+hear! The stillness of night is a vulgar error. All the dead things seem
+to be alive. Crack! That is the old chest of drawers; you never hear it
+crack in the daytime. Creak! There's a door ajar; you know you shut them
+all.
+
+Where can that latch be that rattles so? Is anybody trying it softly?
+or, worse than any body, is---? (Cold shiver.) Then a sudden gust that
+jars all the windows;--very strange!--there does not seem to be any wind
+about that it belongs to. When it stops, you hear the worms boring in
+the powdery beams overhead. Then steps outside,--a stray animal, no
+doubt. All right,--but a gentle moisture breaks out all over you; and
+then something like a whistle or a cry,--another gust of wind, perhaps;
+that accounts for the rustling that just made your heart roll over and
+tumble about, so that it felt more like a live rat under your ribs
+than a part of your own body; then a crash of something that has
+fallen,--blown over, very likely---Pater noster, qui es in coelis! for
+you are damp and cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed trembling
+so that the death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!
+
+No,--night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings. Who
+ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it, of that
+Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,--foxes, and owls, and
+crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on moonshiny
+nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the eyes of dead
+fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach? Our old mother Nature
+has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when she comes in her dress
+of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops; but when she follows us
+up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black velvet and diamonds, every
+creak of her sandals and every whisper of her lips is full of mystery
+and fear.
+
+You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not believe there is
+anything about this singular little neighbor of mine which is as it
+should not be. Probably a visit to his room would clear up all that has
+puzzled me, and make me laugh at the notions which began, I suppose, in
+nightmares, and ended by keeping my imagination at work so as almost to
+make me uncomfortable at times. But it is not so easy to visit him as
+some of our other boarders, for various reasons which I will not stop to
+mention. I think some of them are rather pleased to get “the Professor”
+ under their ceilings.
+
+The young man John, for instance, asked me to come up one day and try
+some “old Burbon,” which he said was A 1. On asking him what was the
+number of his room, he answered, that it was forty-'leven, sky-parlor
+floor, but that I shouldn't find it, if he did n't go ahead to show me
+the way. I followed him to his habitat, being very willing to see in
+what kind of warren he burrowed, and thinking I might pick up something
+about the boarders who had excited my curiosity.
+
+Mighty close quarters they were where the young man John bestowed
+himself and his furniture; this last consisting of a bed, a chair,
+a bureau, a trunk, and numerous pegs with coats and “pants” and
+“vests,”--as he was in the habit of calling waist-coats and pantaloons
+or trousers,--hanging up as if the owner had melted out of them.
+Several prints were pinned up unframed,--among them that grand national
+portrait-piece, “Barnum presenting Ossian E. Dodge to Jenny Lind,” and a
+picture of a famous trot, in which I admired anew the cabalistic air of
+that imposing array of expressions, and especially the Italicized word,
+“Dan Mace names b. h. Major Slocum,” and “Hiram Woodruff names g. m.
+Lady Smith.” “Best three in five. Time: 2.40, 2.46, 2.50.”
+
+That set me thinking how very odd this matter of trotting horses is, as
+an index of the mathematical exactness of the laws of living mechanism.
+I saw Lady Suffolk trot a mile in 2.26. Flora Temple has trotted close
+down to 2.20; and Ethan Allen in 2.25, or less. Many horses have trotted
+their mile under 2.30; none that I remember in public as low down as
+2.20. From five to ten seconds, then, in about a hundred and sixty is
+the whole range of the maxima of the present race of trotting horses.
+The same thing is seen in the running of men. Many can run a mile in
+five minutes; but when one comes to the fractions below, they taper down
+until somewhere about 4.30 the maximum is reached. Averages of masses
+have been studied more than averages of maxima and minima. We know from
+the Registrar-General's Reports, that a certain number of children--say
+from one to two dozen--die every year in England from drinking hot water
+out of spouts of teakettles. We know, that, among suicides, women and
+men past a certain age almost never use fire-arms. A woman who has made
+up her mind to die is still afraid of a pistol or a gun. Or is it that
+the explosion would derange her costume?
+
+I say, averages of masses we have, but our tables of maxima we owe
+to the sporting men more than to the philosophers. The lesson their
+experience teaches is, that Nature makes no leaps,--does nothing per
+saltum. The greatest brain that ever lived, no doubt, was only a
+small fraction of an idea ahead of the second best. Just look at the
+chess-players. Leaving out the phenomenal exceptions, the nice
+shades that separate the skilful ones show how closely their brains
+approximate,--almost as closely as chronometers. Such a person is a
+“knight-player,”--he must have that piece given him. Another must have
+two pawns. Another, “pawn and two,” or one pawn and two moves. Then
+we find one who claims “pawn and move,” holding himself, with this
+fractional advantage, a match for one who would be pretty sure to beat
+him playing even.--So much are minds alike; and you and I think we
+are “peculiar,”--that Nature broke her jelly-mould after shaping our
+cerebral convolutions. So I reflected, standing and looking at the
+picture.
+
+--I say, Governor,--broke in the young man John,--them bosses '11 stay
+jest as well, if you'll only set down. I've had 'em this year, and they
+haven't stirred.--He spoke, and handed the chair towards me,--seating
+himself, at the same time, on the end of the bed.
+
+You have lived in this house some time?--I said,--with a note of
+interrogation at the end of the statement.
+
+Do I look as if I'd lost much flesh--said he, answering my question by
+another.
+
+No,--said I;--for that matter, I think you do credit to “the bountifully
+furnished table of the excellent lady who provides so liberally for the
+company that meets around her hospitable board.”
+
+[The sentence in quotation-marks was from one of those disinterested
+editorials in small type, which I suspect to have been furnished by
+a friend of the landlady's, and paid for as an advertisement. This
+impartial testimony to the superior qualities of the establishment and
+its head attracted a number of applicants for admission, and a couple
+of new boarders made a brief appearance at the table. One of them was
+of the class of people who grumble if they don't get canvas-backs and
+woodcocks every day, for three-fifty per week. The other was subject to
+somnambulism, or walking in the night, when he ought to have been
+asleep in his bed. In this state he walked into several of the boarders'
+chambers, his eyes wide open, as is usual with somnambulists, and,
+from some odd instinct or other, wishing to know what the hour was, got
+together a number of their watches, for the purpose of comparing them,
+as it would seem. Among them was a repeater, belonging to our young
+Marylander. He happened to wake up while the somnambulist was in his
+chamber, and, not knowing his infirmity, caught hold of him and gave him
+a dreadful shaking, after which he tied his hands and feet, and so left
+him till morning, when he introduced him to a gentleman used to taking
+care of such cases of somnambulism.]
+
+If you, my reader, will please to skip backward, over this parenthesis,
+you will come to our conversation, which it has interrupted.
+
+It a'n't the feed,--said the young man John,--it's the old woman's looks
+when a fellah lays it in too strong. The feed's well enough. After geese
+have got tough, 'n' turkeys have got strong, 'n' lamb's got old, 'n'
+veal's pretty nigh beef, 'n' sparragrass 's growin' tall 'n' slim 'n'
+scattery about the head, 'n' green peas are gettin' so big 'n' hard
+they'd be dangerous if you fired 'em out of a revolver, we get hold of
+all them delicacies of the season. But it's too much like feedin' on
+live folks and devourin' widdah's substance, to lay yourself out in the
+eatin' way, when a fellah 's as hungry as the chap that said a turkey
+was too much for one 'n' not enough for two. I can't help lookin' at
+the old woman. Corned-beef-days she's tolerable calm. Roastin'-days she
+worries some, 'n' keeps a sharp eye on the chap that carves. But when
+there's anything in the poultry line, it seems to hurt her feelin's so
+to see the knife goin' into the breast and joints comin' to pieces, that
+there's no comfort in eatin'. When I cut up an old fowl and help the
+boarders, I always feel as if I ought to say, Won't you have a slice of
+widdah?--instead of chicken.
+
+The young man John fell into a train of reflections which ended in his
+producing a Bologna sausage, a plate of “crackers,” as we Boston folks
+call certain biscuits, and the bottle of whiskey described as being A 1.
+
+Under the influence of the crackers and sausage, he grew cordial and
+communicative.
+
+It was time, I thought, to sound him as to those of our boarders who had
+excited my curiosity.
+
+What do you think of our young Iris?--I began.
+
+Fust-rate little filly;-he said.--Pootiest and nicest little chap
+I've seen since the schoolma'am left. Schoolma'am was a brown-haired
+one,--eyes coffee-color. This one has got wine-colored eyes,--'n' that
+'s the reason they turn a fellah's head, I suppose.
+
+This is a splendid blonde,--I said,--the other was a brunette. Which
+style do you like best?
+
+Which do I like best, boiled mutton or roast mutton?--said the young man
+John. Like 'em both,--it a'n't the color of 'em makes the goodness. I
+'ve been kind of lonely since schoolma'am went away. Used to like to
+look at her. I never said anything particular to her, that I remember,
+but--
+
+I don't know whether it was the cracker and sausage, or that the young
+fellow's feet were treading on the hot ashes of some longing that had
+not had time to cool, but his eye glistened as he stopped.
+
+I suppose she wouldn't have looked at a fellah like me,--he said,--but I
+come pretty near tryin'. If she had said, Yes, though, I shouldn't have
+known what to have done with her. Can't marry a woman now-a-days till
+you're so deaf you have to cock your head like a parrot to hear what she
+says, and so longsighted you can't see what she looks like nearer than
+arm's-length.
+
+Here is another chance for you,--I said.--What do you want nicer than
+such a young lady as Iris?
+
+It's no use,--he answered.--I look at them girls and feel as the fellah
+did when he missed catchin' the trout.--'To'od 'a' cost more butter to
+cook him 'n' he's worth,--says the fellah.--Takes a whole piece o' goods
+to cover a girl up now-a-days. I'd as lief undertake to keep a span of
+elephants,--and take an ostrich to board, too,--as to marry one of 'em.
+What's the use? Clerks and counter-jumpers ain't anything. Sparragrass
+and green peas a'n't for them,--not while they're young and tender.
+Hossback-ridin' a'n't for them,--except once a year, on Fast-day. And
+marryin' a'n't for them. Sometimes a fellah feels lonely, and would
+like to have a nice young woman, to tell her how lonely he feels. And
+sometimes a fellah,--here the young man John looked very confidential,
+and, perhaps, as if a little ashamed of his weakness,--sometimes a
+fellah would like to have one o' them small young ones to trot on his
+knee and push about in a little wagon,--a kind of a little Johnny, you
+know;--it's odd enough, but, it seems to me, nobody can afford them
+little articles, except the folks that are so rich they can buy
+everything, and the folks that are so poor they don't want anything. It
+makes nice boys of us young fellahs, no doubt! And it's pleasant to see
+fine young girls sittin', like shopkeepers behind their goods, waitin',
+and waitin', and waitin', 'n' no customers,--and the men lingerin' round
+and lookin' at the goods, like folks that want to be customers, but have
+n't the money!
+
+Do you think the deformed gentleman means to make love to Iris?--I said.
+
+What! Little Boston ask that girl to marry him! Well, now, that's cumin'
+of it a little too strong. Yes, I guess she will marry him and carry
+him round in a basket, like a lame bantam: Look here!--he said,
+mysteriously;--one of the boarders swears there's a woman comes to see
+him, and that he has heard her singin' and screechin'. I should like
+to know what he's about in that den of his. He lays low 'n' keeps
+dark,--and, I tell you, there's a good many of the boarders would like
+to get into his chamber, but he don't seem to want 'em. Biddy could
+tell somethin' about what she's seen when she 's been to put his room
+to rights. She's a Paddy 'n' a fool, but she knows enough to keep her
+tongue still. All I know is, I saw her crossin' herself one day when she
+came out of that room. She looked pale enough, 'n' I heard her mutterin'
+somethin' or other about the Blessed Virgin. If it had n't been for the
+double doors to that chamber of his, I'd have had a squint inside before
+this; but, somehow or other, it never seems to happen that they're both
+open at once.
+
+What do you think he employs himself about? said I.
+
+The young man John winked.
+
+I waited patiently for the thought, of which this wink was the blossom,
+to come to fruit in words.
+
+I don't believe in witches,--said the young man John.
+
+Nor I.
+
+We were both silent for a few minutes.
+
+--Did you ever see the young girl's drawing-books,--I said, presently.
+
+All but one,--he answered;--she keeps a lock on that, and won't show it.
+Ma'am Allen, (the young rogue sticks to that name, in speaking of the
+gentleman with the diamond,) Ma'am Allen tried to peek into it one day
+when she left it on the sideboard. “If you please,” says she,--'n'
+took it from him, 'n' gave him a look that made him curl up like a
+caterpillar on a hot shovel. I only wished he had n't, and had jest
+given her a little sass, for I've been takin' boxin'-lessons, 'n' I 've
+got a new way of counterin' I want to try on to somebody.
+
+--The end of all this was, that I came away from the young fellow's
+room, feeling that there were two principal things that I had to live
+for, for the next six weeks or six months, if it should take so long.
+These were, to get a sight of the young girl's drawing-book, which I
+suspected had her heart shut up in it, and to get a look into the Little
+Gentleman's room.
+
+I don't doubt you think it rather absurd that I should trouble myself
+about these matters. You tell me, with some show of reason, that all
+I shall find in the young girl's--book will be some outlines of
+angels with immense eyes, traceries of flowers, rural sketches, and
+caricatures, among which I shall probably have the pleasure of seeing
+my own features figuring. Very likely. But I'll tell you what I think
+I shall find. If this child has idealized the strange little bit of
+humanity over which she seems to have spread her wings like a brooding
+dove,--if, in one of those wild vagaries that passionate natures are so
+liable to, she has fairly sprung upon him with her clasping nature, as
+the sea-flowers fold about the first stray shell-fish that brushes their
+outspread tentacles, depend upon it, I shall find the marks of it in
+this drawing-book of hers,--if I can ever get a look at it,--fairly, of
+course, for I would not play tricks to satisfy my curiosity.
+
+Then, if I can get into this Little Gentleman's room under any fair
+pretext, I shall, no doubt, satisfy myself in five minutes that he is
+just like other people, and that there is no particular mystery about
+him.
+
+The night after my visit to the young man John, I made all these and
+many more reflections. It was about two o'clock in the morning,--bright
+starlight,--so light that I could make out the time on my
+alarm-clock,--when I woke up trembling and very moist. It was the heavy
+dragging sound, as I had often heard it before that waked me. Presently
+a window was softly closed. I had just begun to get over the agitation
+with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when I heard the sound
+which seemed to me as of a woman's voice,--the clearest, purest soprano
+which one could well conceive of. It was not loud, and I could not
+distinguish a word, if it was a woman's voice; but there were recurring
+phrases of sound and snatches of rhythm that reached me, which suggested
+the idea of complaint, and sometimes, I thought, of passionate grief and
+despair. It died away at last,--and then I heard the opening of a door,
+followed by a low, monotonous sound, as of one talking,--and then
+the closing of a door,--and presently the light on the opposite wall
+disappeared and all was still for the night.
+
+By George! this gets interesting,--I said, as I got out of bed for a
+change of night-clothes.
+
+I had this in my pocket the other day, but thought I would n't read it
+at our celebration. So I read it to the boarders instead, and print it
+to finish off this record with.
+
+
+               ROBINSON OF LEYDEN.
+
+     He sleeps not here; in hope and prayer
+     His wandering flock had gone before,
+     But he, the shepherd, might not share
+     Their sorrows on the wintry shore.
+
+     Before the Speedwell's anchor swung,
+     Ere yet the Mayflower's sail was spread,
+     While round his feet the Pilgrims clung,
+     The pastor spake, and thus he said:--
+
+     “Men, brethren, sisters, children dear!
+     God calls you hence from over sea;
+     Ye may not build by Haerlem Meer,
+     Nor yet along the Zuyder-Zee.
+
+     “Ye go to bear the saving word
+     To tribes unnamed and shores untrod:
+     Heed well the lessons ye have heard
+     From those old teachers taught of God.
+
+     “Yet think not unto them was lent
+     All light for all the coming days,
+     And Heaven's eternal wisdom spent
+     In making straight the ancient ways.
+
+     “The living fountain overflows
+     For every flock, for every lamb,
+     Nor heeds, though angry creeds oppose
+     With Luther's dike or Calvin's dam.”
+
+     He spake; with lingering, long embrace,
+     With tears of love and partings fond,
+     They floated down the creeping Maas,
+     Along the isle of Ysselmond.
+
+     They passed the frowning towers of Briel,
+     The “Hook of Holland's” shelf of sand,
+     And grated soon with lifting keel
+     The sullen shores of Fatherland.
+
+     No home for these!--too well they knew
+     The mitred king behind the throne;
+     The sails were set, the pennons flew,
+     And westward ho! for worlds unknown.
+
+     --And these were they who gave us birth,
+     The Pilgrims of the sunset wave,
+     Who won for us this virgin earth,
+     And freedom with the soil they gave.
+
+     The pastor slumbers by the Rhine,
+     --In alien earth the exiles lie,
+     --Their nameless graves our holiest shrine,
+     His words our noblest battle-cry!
+
+     Still cry them, and the world shall hear,
+     Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea!
+     Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer,
+     Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee!
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our
+boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were going
+on. There is no particular change that I can think of in the aspect
+of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were quietly
+playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this smooth surface
+of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show themselves some
+fine morning or other in events, if not in catastrophes. I have been
+watchful, as I said I should be, but have little to tell as yet. You
+may laugh at me, and very likely think me foolishly fanciful to trouble
+myself about what is going on in a middling-class household like
+ours. Do as you like. But here is that terrible fact to begin with,--a
+beautiful young girl, with the blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to
+Nature's women, turned loose among live men.
+
+-Terrible fact?
+
+Very terrible. Nothing more so. Do you forget the angels who lost heaven
+for the daughters of men? Do you forget Helen, and the fair women who
+made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was born? If
+jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if pangs that
+waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness or moping
+melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful possibilities,
+then there is always something frightful about a lovely young woman.--I
+love to look at this “Rainbow,” as her father used sometimes to call
+her, of ours. Handsome creature that she is in forms and colors,--the
+very picture, as it seems to me, of that “golden blonde” my friend whose
+book you read last year fell in love with when he was a boy, (as you
+remember, no doubt,)--handsome as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it
+is not her beauty alone that holds my eyes upon her. Let me tell you
+one of my fancies, and then you will understand the strange sort of
+fascination she has for me.
+
+It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that
+there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they get
+hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later years.
+These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden startling
+flashes,--second wakings, as it were,--a waking out of the waking state,
+which last is very apt to be a half-sleep. I have many times stopped
+short and held my breath, and felt the blood leaving my cheeks, in one
+of these sudden clairvoyant flashes. Of course I cannot tell what
+kind of a secret this is, but I think of it as a disclosure of
+certain relations of our personal being to time and space, to other
+intelligences, to the procession of events, and to their First Great
+Cause. This secret seems to be broken up, as it were, into fragments,
+so that we find here a word and there a syllable, and then again only a
+letter of it; but it never is written out for most of us as a complete
+sentence, in this life. I do not think it could be; for I am disposed to
+consider our beliefs about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind
+of premonition of an enlargement of our faculties in some future state
+than as an expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life.
+Persons, however, have fallen into trances,--as did the Reverend William
+Tennent, among many others,--and learned some things which they could
+not tell in our human words.
+
+Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this
+infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women are
+those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great mystery.
+There are women's faces, some real, some ideal, which contain something
+in them that becomes a positive element in our creed, so direct and
+palpable a revelation is it of the infinite purity and love. I remember
+two faces of women with wings, such as they call angels, of Fra
+Angelico,--and I just now came across a print of Raphael's Santa
+Apollina, with something of the same quality,--which I was sure had
+their prototypes in the world above ours. No wonder the Catholics pay
+their vows to the Queen of Heaven! The unpoetical side of Protestantism
+is, that it has no women to be worshipped.
+
+But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great Secret
+to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces of it.
+Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty of a plain
+countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the lips of a woman,
+not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a message for us, and
+wait almost with awe to hear their accents. But this young girl has at
+once the beauty of feature and the unspoken mystery of expression. Can
+she tell me anything?
+
+Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it which
+I have been groping after through so many friendships that I have tired
+of, and through--Hush! Is the door fast? Talking loud is a bad trick in
+these curious boarding-houses.
+
+You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind you of
+and to use for a special illustration. Riding along over a rocky road,
+suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing gravel changes to
+a deep heavy rumble. There is a great hollow under your feet,--a huge
+unsunned cavern. Deep, deep beneath you in the core of the living
+rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away it stretches its winding
+galleries, their roofs dripping into streams where fishes have been
+swimming and spawning in the dark until their scales are white as milk
+and their eyes have withered out, obsolete and useless.
+
+So it is in life. We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces, grinding
+over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--now and then
+jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must ride over or round
+as we best may, sometimes bringing short up against a disappointment,
+but still working along with the creaking and rattling and grating
+and jerking that belong to the journey of life, even in the
+smoothest-rolling vehicle. Suddenly we hear the deep underground
+reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of some abyss of
+thought or passion beneath us.
+
+I wish the girl would go. I don't like to look at her so much, and yet I
+cannot help it. Always that same expression of something that I ought to
+know,--something that she was made to tell and I to hear,--lying there
+ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of her eyes and make
+a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell the
+truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the
+dry stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies in
+an hour of passion.
+
+It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track. The
+Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three Words. Set
+your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could give you which
+settle all that matter. I don't wonder, however, that you confounded the
+Great Secret with the Three Words.
+
+I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to tell.
+When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the morning of the
+fifth of July. And just as that little patriotic implement is made with
+a slender train which leads to the magazine in its interior, so a sharp
+eye can almost always see the train leading from a young girl's eye or
+lip to the “I love you” in her heart. But the Three Words are not the
+Great Secret I mean. No, women's faces are only one of the tablets
+on which that is written in its partial, fragmentary symbols. It lies
+deeper than Love, though very probably Love is a part of it. Some, I
+think,--Wordsworth might be one of them,--spell out a portion of it from
+certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others. I
+can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which seem
+to me to come near the region where I think it lies. I have known two
+persons who pursued it with the passion of the old alchemists,--all
+wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving up the daily search
+for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and their dreams changed to
+visions of things that ran and crawled about their floor and ceilings,
+and so they died. The vulgar called them drunkards.
+
+I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this
+young girl's face produces on me. It is akin to those influences a
+friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from certain
+voices. I cannot translate it into words,--only into feelings; and
+these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her face hinted that
+revelation of something we are close to knowing, which all imaginative
+persons are looking for either in this world or on the very threshold of
+the next.
+
+You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful incomprehensibleness
+of my description of the expression in a young girl's face. You forget
+what a miserable surface-matter this language is in which we try to
+reproduce our interior state of being. Articulation is a shallow trick.
+From the light Poh! which we toss off from our lips as we fling a
+nameless scribbler's impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest
+utterances which comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need,
+is only a space of some three or four inches. Words, which are a set of
+clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared to
+tones and expression of the features. I give it up; I thought I could
+shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this young
+girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use. No doubt
+your head aches, trying to make something of my description. If there
+is here and there one that can make anything intelligible out of my talk
+about the Great Secret, and who has spelt out a syllable or two of it on
+some woman's face, dead or living, that is all I can expect. One should
+see the person with whom he converses about such matters. There
+are dreamy-eyed people to whom I should say all these things with a
+certainty of being understood;--
+
+          That moment that his face I see,
+          I know the man that must hear me
+          To him my tale I teach.
+
+--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar for
+this August number, so that they will never see it.
+
+--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious attempt,
+which may go for nothing, and you can have your money refunded, if you
+will make the change.
+
+This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
+unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
+breakfast-table. The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she again
+seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards him. That
+slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each
+other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side,
+is a physical fact I have often noticed. Then there is a tendency in all
+the men's eyes to converge on her; and I do firmly believe, that, if
+all their chairs were examined, they would be found a little obliquely
+placed, so as to favor the direction in which their occupants love to
+look.
+
+That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting
+opposite to me, is no exception to the rule. She brought down some
+mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber. She gave a
+sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and sent another
+by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.
+
+--Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,--he said, and put it gallantly in his
+button-hole.--After breakfast he must see some of her drawings. Very
+fine performances,--very fine!--truly elegant productions, truly
+elegant!--Had seen Miss Linwood's needlework in London, in the year
+(eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)--patronized
+by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,--elegant, truly elegant
+productions, very fine performances; these drawings reminded him of
+them;--wonderful resemblance to Nature; an extraordinary art, painting;
+Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures that he remembered seeing when
+he was a boy. Used to remember some lines about a portrait Written by
+Mr. Cowper, beginning,
+
+         “Oh that those lips had language!  Life has pass'd
+          With me but roughly since I heard thee last.”
+
+And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother
+of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and
+looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look. The dead
+young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used to look
+at him so many, many years ago. He stood still as if in a waking dream,
+his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines grew indistinct and
+they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face shaped itself out of
+the glimmering light through which he saw them.--What is there quite
+so profoundly human as an old man's memory of a mother who died in his
+earlier years? Mother she remains till manhood, and by-and-by she grows
+to be as a sister; and at last, when, wrinkled and bowed and broken,
+he looks back upon her in her fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he
+caresses, not his parent, but, as it were, his child.
+
+If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words with
+which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of thought.
+
+--If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!--he said.--All
+gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms of her
+great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest little
+picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody that you
+don't want to see.--The old gentleman put his hand to his forehead so as
+to shade his eyes. I saw he was looking at the dim photograph of memory,
+and turned from him to Iris.
+
+How many drawing-books have you filled,--I said,--since you began to
+take lessons?--This was the first,--she answered,--since she was here;
+and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of large size
+she had covered with drawings.
+
+I turned over the leaves of the book before us. Academic studies,
+principally of the human figure. Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so
+forth. Limbs from statues. Hands and feet from Nature. What a superb
+drawing of an arm! I don't remember it among the figures from Michel
+Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly. From Nature, I
+think, or after a cast from Nature.--Oh!
+
+--Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,--I said, taking up the
+drawing-book with a lock on it,--Yes,--she said.--I should like to see
+her style of working on a small scale.--There was nothing in it worth
+showing,--she said; and presently I saw her try the lock, which proved
+to be fast. We are all caricatured in it, I haven't the least doubt.
+I think, though, I could tell by her way of dealing with us what
+her fancies were about us boarders. Some of them act as if they were
+bewitched with her, but she does not seem to notice it much. Her
+thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor more than on anybody else.
+The young fellow John appears to stand second in her good graces. I
+think he has once or twice sent her what the landlady's daughter calls
+bo-kays of flowers,--somebody has, at any rate.--I saw a book she
+had, which must have come from the divinity-student. It had a dreary
+title-page, which she had enlivened with a fancy portrait of the
+author,--a face from memory, apparently,--one of those faces that small
+children loathe without knowing why, and which give them that inward
+disgust for heaven so many of the little wretches betray, when they
+hear that these are “good men,” and that heaven is full of such.--The
+gentleman with the diamond--the Koh-i-noor, so called by us--was not
+encouraged, I think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap. He
+pulls his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never
+sees him, as it should seem. The young Marylander, who I thought would
+have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks from his
+corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to say, I
+wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--which would,
+perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present one. But nothing
+comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my sagacious idea of finding
+out the girl's fancies by looking into her locked drawing-book.
+
+Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made
+an attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber. For this
+purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was just
+ready to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk, followed
+him as he toiled back to his room. He rested on the landing and faced
+round toward me. There was something in his eye which said, Stop there!
+So we finished our conversation on the landing. The next day, I mustered
+assurance enough to knock at his door, having a pretext ready.--No
+answer.--Knock again. A door, as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and
+locked, and presently I heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled,
+misshapen boots. The bolts and the lock of the inner door were
+unfastened,--with unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the
+passage. He pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one
+at which I stood. He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as
+“Mr. Copley” used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in; and
+a quaint-looking key in his hand. Our conversation was short, but long
+enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not want my company
+in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.
+
+I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a
+schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits. I mean to give up
+such nonsense and mind my own business.--Hark! What the deuse is that
+odd noise in his chamber?
+
+--I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when I was
+a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a distinct
+apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the
+neighborhood where I was born and bred. The first was a series of
+marks called the “Devil's footsteps.” These were patches of sand in
+the pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush blackberry, the
+“dewberry,” as our Southern neighbors call it, in prettier and more
+Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers,--where even
+the pale, dry, sadly-sweet “everlasting” could not grow, but all was
+bare and blasted. The second was a mark in one of the public buildings
+near my home,--the college dormitory named after a Colonial Governor.
+I do not think many persons are aware of the existence of this
+mark,--little having been said about the story in print, as it was
+considered very desirable, for the sake of the Institution, to hush it
+up. In the northwest corner, and on the level of the third or fourth
+story, there are signs of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but
+not to be mistaken. A considerable portion of that corner must have been
+carried away, from within outward. It was an unpleasant affair; and I
+do not care to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using
+sacred things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which
+was variously explained, took place. The story of the Appearance in the
+chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to the
+building there could be no question; and the zig-zag line, where the
+mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly visible. The
+queer burnt spots, called the “Devil's footsteps,” had never attracted
+attention before this time, though there is no evidence that they had
+not existed previously, except that of the late Miss M., a “Goody,” so
+called, or sweeper, who was positive on the subject, but had a strange
+horror of referring to an affair of which she was thought to know
+something.--I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of
+impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with
+untenanted, locked upper-chambers, and a most ghostly garret,--with the
+“Devil's footsteps” in the fields behind the house and in front of it
+the patched dormitory where the unexplained occurrence had taken place
+which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that
+one of them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a
+dreadful season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned
+for his ascetic sanctity.
+
+There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced
+by these two singular facts I have just mentioned. There was a dark
+storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly see a
+heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which seemed
+to me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their fright to have
+huddled together and climbed up on each other's backs,--as the people
+did in that awful crush where so many were killed, at the execution of
+Holloway and Haggerty. Then the Lady's portrait, up-stairs, with the
+sword-thrusts through it,--marks of the British officers' rapiers,--and
+the tall mirror in which they used to look at their red coats,--confound
+them for smashing its mate?--and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair
+in which Lord Percy used to sit while his hair was dressing;--he was a
+gentleman, and always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save
+the silk covering my grandmother embroidered. Then the little room
+downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on the
+hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,--“the study”
+ in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of armed
+men,--sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will show you
+the “dents” left by the butts of their muskets all over the floor. With
+all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild stories
+those awful country-boys that came to live in our service brought with
+them;--of contracts written in blood and left out over night, not to be
+found the next morning, (removed by the Evil One, who takes his nightly
+round among our dwellings, and filed away for future use,)--of dreams
+coming true,--of death-signs,--of apparitions, no wonder that my
+imagination got excited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies.
+
+Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly see
+a ghost is all very well-in the day-time. All the reason in the world
+will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just such
+circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head. That is the
+only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of curiosity with which
+I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy with which I lie awake
+whenever I hear anything going on in his chamber after midnight.
+
+But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred for
+the present. You will see in what way it happened that my thoughts were
+turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how I got my fancy
+full of material images,--faces, heads, figures, muscles, and so
+forth,--in such a way that I should have no chance in this number to
+gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the means of so doing.
+
+Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this time.
+It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it that I
+should sit to him for my portrait. When a soul draws a body in the great
+lottery of life, where every one is sure of a prize, such as it is, the
+said soul inspects the said body with the same curious interest with
+which one who has ventured into a “gift enterprise” examines the
+“massive silver pencil-case” with the coppery smell and impressible
+tube, or the “splendid gold ring” with the questionable specific
+gravity, which it has been his fortune to obtain in addition to his
+purchase.
+
+The soul, having studied the article of which it finds itself
+proprietor, thinks, after a time, it knows it pretty well. But there is
+this difference between its view and that of a person looking at us:--we
+look from within, and see nothing but the mould formed by the elements
+in which we are incased; other observers look from without, and see
+us as living statues. To be sure, by the aid of mirrors, we get a few
+glimpses of our outside aspect; but this occasional impression is always
+modified by that look of the soul from within outward which none but
+ourselves can take. A portrait is apt, therefore, to be a surprise to
+us. The artist looks only from without. He sees us, too, with a hundred
+aspects on our faces we are never likely to see. No genuine expression
+can be studied by the subject of it in the looking-glass.
+
+More than this; he sees us in a way in which many of our friends or
+acquaintances never see us. Without wearing any mask we are conscious
+of, we have a special face for each friend. For, in the first place,
+each puts a special reflection of himself upon us, on the principle of
+assimilation you found referred to in my last record, if you happened
+to read that document. And secondly, each of our friends is capable of
+seeing just so far, and no farther, into our face, and each sees in it
+the particular thing that he looks for. Now the artist, if he is truly
+an artist, does not take any one of these special views. Suppose he
+should copy you as you appear to the man who wants your name to a
+subscription-list, you could hardly expect a friend who entertains you
+to recognize the likeness to the smiling face which sheds its radiance
+at his board. Even within your own family, I am afraid there is a
+face which the rich uncle knows, that is not so familiar to the poor
+relation. The artist must take one or the other, or something compounded
+of the two, or something different from either. What the daguerreotype
+and photograph do is to give the features and one particular look, the
+very look which kills all expression, that of self-consciousness. The
+artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in repose,
+puts your face through its exercises, observes its transitions, and
+so gets the whole range of its expression. Out of all this he forms an
+ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your exact look at any one time
+or to any particular person. Such a portrait cannot be to everybody what
+the ungloved call “as nat'ral as life.” Every good picture, therefore,
+must be considered wanting in resemblance by many persons.
+
+There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist shapes
+your features from his outline. It is that you resemble so many
+relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular likeness
+in your countenance.
+
+He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances, thus:
+
+There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I never
+thought I had a sign of it. The mother's eyebrow and grayish-blue eye,
+those I knew I had. But there is a something which recalls a smile that
+faded away from my sister's lips--how many years ago! I thought it so
+pleasant in her, that I love myself better for having a trace of it.
+
+Are we not young? Are we not fresh and blooming? Wait, a bit. The artist
+takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines, diverging
+outwards from the eye over the temple. Five years.--The artist draws
+one tolerably distinct and two faint lines, perpendicularly between the
+eyebrows. Ten years.--The artist breaks up the contours round the mouth,
+so that they look a little as a hat does that has been sat upon and
+recovered itself, ready, as one would say, to crumple up again in the
+same creases, on smiling or other change of feature.--Hold on! Stop
+that! Give a young fellow a chance! Are we not whole years short of that
+interesting period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc., etc.,
+etc.?
+
+There now! That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article,
+getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the
+wrongs of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye
+and the reflection of a red curtain on our cheek. Is he not a POET that
+painted us?
+
+          “Blest be the art that can immortalize!”
+                                         COWPER.
+
+--Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with
+any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation,
+and in his features as special and definite an expression of his sole
+individuality as if he were the first created of his race: As soon as
+we are old enough to get the range of three or four generations well in
+hand, and to take in large family histories, we never see an individual
+in a face of any stock we know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with
+fragmentary tints from this and that ancestor. The analysis of a face
+into its ancestral elements requires that it should be examined in the
+very earliest infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look
+it brings with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief
+space when Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his
+silent servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he
+has wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all
+the traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after feature,
+from the slight outline to the finished portrait.
+
+--I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our
+bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as
+identified with ourselves. In early years, while the child “feels its
+life in every limb,” it lives in the body and for the body to a very
+great extent. It ought to be so. There have been many very interesting
+children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the things of earth
+and an extraordinary development of the spiritual nature. There is a
+perfect literature of their biographies, all alike in their essentials;
+the same “disinclination to the usual amusements of childhood “;
+the same remarkable sensibility; the same docility; the same
+conscientiousness; in short, an almost uniform character, marked by
+beautiful traits, which we look at with a painful admiration. It will
+be found that most of these children are the subjects of some
+constitutional unfitness for living, the most frequent of which I need
+not mention. They are like the beautiful, blushing, half-grown fruit
+that falls before its time because its core is gnawed out. They have
+their meaning,--they do not-live in vain,--but they are windfalls. I am
+convinced that many healthy children are injured morally by being forced
+to read too much about these little meek sufferers and their spiritual
+exercises. Here is a boy that loves to run, swim, kick football, turn
+somersets, make faces, whittle, fish, tear his clothes, coast, skate,
+fire crackers, blow squash “tooters,” cut his name on fences, read about
+Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat the widest-angled slices of
+pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts with his back teeth and
+bite out the better part of another boy's apple with his front ones,
+turn up coppers, “stick” knives, call names, throw stones, knock off
+hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, “cut behind” anything on
+wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth, “holler” Fire! on slight
+evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an engine-company, or, in his
+own words, “blow for tub No. 11,” or whatever it may be;--isn't that
+a pretty nice sort of a boy, though he has not got anything the matter
+with him that takes the taste of this world out? Now, when you put into
+such a hot-blooded, hard-fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's hand a
+sad-looking volume or pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin, white-faced
+child, whose life is really as much a training for death as the last
+month of a condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in common
+between his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the
+experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents? The time comes
+when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the beauty of
+resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the pillow of those
+who die before their time, in humble hope and trust. But it is not
+until he has worked his way through the period of honest hearty animal
+existence, which every robust child should make the most of,--not until
+he has learned the use of his various faculties, which is his first
+duty,--that a boy of courage and animal vigor is in a proper state to
+read these tearful records of premature decay. I have no doubt that
+disgust is implanted in the minds of many healthy children by early
+surfeits of pathological piety. I do verily believe that He who took
+children in His arms and blessed them loved the healthiest and
+most playful of them just as well as those who were richest in the
+tuberculous virtues. I know what I am talking about, and there are more
+parents in this country who will be willing to listen to what I say than
+there are fools to pick a quarrel with me. In the sensibility and the
+sanctity which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most
+beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the
+Divine benevolence. But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust natures
+out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply what we
+Professors call “bad practice”; and I know by experience that there are
+worthy people who not only try it on their own children, but actually
+force it on those of their neighbors.
+
+--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed, or
+done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized. A polite note
+from Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at their
+Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted. We repaired to
+that scientific Golgotha.
+
+Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the
+woman in the toy called a “weather-house,” both on the same wooden arm
+suspended on a pivot,--so that when one comes to the door, the other
+retires backwards, and vice versa. The more particular speciality of one
+is to lubricate your entrance and exit,--that of the other to polish
+you off phrenologically in the recesses of the establishment. Suppose
+yourself in a room full of casts and pictures, before a counterful of
+books with taking titles. I wonder if the picture of the brain is
+there, “approved” by a noted Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the
+Professor's, folio plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim. An extra
+convolution, No. 9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath,
+which was not to be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very
+liberally supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue
+of “organs.” Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women,
+--horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of
+life,--looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or Joe
+Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them on his
+cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen “shiners” on a stripped twig of
+willow.
+
+The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let
+the horn-combers wait,--he shall be bumped without inspecting the
+antechamber.
+
+Tape round the head,--22 inches. (Come on, old 23 inches, if you think
+you are the better man!)
+
+Feels thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles as those horrid
+old women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the provision-stalls
+at the Quincy Market. Vitality, No. 5 or 6, or something or other.
+Victuality, (organ at epigastrium,) some other number equally
+significant.
+
+Mild champooing of head now commences. 'Extraordinary revelations!
+Cupidiphilous, 6! Hymeniphilous, 6 +! Paediphilous, 5! Deipniphilous, 6!
+Gelasmiphilous, 6! Musikiphilous, 5! Uraniphilous, 5! Glossiphilous, 8!!
+and so on. Meant for a linguist.--Invaluable information. Will invest in
+grammars and dictionaries immediately.--I have nothing against the grand
+total of my phrenological endowments.
+
+I never set great store by my head, and did not think Messrs. Bumpus
+and Crane would give me so good a lot of organs as they did, especially
+considering that I was a dead-head on that occasion. Much obliged to
+them for their politeness. They have been useful in their way by calling
+attention to important physiological facts. (This concession is due to
+our immense bump of Candor.)
+
+A short Lecture on Phrenology, read to the Boarders at our
+Breakfast-Table.
+
+I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a Pseudo-science.
+A Pseudo-science consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting
+arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its
+doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells
+against it, is excluded. It is invariably connected with some lucrative
+practical application. Its professors and practitioners are usually
+shrewd people; they are very serious with the public, but wink and laugh
+a good deal among themselves. The believing multitude consists of women
+of both sexes, feeble minded inquirers, poetical optimists, people
+who always get cheated in buying horses, philanthropists who insist
+on hurrying up the millennium, and others of this class, with here and
+there a clergyman, less frequently a lawyer, very rarely a physician,
+and almost never a horse-jockey or a member of the detective police.--I
+do not say that Phrenology was one of the Pseudo-sciences.
+
+A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies. It may
+contain many truths, and even valuable ones. The rottenest bank starts
+with a little specie. It puts out a thousand promises to pay on the
+strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly a good one.
+The practitioners of the Pseudo-sciences know that common minds, after
+they have been baited with a real fact or two, will jump at the merest
+rag of a lie, or even at the bare hook. When we have one fact found us,
+we are very apt to supply the next out of our own imagination. (How
+many persons can read Judges xv. 16 correctly the first time?) The
+Pseudo-sciences take advantage of this.--I did not say that it was so
+with Phrenology.
+
+I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was
+something in Phrenology. A broad, high forehead, it is commonly agreed,
+promises intellect; one that is “villanous low” and has a huge hind-head
+back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature. I have as rarely met
+an unbiassed and sensible man who really believed in the bumps. It is
+observed, however, that persons with what the Phrenologists call “good
+heads” are more prone than others toward plenary belief in the doctrine.
+
+It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that the
+moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable substance
+of the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary, I might be
+puzzled. But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar cheese, I call
+on him to prove the truth of the Gaseous nature of our satellite, before
+I purchase.
+
+It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological statement.
+It is only necessary to show that its truth is not proved, and cannot
+be, by the common course of argument. The walls of the head are double,
+with a great air-chamber between them, over the smallest and most
+closely crowded “organs.” Can you tell how much money there is in a
+safe, which also has thick double walls, by kneading its knobs with your
+fingers? So when a man fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the
+organs of Individuality, Size, etc., I trust him as much as I should
+if he felt of the outside of my strong-box and told me that there was
+a five-dollar or a ten-dollar-bill under this or that particular rivet.
+Perhaps there is; only he does n't know anything about at. But this is
+a point that I, the Professor, understand, my friends, or ought
+to, certainly, better than you do. The next argument you will all
+appreciate.
+
+I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of
+Phrenology, which is very similar to that of the Pseudo-sciences. An
+example will show it most conveniently.
+
+A. is a notorious thief. Messrs. Bumpus and Crane examine him and find a
+good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness. Positive fact for Phrenology. Casts
+and drawings of A. are multiplied, and the bump does not lose in the act
+of copying.--I did not say it gained.--What do you look so for? (to the
+boarders.)
+
+Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A. But B. has no bump at all
+over Acquisitiveness. Negative fact; goes against Phrenology.--Not a bit
+of it. Don't you see how small Conscientiousness is? That's the reason
+B. stole.
+
+And then comes C., ten times as much a thief as either A. or B.,--used
+to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own pockets and
+put its contents in another, if he could find no other way of committing
+petty larceny. Unfortunately, C. has a hollow, instead of a bump,
+over Acquisitiveness. Ah, but just look and see what a bump of
+Alimentiveness! Did not C. buy nuts and gingerbread, when a boy, with
+the money he stole? Of course you see why he is a thief, and how his
+example confirms our noble science.
+
+At last comes along a case which is apparently a settler, for there is
+a little brain with vast and varied powers,--a case like that of Byron,
+for instance. Then comes out the grand reserve-reason which covers
+everything and renders it simply impossible ever to corner a
+Phrenologist. “It is not the size alone, but the quality of an organ,
+which determines its degree of power.”
+
+Oh! oh! I see.--The argument may be briefly stated thus by the
+Phrenologist: “Heads I win, tails you lose.” Well, that's convenient.
+
+It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to the
+Pseudo-sciences. I did not say it was a Pseudo-science.
+
+I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and amazed
+at the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of Phrenology had
+read their characters written upon their skulls. Of course the Professor
+acquires his information solely through his cranial inspections and
+manipulations.--What are you laughing at? (to the boarders.)--But let us
+just suppose, for a moment, that a tolerably cunning fellow, who did not
+know or care anything about Phrenology, should open a shop and undertake
+to read off people's characters at fifty cents or a dollar apiece. Let
+us see how well he could get along without the “organs.”
+
+I will suppose myself to set up such a shop. I would invest one hundred
+dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts, and other
+matters that would make the most show for the money. That would do to
+begin with. I would then advertise myself as the celebrated Professor
+Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and wait for my first
+customer. My first customer is a middle-aged man. I look at him,--ask
+him a question or two, so as to hear him talk. When I have got the
+hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed to fumble his skull,
+dictating as follows: SCALE FROM 1 TO 10.
+
+
+  LIST OF FACULTIES FOR           PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL.
+        CUSTOMER.
+                               Each to be accompanied with a wink.
+
+  Amativeness, 7.        Most men love the conflicting sex, and all
+                         men love to be told they do.
+
+  Alimentiveness, 8.     Don't you see that he has burst off his
+                         lowest waistcoat-button with feeding,--hey
+
+  Acquisitiveness, 8.    Of course.  A middle-aged Yankee.
+
+  Approbativeness 7+.    Hat well brushed.  Hair ditto.  Mark the
+                         effect of that plus sign.
+
+  Self-Esteem 6.         His face shows that.
+
+  Benevolence 9.         That'll please him.
+
+  Conscientiousness 8 1/2  That fraction looks first-rate.
+
+  Mirthfulness 7         Has laughed twice since he came in.
+
+  Ideality 9             That sounds well.
+
+  Form, Size, Weight,    4 to 6.  Average everything that Color, Locality,
+                         cannot be guessed. Eventuality, etc. etc.
+
+                  And so of the other faculties.
+
+
+Of course, you know, that isn't the way the Phrenologists do. They go
+only by the bumps.--What do you keep laughing so for? (to the boarders.)
+I only said that is the way I should practise “Phrenology” for a living.
+
+                    End of my Lecture.
+
+
+--The Reformers have good heads, generally. Their faces are commonly
+serene enough, and they are lambs in private intercourse, even though
+their voices may be like
+
+         The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore,
+
+when heard from the platform. Their greatest spiritual danger is from
+the perpetual flattery of abuse to which they are exposed. These lines
+are meant to caution them.
+
+
+          SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER.
+
+               HIS TEMPTATION.
+
+     No fear lest praise should make us proud!
+     We know how cheaply that is won;
+     The idle homage of the crowd
+     Is proof of tasks as idly done.
+
+     A surface-smile may pay the toil
+     That follows still the conquering Right,
+     With soft, white hands to dress the spoil
+     That sunbrowned valor clutched in fight.
+
+     Sing the sweet song of other days,
+     Serenely placid, safely true,
+     And o'er the present's parching ways
+     Thy verse distils like evening dew.
+
+     But speak in words of living power,
+     --They fall like drops of scalding rain
+     That plashed before the burning shower
+     Swept o'er the cities of the plain!
+
+     Then scowling Hate turns deadly pale,
+     --Then Passion's half-coiled adders spring,
+     And, smitten through their leprous mail,
+     Strike right and left in hope to sting.
+
+     If thou, unmoved by poisoning wrath,
+     Thy feet on earth, thy heart above,
+     Canst walk in peace thy kingly path,
+     Unchanged in trust, unchilled in love,--
+
+     Too kind for bitter words to grieve,
+     Too firm for clamor to dismay,
+     When Faith forbids thee to believe,
+     And Meekness calls to disobey,--
+
+     Ah, then beware of mortal pride!
+     The smiling pride that calmly scorns
+     Those foolish fingers, crimson dyed
+     In laboring on thy crown of thorns!
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+One of our boarders--perhaps more than one was concerned in it--sent in
+some questions to me, the other day, which, trivial as some of them are,
+I felt bound to answer.
+
+1.--Whether a lady was ever known to write a letter covering only a
+single page?
+
+To this I answered, that there was a case on record where a lady had but
+half a sheet of paper and no envelope; and being obliged to send through
+the post-office, she covered only one side of the paper (crosswise,
+lengthwise, and diagonally).
+
+2.--What constitutes a man a gentleman?
+
+To this I gave several answers, adapted to particular classes of
+questioners.
+
+a. Not trying to be a gentleman.
+
+b. Self-respect underlying courtesy.
+
+c. Knowledge and observance of the fitness of things in social
+intercourse.
+
+d. f. s. d. (as many suppose.)
+
+3.--Whether face or figure is most attractive in the female sex?
+
+Answered in the following epigram, by a young man about town:
+
+     Quoth Tom, “Though fair her features be,
+     It is her figure pleases me.”
+      “What may her figure be?” I cried.
+     “One hundred thousand!” he replied.
+
+When this was read to the boarders, the young man John said he should
+like a chance to “step up” to a figger of that kind, if the girl was one
+of the right sort.
+
+The landlady said them that merried for money didn't deserve the
+blessin' of a good wife. Money was a great thing when them that had it
+made a good use of it. She had seen better days herself, and knew what
+it was never to want for anything. One of her cousins merried a very
+rich old gentleman, and she had heerd that he said he lived ten year
+longer than if he'd staid by himself without anybody to take care of
+him. There was nothin' like a wife for nussin' sick folks and them that
+couldn't take care of themselves.
+
+The young man John got off a little wink, and pointed slyly with his
+thumb in the direction of our diminutive friend, for whom he seemed to
+think this speech was intended.
+
+If it was meant for him, he did n't appear to know that it was. Indeed,
+he seems somewhat listless of late, except when the conversation falls
+upon one of those larger topics that specially interest him, and then he
+grows excited, speaks loud and fast, sometimes almost savagely,--and, I
+have noticed once or twice, presses his left hand to his right side,
+as if there were something that ached, or weighed, or throbbed in that
+region.
+
+While he speaks in this way, the general conversation is interrupted,
+and we all listen to him. Iris looks steadily in his face, and then
+he will turn as if magnetized and meet the amber eyes with his own
+melancholy gaze. I do believe that they have some kind of understanding
+together, that they meet elsewhere than at our table, and that there is
+a mystery, which is going to break upon us all of a sudden, involving
+the relations of these two persons. From the very first, they have taken
+to each other. The one thing they have in common is the heroic will.
+In him, it shows itself in thinking his way straightforward, in doing
+battle for “free trade and no right of search” on the high seas of
+religious controversy, and especially in fighting the battles of his
+crooked old city. In her, it is standing up for her little friend with
+the most queenly disregard of the code of boarding-house etiquette.
+People may say or look what they like,--she will have her way about this
+sentiment of hers.
+
+The Poor Relation is in a dreadful fidget whenever the Little Gentleman
+says anything that interferes with her own infallibility. She seems
+to think Faith must go with her face tied up, as if she had the
+toothache,--and that if she opens her mouth to the quarter the wind
+blows from, she will catch her “death o' cold.”
+
+The landlady herself came to him one day, as I have found out, and
+tried to persuade him to hold his tongue.--The boarders was gettin'
+uneasy,--she said,--and some of 'em would go, she mistrusted, if he
+talked any more about things that belonged to the ministers to settle.
+She was a poor woman, that had known better days, but all her livin'
+depended on her boarders, and she was sure there was n't any of 'em she
+set so much by as she did by him; but there was them that never liked to
+hear about sech things, except on Sundays.
+
+The Little Gentleman looked very smiling at the landlady, who smiled
+even more cordially in return, and adjusted her cap-ribbon with an
+unconscious movement,--a reminiscence of the long-past pairing-time,
+when she had smoothed her locks and softened her voice, and won her mate
+by these and other bird-like graces.--My dear Madam,--he said,--I will
+remember your interests, and speak only of matters to which I am totally
+indifferent.--I don't doubt he meant this; but a day or two after,
+something stirred him up, and I heard his voice uttering itself aloud,
+thus:
+
+-It must be done, Sir!--he was saying,--it must be done! Our religion
+has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has been Orientalized,
+it has been Anglicized, and the time is at hand when it must be
+AMERICANIZED! Now, Sir, you see what Americanizing is in politics;--it
+means that a man shall have a vote because he is a man,--and shall vote
+for whom he pleases, without his neighbor's interference. If he chooses
+to vote for the Devil, that is his lookout;--perhaps he thinks the Devil
+is better than the other candidates; and I don't doubt he's often right,
+Sir. Just so a man's soul has a vote in the spiritual community; and
+it doesn't do, Sir, or it won't do long, to call him “schismatic”
+ and “heretic” and those other wicked names that the old murderous
+Inquisitors have left us to help along “peace and goodwill to men”!
+
+As long as you could catch a man and drop him into an oubliette, or pull
+him out a few inches longer by machinery, or put a hot iron through his
+tongue, or make him climb up a ladder and sit on a board at the top of a
+stake so that he should be slowly broiled by the fire kindled round it,
+there was some sense in these words; they led to something. But since we
+have done with those tools, we had better give up those words. I should
+like to see a Yankee advertisement like this!--(the Little Gentleman
+laughed fiercely as he uttered the words,--)
+
+--Patent thumb-screws,--will crush the bone in three turns.
+
+--The cast-iron boot, with wedge and mallet, only five dollars!
+
+--The celebrated extension-rack, warranted to stretch a man six inches
+in twenty minutes,--money returned, if it proves unsatisfactory.
+
+I should like to see such an advertisement, I say, Sir! Now, what's
+the use of using the words that belonged with the thumb-screws, and
+the Blessed Virgin with the knives under her petticoats and sleeves and
+bodice, and the dry pan and gradual fire, if we can't have the things
+themselves, Sir? What's the use of painting the fire round a poor
+fellow, when you think it won't do to kindle one under him,--as they did
+at Valencia or Valladolid, or wherever it was?
+
+--What story is that?--I said.
+
+Why,--he answered,--at the last auto-da-fe, in 1824 or '5, or somewhere
+there,--it's a traveller's story, but a mighty knowing traveller he
+is,--they had a “heretic” to use up according to the statutes provided
+for the crime of private opinion. They could n't quite make up their
+minds to burn him, so they only hung him in a hogshead painted all over
+with flames!
+
+No, Sir! when a man calls you names because you go to the ballot-box
+and vote for your candidate, or because you say this or that is your
+opinion, he forgets in which half of the world he was born, Sir! It
+won't be long, Sir, before we have Americanized religion as we have
+Americanized government; and then, Sir, every soul God sends into
+the world will be good in the face of all men for just so much of His
+“inspiration” as “giveth him understanding”!--None of my words, Sir!
+none of my words!
+
+--If Iris does not love this Little Gentleman, what does love look like
+when one sees it? She follows him with her eyes, she leans over toward
+him when he speaks, her face changes with the changes of his speech, so
+that one might think it was with her as with Christabel,--
+
+          That all her features were resigned
+          To this sole image in her mind.
+
+But she never looks at him with such intensity of devotion as when he
+says anything about the soul and the soul's atmosphere, religion.
+
+Women are twice as religious as men;--all the world knows that.
+Whether they are any better, in the eyes of Absolute Justice, might be
+questioned; for the additional religious element supplied by sex hardly
+seems to be a matter of praise or blame. But in all common aspects they
+are so much above us that we get most of our religion from them,--from
+their teachings, from their example,--above all, from their pure
+affections.
+
+Now this poor little Iris had been talked to strangely in her childhood.
+Especially she had been told that she hated all good things,--which
+every sensible parent knows well enough is not true of a great many
+children, to say the least. I have sometimes questioned whether many
+libels on human nature had not been a natural consequence of the
+celibacy of the clergy, which was enforced for so long a period.
+
+The child had met this and some other equally encouraging statements
+as to her spiritual conditions, early in life, and fought the battle of
+spiritual independence prematurely, as many children do. If all she did
+was hateful to God, what was the meaning of the approving or else
+the disapproving conscience, when she had done “right” or “wrong”? No
+“shoulder-striker” hits out straighter than a child with its logic. Why,
+I can remember lying in my bed in the nursery and settling questions
+which all that I have heard since and got out of books has never been
+able to raise again. If a child does not assert itself in this way in
+good season, it becomes just what its parents or teachers were, and is
+no better than a plastic image.--How old was I at the time?--I suppose
+about 5823 years old,--that is, counting from Archbishop Usher's date
+of the Creation, and adding the life of the race, whose accumulated
+intelligence is a part of my inheritance, to my own. A good deal older
+than Plato, you see, and much more experienced than my Lord Bacon and
+most of the world's teachers.--Old books, as you well know, are books of
+the world's youth, and new books are fruits of its age. How many of all
+these ancient folios round me are like so many old cupels! The gold has
+passed out of them long ago, but their pores are full of the dross with
+which it was mingled.
+
+And so Iris--having thrown off that first lasso which not only fetters,
+but chokes those whom it can hold, so that they give themselves up
+trembling and breathless to the great soul-subduer, who has them by the
+windpipe had settled a brief creed for herself, in which love of the
+neighbor, whom we have seen, was the first article, and love of
+the Creator, whom we have not seen, grew out of this as its natural
+development, being necessarily second in order of time to the first
+unselfish emotions which we feel for the fellow-creatures who surround
+us in our early years.
+
+The child must have some place of worship. What would a young girl be
+who never mingled her voice with the songs and prayers that rose all
+around her with every returning day of rest? And Iris was free to
+choose. Sometimes one and sometimes another would offer to carry her
+to this or that place of worship; and when the doors were hospitably
+opened, she would often go meekly in by herself. It was a curious fact,
+that two churches as remote from each other in doctrine as could well be
+divided her affections.
+
+The Church of Saint Polycarp had very much the look of a Roman
+Catholic chapel. I do not wish to run the risk of giving names to the
+ecclesiastical furniture which gave it such a Romish aspect; but there
+were pictures, and inscriptions in antiquated characters, and there
+were reading-stands, and flowers on the altar, and other elegant
+arrangements. Then there were boys to sing alternately in choirs
+responsive to each other, and there was much bowing, with very loud
+responding, and a long service and a short sermon, and a bag, such as
+Judas used to hold in the old pictures, was carried round to receive
+contributions. Everything was done not only “decently and in order,”
+ but, perhaps one might say, with a certain air of magnifying their
+office on the part of the dignified clergymen, often two or three in
+number. The music and the free welcome were grateful to Iris, and she
+forgot her prejudices at the door of the chapel. For this was a church
+with open doors, with seats for all classes and all colors alike,--a
+church of zealous worshippers after their faith, of charitable and
+serviceable men and women, one that took care of its children and never
+forgot its poor, and whose people were much more occupied in looking out
+for their own souls than in attacking the faith of their neighbors. In
+its mode of worship there was a union of two qualities,--the taste and
+refinement, which the educated require just as much in their churches as
+elsewhere, and the air of stateliness, almost of pomp, which impresses
+the common worshipper, and is often not without its effect upon
+those who think they hold outward forms as of little value. Under the
+half-Romish aspect of the Church of Saint Polycarp, the young girl
+found a devout and loving and singularly cheerful religious spirit. The
+artistic sense, which betrayed itself in the dramatic proprieties of
+its ritual, harmonized with her taste. The mingled murmur of the loud
+responses, in those rhythmic phrases, so simple, yet so fervent, almost
+as if every tenth heart-beat, instead of its dull tic-tac, articulated
+itself as “Good Lord, deliver us! “--the sweet alternation of the two
+choirs, as their holy song floated from side to side, the keen young
+voices rising like a flight of singing-birds that passes from one grove
+to another, carrying its music with it back and forward,--why should
+she not love these gracious outward signs of those inner harmonies
+which none could deny made beautiful the lives of many of her
+fellow-worshippers in the humble, yet not inelegant Chapel of Saint
+Polycarp?
+
+The young Marylander, who was born and bred to that mode of worship, had
+introduced her to the chapel, for which he did the honors for such of
+our boarders as were not otherwise provided for. I saw them looking over
+the same prayer-book one Sunday, and I could not help thinking that two
+such young and handsome persons could hardly worship together in
+safety for a great while. But they seemed to mind nothing but their
+prayer-book. By-and-by the silken bag was handed round.--I don't believe
+she will; so awkward, you know;--besides, she only came by invitation.
+There she is, with her hand in her pocket, though,--and sure enough, her
+little bit of silver tinkled as it struck the coin beneath. God bless
+her! she has n't much to give; but her eye glistens when she gives it,
+and that is all Heaven asks.--That was the first time I noticed these
+young people together, and I am sure they behaved with the most charming
+propriety,--in fact, there was one of our silent lady-boarders with
+them, whose eyes would have kept Cupid and Psyche to their good
+behavior. A day or two after this I noticed that the young gentleman had
+left his seat, which you may remember was at the corner diagonal to that
+of Iris, so that they have been as far removed from each other as they
+could be at the table. His new seat is three or four places farther down
+the table. Of course I made a romance out of this, at once. So stupid
+not to see it! How could it be otherwise?--Did you speak, Madam? I beg
+your pardon. (To my lady-reader.)
+
+I never saw anything like the tenderness with which this young girl
+treats her little deformed neighbor. If he were in the way of going to
+church, I know she would follow him. But his worship, if any, is not
+with the throng of men and women and staring children.
+
+I, the Professor, on the other hand, am a regular church-goer. I should
+go for various reasons if I did not love it; but I am happy enough to
+find great pleasure in the midst of devout multitudes, whether I can
+accept all their creeds or not. One place of worship comes nearer than
+the rest to my ideal standard, and to this it was that I carried our
+young girl.
+
+The Church of the Galileans, as it is called, is even humbler in outside
+pretensions than the Church of Saint Polycarp. Like that, it is open to
+all comers. The stranger who approaches it looks down a quiet street and
+sees the plainest of chapels,--a kind of wooden tent, that owes whatever
+grace it has to its pointed windows and the high, sharp roofs--traces,
+both, of that upward movement of ecclesiastical architecture which
+soared aloft in cathedral-spires, shooting into the sky as the spike of
+a flowering aloe from the cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below.
+This suggestion of medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which
+a hand-bell might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was
+all of outward show the small edifice could boast. Within there was very
+little that pretended to be attractive. A small organ at one side, and a
+plain pulpit, showed that the building was a church; but it was a church
+reduced to its simplest expression:
+
+Yet when the great and wise monarch of the East sat upon his throne, in
+all the golden blaze of the spoils of Ophir and the freights of the navy
+of Tarshish, his glory was not like that of this simple chapel in its
+Sunday garniture. For the lilies of the field, in their season, and the
+fairest flowers of the year, in due succession, were clustered every
+Sunday morning over the preacher's desk. Slight, thin-tissued
+blossoms of pink and blue and virgin white in early spring, then the
+full-breasted and deep-hearted roses of summer, then the velvet-robed
+crimson and yellow flowers of autumn, and in the winter delicate exotics
+that grew under skies of glass in the false summers of our crystal
+palaces without knowing that it was the dreadful winter of New England
+which was rattling the doors and frosting the panes,--in their language
+the whole year told its history of life and growth and beauty from that
+simple desk. There was always at least one good sermon,--this floral
+homily. There was at least one good prayer,--that brief space when all
+were silent, after the manner of the Friends at their devotions.
+
+Here, too, Iris found an atmosphere of peace and love. The same gentle,
+thoughtful faces, the same cheerful but reverential spirit, the
+same quiet, the same life of active benevolence. But in all else how
+different from the Church of Saint Polycarp! No clerical costume, no
+ceremonial forms, no carefully trained choirs. A liturgy they have, to
+be sure, which does not scruple to borrow from the time-honored manuals
+of devotion, but also does not hesitate to change its expressions to its
+own liking.
+
+Perhaps the good people seem a little easy with each other;--they are
+apt to nod familiarly, and have even been known to whisper before
+the minister came in. But it is a relief to get rid of that old
+Sunday--no,--Sabbath face, which suggests the idea that the first day
+of the week is commemorative of some most mournful event. The truth
+is, these brethren and sisters meet very much as a family does for its
+devotions, not putting off their humanity in the least, considering it
+on the whole quite a delightful matter to come together for prayer and
+song and good counsel from kind and wise lips. And if they are freer in
+their demeanor than some very precise congregations, they have not the
+air of a worldly set of people. Clearly they have not come to advertise
+their tailors and milliners, nor for the sake of exchanging criticisms
+on the literary character of the sermon they may hear. There is no
+restlessness and no restraint among these quiet, cheerful worshippers.
+One thing that keeps them calm and happy during the season so evidently
+trying to many congregations is, that they join very generally in the
+singing. In this way they get rid of that accumulated nervous force
+which escapes in all sorts of fidgety movements, so that a minister
+trying to keep his congregation still reminds one of a boy with his hand
+over the nose of a pump which another boy is working,--this spirting
+impatience of the people is so like the jets that find their way through
+his fingers, and the grand rush out at the final Amen! has such a
+wonderful likeness to the gush that takes place when the boy pulls his
+hand away, with immense relief, as it seems, to both the pump and the
+officiating youngster.
+
+How sweet is this blending of all voices and all hearts in one common
+song of praise! Some will sing a little loud, perhaps,--and now and
+then an impatient chorister will get a syllable or two in advance, or an
+enchanted singer so lose all thought of time and place in the luxury
+of a closing cadence that he holds on to the last semi-breve upon his
+private responsibility; but how much more of the spirit of the old
+Psalmist in the music of these imperfectly trained voices than in the
+academic niceties of the paid performers who take our musical worship
+out of our hands!
+
+I am of the opinion that the creed of the Church of the Galileans is not
+laid down in as many details as that of the Church of Saint Polycarp.
+Yet I suspect, if one of the good people from each of those churches had
+met over the bed of a suffering fellow-creature, or for the promotion
+of any charitable object, they would have found they had more in common
+than all the special beliefs or want of beliefs that separated them
+would amount to. There are always many who believe that the fruits of
+a tree afford a better test of its condition than a statement of the
+composts with which it is dressed, though the last has its meaning and
+importance, no doubt.
+
+Between these two churches, then, our young Iris divides her affections.
+But I doubt if she listens to the preacher at either with more devotion
+than she does to her little neighbor when he talks of these matters.
+
+What does he believe? In the first place, there is some deep-rooted
+disquiet lying at the bottom of his soul, which makes him very bitter
+against all kinds of usurpation over the right of private judgment. Over
+this seems to lie a certain tenderness for humanity in general, bred out
+of life-long trial, I should say, but sharply streaked with fiery lines
+of wrath at various individual acts of wrong, especially if they come
+in an ecclesiastical shape, and recall to him the days when his mother's
+great-grandmother was strangled on Witch Hill, with a text from the Old
+Testament for her halter. With all this, he has a boundless belief
+in the future of this experimental hemisphere, and especially in the
+destiny of the free thought of its northeastern metropolis.
+
+--A man can see further, Sir,--he said one day,--from the top of Boston
+State House, and see more that is worth seeing, than from all the
+pyramids and turrets and steeples in all the places in the world! No
+smoke, Sir; no fog, Sir; and a clean sweep from the Outer Light and the
+sea beyond it to the New Hampshire mountains! Yes, Sir,--and there are
+great truths that are higher than mountains and broader than seas, that
+people are looking for from the tops of these hills of ours;--such as
+the world never saw, though it might have seen them at Jerusalem, if its
+eyes had been open!--Where do they have most crazy people? Tell me that,
+Sir!
+
+I answered, that I had heard it said there were more in New England than
+in most countries, perhaps more than in any part of the world.
+
+Very good, Sir,--he answered.--When have there been most people killed
+and wounded in the course of this century?
+
+During the wars of the French Empire, no doubt,--I said.
+
+That's it! that's it!--said the Little Gentleman;--where the battle of
+intelligence is fought, there are most minds bruised and broken! We're
+battling for a faith here, Sir.
+
+The divinity-student remarked, that it was rather late in the world's
+history for men to be looking out for a new faith.
+
+I did n't say a new faith,--said the Little Gentleman;--old or new,
+it can't help being different here in this American mind of ours from
+anything that ever was before; the people are new, Sir, and that makes
+the difference. One load of corn goes to the sty, and makes the fat
+of swine,--another goes to the farm-house, and becomes the muscle that
+clothes the right arms of heroes. It is n't where a pawn stands on the
+board that makes the difference, but what the game round it is when it
+is on this or that square.
+
+Can any man look round and see what Christian countries are now doing,
+and how they are governed, and what is the general condition of society,
+without seeing that Christianity is the flag under which the world
+sails, and not the rudder that steers its course? No, Sir! There was
+a great raft built about two thousand years ago,--call it an ark,
+rather,--the world's great ark! big enough to hold all mankind, and made
+to be launched right out into the open waves of life,--and here it has
+been lying, one end on the shore and one end bobbing up and down in the
+water, men fighting all the time as to who should be captain and who
+should have the state-rooms, and throwing each other over the side
+because they could not agree about the points of compass, but the
+great vessel never getting afloat with its freight of nations and their
+rulers;--and now, Sir, there is and has been for this long time a fleet
+of “heretic” lighters sailing out of Boston Bay, and they have been
+saying, and they say now, and they mean to keep saying, “Pump out your
+bilge-water, shovel over your loads of idle ballast, get out your old
+rotten cargo, and we will carry it out into deep waters and sink it
+where it will never be seen again; so shall the ark of the world's hope
+float on the ocean, instead of sticking in the dock-mud where it is
+lying!”
+
+It's a slow business, this of getting the ark launched. The Jordan was
+n't deep enough, and the Tiber was n't deep enough, and the Rhone was
+n't deep enough, and the Thames was n't deep enough, and perhaps the
+Charles is n't deep enough; but I don't feel sure of that, Sir, and I
+love to hear the workmen knocking at the old blocks of tradition and
+making the ways smooth with the oil of the Good Samaritan. I don't know,
+Sir,--but I do think she stirs a little,--I do believe she slides;--and
+when I think of what a work that is for the dear old three-breasted
+mother of American liberty, I would not take all the glory of all the
+greatest cities in the world for my birthright in the soil of little
+Boston!
+
+--Some of us could not help smiling at this burst of local patriotism,
+especially when it finished with the last two words.
+
+And Iris smiled, too. But it was the radiant smile of pleasure which
+always lights up her face when her little neighbor gets excited on the
+great topics of progress in freedom and religion, and especially on the
+part which, as he pleases himself with believing, his own city is
+to take in that consummation of human development to which he looks
+forward.
+
+Presently she looked into his face with a changed expression,--the
+anxiety of a mother that sees her child suffering.
+
+You are not well,--she said.
+
+I am never well,--he answered.--His eyes fell mechanically on the
+death's-head ring he wore on his right hand. She took his hand as if it
+had been a baby's, and turned the grim device so that it should be out
+of sight. One slight, sad, slow movement of the head seemed to say, “The
+death-symbol is still there!”
+
+A very odd personage, to be sure! Seems to know what is going on,
+--reads books, old and new,--has many recent publications sent him, they
+tell me, but, what is more curious, keeps up with the everyday affairs
+of the world, too. Whether he hears everything that is said with
+preternatural acuteness, or whether some confidential friend visits him
+in a quiet way, is more than I can tell. I can make nothing more of
+the noises I hear in his room than my old conjectures. The movements
+I mention are less frequent, but I often hear the plaintive cry,--I
+observe that it is rarely laughing of late;--I never have detected one
+articulate word, but I never heard such tones from anything but a human
+voice.
+
+There has been, of late, a deference approaching to tenderness, on
+the part of the boarders generally so far as he is concerned. This is
+doubtless owing to the air of suffering which seems to have saddened his
+look of late. Either some passion is gnawing at him inwardly, or some
+hidden disease is at work upon him.
+
+--What 's the matter with Little Boston?--said the young man John to me
+one day.--There a'n't much of him, anyhow; but 't seems to me he looks
+peakeder than ever. The old woman says he's in a bad way, 'n' wants a
+puss to take care of him. Them pusses that take care of old rich folks
+marry 'em sometimes,--'n' they don't commonly live a great while after
+that. No, Sir! I don't see what he wants to die for, after he's taken so
+much trouble to live in such poor accommodations as that crooked body
+of his. I should like to know how his soul crawled into it, 'n' how it's
+goin' to get out. What business has he to die, I should like to know?
+Let Ma'am Allen (the gentleman with the diamond) die, if he likes, and
+be (this is a family-magazine); but we a'n't goin' to have him dyin'.
+Not by a great sight. Can't do without him anyhow. A'n't it fun to hear
+him blow off his steam?
+
+I believe the young fellow would take it as a personal insult, if the
+Little Gentleman should show any symptoms of quitting our table for a
+better world.
+
+--In the mean time, what with going to church in company with our young
+lady, and taking every chance I could get to talk with her, I have found
+myself becoming, I will not say intimate, but well acquainted with Miss
+Iris. There is a certain frankness and directness about her that perhaps
+belong to her artist nature. For, you see, the one thing that marks the
+true artist is a clear perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction
+from that imperfect mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the
+feeble pictures and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas
+or in stone. A true artist, therefore, can hardly fail to have a sharp,
+well-defined mental physiognomy. Besides this, many young girls have
+a strange audacity blended with their instinctive delicacy. Even in
+physical daring many of them are a match for boys; whereas you will find
+few among mature women, and especially if they are mothers, who do not
+confess, and not unfrequently proclaim, their timidity. One of these
+young girls, as many of us hereabouts remember, climbed to the top of a
+jagged, slippery rock lying out in the waves,--an ugly height to get up,
+and a worse one to get down, even for a bold young fellow of sixteen.
+Another was in the way of climbing tall trees for crows' nests,--and
+crows generally know about how far boys can “shin up,” and set their
+household establishments above that high-water mark. Still another of
+these young ladies I saw for the first time in an open boat, tossing on
+the ocean ground-swell, a mile or two from shore, off a lonely island.
+She lost all her daring, after she had some girls of her own to look out
+for.
+
+Many blondes are very gentle, yielding in character, impressible,
+unelastic. But the positive blondes, with the golden tint running
+through them, are often full of character. They come, probably enough,
+from those deep-bosomed German women that Tacitus portrayed in such
+strong colors. The negative blondes, or those women whose tints have
+faded out as their line of descent has become impoverished, are of
+various blood, and in them the soul has often become pale with that
+blanching of the hair and loss of color in the eyes which makes them
+approach the character of Albinesses.
+
+I see in this young girl that union of strength and sensibility which,
+when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to accompany
+this combination of active and passive capacity, we call genius. She is
+not an accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but there is always
+an air in every careless figure she draws, as it were of upward
+aspiration,--the elan of John of Bologna's Mercury,--a lift to them, as
+if they had on winged sandals, like the herald of the Gods. I hear her
+singing sometimes; and though she evidently is not trained, yet is there
+a wild sweetness in her fitful and sometimes fantastic melodies,--such
+as can come only from the inspiration of the moment,--strangely
+enough, reminding me of those long passages I have heard from my little
+neighbor's room, yet of different tone, and by no means to be mistaken
+for those weird harmonies.
+
+I cannot pretend to deny that I am interested in the girl. Alone,
+unprotected, as I have seen so many young girls left in boarding-houses,
+the centre of all the men's eyes that surround the table, watched with
+jealous sharpness by every woman, most of all by that poor relation
+of our landlady, who belongs to the class of women that like to
+catch others in mischief when they themselves are too mature for
+indiscretions, (as one sees old rogues turn to thief-catchers,) one of
+Nature's gendarmerie, clad in a complete suit of wrinkles, the
+cheapest coat-of-mail against the shafts of the great little enemy,--so
+surrounded, Iris spans this commonplace household-life of ours with her
+arch of beauty, as the rainbow, whose name she borrows, looks down on a
+dreary pasture with its feeding flocks and herds of indifferent animals.
+
+These young girls that live in boarding-houses can do pretty much
+as they will. The female gendarmes are off guard occasionally. The
+sitting-room has its solitary moments, when any two boarders who wish to
+meet may come together accidentally, (accidentally, I said, Madam, and
+I had not the slightest intention of Italicizing the word,) and discuss
+the social or political questions of the day, or any other subject that
+may prove interesting. Many charming conversations take place at the
+foot of the stairs, or while one of the parties is holding the latch
+of a door,--in the shadow of porticoes, and especially on those outside
+balconies which some of our Southern neighbors call “stoops,” the most
+charming places in the world when the moon is just right and the roses
+and honeysuckles are in full blow,--as we used to think in eighteen
+hundred and never mention it.
+
+On such a balcony or “stoop,” one evening, I walked with Iris. We were
+on pretty good terms now, and I had coaxed her arm under mine,--my left
+arm, of course. That leaves one's right arm free to defend the lovely
+creature, if the rival--odious wretch! attempt, to ravish her from your
+side. Likewise if one's heart should happen to beat a little, its mute
+language will not be without its meaning, as you will perceive when the
+arm you hold begins to tremble, a circumstance like to occur, if you
+happen to be a good-looking young fellow, and you two have the “stoop”
+ to yourselves.
+
+We had it to ourselves that evening. The Koh-inoor, as we called him,
+was in a corner with our landlady's daughter. The young fellow John was
+smoking out in the yard. The gendarme was afraid of the evening air, and
+kept inside, The young Marylander came to the door, looked out and saw
+us walking together, gave his hat a pull over his forehead and stalked
+off. I felt a slight spasm, as it were, in the arm I held, and saw the
+girl's head turn over her shoulder for a second. What a kind creature
+this is! She has no special interest in this youth, but she does not
+like to see a young fellow going off because he feels as if he were not
+wanted.
+
+She had her locked drawing-book under her arm.--Let me take it,--I said.
+
+She gave it to me to carry.
+
+This is full of caricatures of all of us, I am sure,--said I.
+
+She laughed, and said,--No,--not all of you.
+
+I was there, of course?
+
+Why, no,--she had never taken so much pains with me.
+
+Then she would let me see the inside of it?
+
+She would think of it.
+
+Just as we parted, she took a little key from her pocket and handed it
+to me. This unlocks my naughty book,--she said,--you shall see it. I am
+not afraid of you.
+
+I don't know whether the last words exactly pleased me. At any rate, I
+took the book and hurried with it to my room. I opened it, and saw, in a
+few glances, that I held the heart of Iris in my hand.
+
+--I have no verses for you this month, except these few lines suggested
+by the season.
+
+
+               MIDSUMMER.
+
+     Here! sweep these foolish leaves away,
+     I will not crush my brains to-day!
+     Look! are the southern curtains drawn?
+     Fetch me a fan, and so begone!
+
+     Not that,--the palm-tree's rustling leaf
+     Brought from a parching coral-reef!
+     Its breath is heated;--I would swing
+     The broad gray plumes,--the eagle's wing.
+
+     I hate these roses' feverish blood!
+     Pluck me a half-blown lily-bud,
+     A long-stemmed lily from the lake,
+     Cold as a coiling water-snake.
+
+     Rain me sweet odors on the air,
+     And wheel me up my Indian chair,
+     And spread some book not overwise
+     Flat out before my sleepy eyes.
+
+     --Who knows it not,--this dead recoil
+     Of weary fibres stretched with toil,
+     The pulse that flutters faint and low
+     When Summer's seething breezes blow?
+
+     O Nature! bare thy loving breast
+     And give thy child one hour of rest,
+     One little hour to lie unseen
+     Beneath thy scarf of leafy green!
+
+     So, curtained by a singing pine,
+     Its murmuring voice shall blend with mine,
+     Till, lost in dreams, my faltering lay
+     In sweeter music dies away.
+
+
+
+X
+
+               IRIS, HER BOOK
+
+     I pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
+     By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
+     Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!
+
+     For Iris had no mother to infold her,
+     Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
+     Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her.
+
+     She had not learned the mystery of awaking
+     Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow's aching,
+     Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.
+
+     Yet lived, wrought, suffered.  Lo, the pictured token!
+     Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
+     Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?
+
+     She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,
+     Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
+     And talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.
+
+     Twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wearing,
+     Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
+     Then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.
+
+     Questioning all things: Why her Lord had sent her?
+     What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her?
+     Scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.
+
+     And then all tears and anguish: Queen of Heaven,
+     Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven,
+     Save me! oh, save me!  Shall I die forgiven?
+
+     And then--Ah, God!  But nay, it little matters
+     Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters,
+     The myriad germs that Nature shapes and shatters!
+
+     If she had--Well!  She longed, and knew not wherefore
+     Had the world nothing she might live to care for?
+     No second self to say her evening prayer for?
+
+     She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
+     Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
+     Showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.
+
+     Vain?  Let it be so!  Nature was her teacher.
+     What if a lonely and unsistered creature
+     Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,
+
+     Saying, unsaddened,--This shall soon be faded,
+     And double-hued the shining tresses braided,
+     And all the sunlight of the morning shaded?
+
+     --This her poor book is full of saddest follies,
+     Of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
+     With summer roses twined and wintry hollies.
+
+     In the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
+     Somewhere, beneath some maiden's tear-dimmed glances
+     May fall her little book of dreams and fancies.
+
+     Sweet sister!  Iris, who shall never name thee,
+     Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
+     Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.
+
+     Spare her, I pray thee!  If the maid is sleeping,
+     Peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping.
+     No more!  She leaves her memory in thy keeping.
+
+These verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume. As
+I turned the pages, I hesitated for a moment. Is it quite fair to take
+advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the unsunned depths of
+a young girl's nature, which I can look through, as the balloon-voyagers
+tell us they see from their hanging-baskets through the translucent
+waters which the keenest eye of such as sail over them in ships might
+strive to pierce in vain? Why has the child trusted me with such artless
+confessions,--self-revelations, which might be whispered by trembling
+lips, under the veil of twilight, in sacred confessionals, but which
+I cannot look at in the light of day without a feeling of wronging a
+sacred confidence?
+
+To all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought.
+She did not know how fearfully she had disclosed herself; she was too
+profoundly innocent. Her soul was no more ashamed than the fair shapes
+that walked in Eden without a thought of over-liberal loveliness. Having
+nobody to tell her story to,--having, as she said in her verses, no
+musical instrument to laugh and cry with her,--nothing, in short, but
+the language of pen and pencil,--all the veinings of her nature were
+impressed on these pages as those of a fresh leaf are transferred to the
+blank sheets which inclose it. It was the same thing which I remember
+seeing beautifully shown in a child of some four or five years we had
+one day at our boarding-house. The child was a deaf mute. But its soul
+had the inner sense that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity
+which through natural organs realizes itself in words. Only it had
+to talk with its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid
+alternations of feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted
+over its face, I have never seen in any other human countenance.
+
+I wonder if something of spiritual transparency is not typified in
+the golden-blonde organization. There are a great many little
+creatures,--many small fishes, for instance,--which are literally
+transparent, with the exception of some of the internal organs. The
+heart can be seen beating as if in a case of clouded crystal. The
+central nervous column with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through
+the whole length of the diaphanous muscles of the body. Other little
+creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only their
+surface. Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black, beady-eyes
+and swarthy hue; Judas, in Leonardo's picture, is the model of them all.
+
+However this may be, I should say there never had been a book like this
+of Iris,--so full of the heart's silent language, so transparent that
+the heart itself could be seen beating through it. I should say there
+never could have been such a book, but for one recollection, which is
+not peculiar to myself, but is shared by a certain number of my former
+townsmen. If you think I over-color this matter of the young girl's
+book, hear this, which there are others, as I just said, besides myself,
+will tell you is strictly true.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+THE BOOK OF THE THREE MAIDEN SISTERS.
+
+In the town called Cantabridge, now a city, water-veined and gas
+windpiped, in the street running down to the Bridge, beyond which
+dwelt Sally, told of in a book of a friend of mine, was of old a house
+inhabited by three maidens. They left no near kinsfolk, I believe;
+whether they did or not, I have no ill to speak of them; for they lived
+and died in all good report and maidenly credit. The house they lived
+in was of the small, gambrel-roofed cottage pattern, after the shape of
+Esquires' houses, but after the size of the dwellings of handicraftsmen.
+The lower story was fitted up as a shop. Specially was it provided with
+one of those half-doors now so rarely met with, which are to whole
+doors as spencers worn by old folk are to coats. They speak of limited
+commerce united with a social or observing disposition--on the part of
+the shopkeeper,--allowing, as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping
+off such as have not the excuse of business to cross the threshold.
+On the door-posts, at either side, above the half-door, hung certain
+perennial articles of merchandise, of which my memory still has hanging
+among its faded photographs a kind of netted scarf and some pairs of
+thick woollen stockings. More articles, but not very many, were stored
+inside; and there was one drawer, containing children's books, out of
+which I once was treated to a minute quarto ornamented with handsome
+cuts. This was the only purchase I ever knew to be made at the shop kept
+by the three maiden ladies, though it is probable there were others. So
+long as I remember the shop, the same scarf and, I should say, the same
+stockings hung on the door-posts.--You think I am exaggerating again,
+and that shopkeepers would not keep the same article exposed for years.
+Come to me, the Professor, and I will take you in five minutes to a shop
+in this city where I will show you an article hanging now in the very
+place where more than thirty years ago I myself inquired the price of
+it of the present head of the establishment. [ This was a glass alembic,
+which hung up in Daniel Henchman's apothecary shop, corner of Cambridge
+and Chambers streets.]
+
+The three maidens were of comely presence, and one of them had
+had claims to be considered a Beauty. When I saw them in the old
+meeting-house on Sundays, as they rustled in through the aisles in silks
+and satins, not gay, but more than decent, as I remember them, I thought
+of My Lady Bountiful in the history of “Little King Pippin,” and of the
+Madam Blaize of Goldsmith (who, by the way, must have taken the hint of
+it from a pleasant poem, “Monsieur de la Palisse,” attributed to De la
+Monnoye, in the collection of French songs before me). There was some
+story of an old romance in which the Beauty had played her part. Perhaps
+they all had had lovers; for, as I said, they were shapely and seemly
+personages, as I remember them; but their lives were out of the flower
+and in the berry at the time of my first recollections.
+
+One after another they all three dropped away, objects of kindly
+attention to the good people round, leaving little or almost nothing,
+and nobody to inherit it. Not absolutely nothing, of course. There must
+have been a few old dresses--perhaps some bits of furniture, a Bible,
+and the spectacles the good old souls read it through, and little
+keepsakes, such as make us cry to look at, when we find them in old
+drawers;--such relics there must have been. But there was more. There
+was a manuscript of some hundred pages, closely written, in which the
+poor things had chronicled for many years the incidents of their daily
+life. After their death it was passed round somewhat freely, and fell
+into my hands. How I have cried and laughed and colored over it! There
+was nothing in it to be ashamed of, perhaps there was nothing in it to
+laugh at, but such a picture of the mode of being of poor simple good
+old women I do believe was never drawn before. And there were all the
+smallest incidents recorded, such as do really make up humble life,
+but which die out of all mere literary memoirs, as the houses where the
+Egyptians or the Athenians lived crumble and leave only their temples
+standing. I know, for instance, that on a given day of a certain year,
+a kindly woman, herself a poor widow, now, I trust, not without special
+mercies in heaven for her good deeds,--for I read her name on a proper
+tablet in the churchyard a week ago,--sent a fractional pudding from her
+own table to the Maiden Sisters, who, I fear, from the warmth and detail
+of their description, were fasting, or at least on short allowance,
+about that time. I know who sent them the segment of melon, which in her
+riotous fancy one of them compared to those huge barges to which we give
+the ungracious name of mudscows. But why should I illustrate further
+what it seems almost a breach of confidence to speak of? Some kind
+friend, who could challenge a nearer interest than the curious strangers
+into whose hands the book might fall, at last claimed it, and I was glad
+that it should be henceforth sealed to common eyes. I learned from it
+that every good and, alas! every evil act we do may slumber unforgotten
+even in some earthly record. I got a new lesson in that humanity which
+our sharp race finds it so hard to learn. The poor widow, fighting
+hard to feed and clothe and educate her children, had not forgotten the
+poorer ancient maidens. I remembered it the other day, as I stood by her
+place of rest, and I felt sure that it was remembered elsewhere. I know
+there are prettier words than pudding, but I can't help it,--the pudding
+went upon the record, I feel sure, with the mite which was cast into the
+treasury by that other poor widow whose deed the world shall remember
+forever, and with the coats and garments which the good women cried
+over, when Tabitha, called by interpretation Dorcas, lay dead in the
+upper chamber, with her charitable needlework strewed around her.
+
+--Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters. You will believe me more
+readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one
+that lay open before me. Sometimes it was a poem that held it, sometimes
+a drawing, angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere hieroglyphic
+symbol of which I could make nothing. A rag of cloud on one page, as I
+remember, with a streak of red zigzagging out of it across the paper as
+naturally as a crack runs through a China bowl. On the next page a dead
+bird,--some little favorite, I suppose; for it was worked out with a
+special love, and I saw on the leaf that sign with which once or twice
+in my life I have had a letter sealed,--a round spot where the paper
+is slightly corrugated, and, if there is writing there, the letters
+are somewhat faint and blurred. Most of the pages were surrounded with
+emblematic traceries. It was strange to me at first to see how often
+she introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,--for it
+seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none too
+little cared for by Nature to be without its beauty for her artist
+eye and pencil. By the side of the garden-flowers,--of Spring's curled
+darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to sketching maidens, of
+flower-de-luces and morning-glories, nay, oftener than these, and more
+tenderly caressed by the colored brush that rendered them,--were those
+common growths which fling themselves to be crushed under our feet and
+our wheels, making themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that
+we forget each of them is a ray of the Divine beauty.
+
+Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,--just as we see
+them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the kindling
+sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens the fields,
+to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems fair to loving
+eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round with milk-white rays;
+the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale blue flowers aflame, one
+after another, sparingly, as the lights are kindled in the candelabra
+of decaying palaces where the heirs of dethroned monarchs are dying out;
+the red and white clovers, the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,--“the
+white man's foot,” as the Indians called it,--the wiry, jointed stems of
+that iron creeping plant which we call “knot-grass,” and which loves its
+life so dearly that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe,
+as it clings to the cracks of the pavement;--all these plants, and many
+more, she wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.--On one of the
+pages were some musical notes. I touched them from curiosity on a piano
+belonging to one of our boarders. Strange! There are passages that I
+have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if they
+were gasping for words to interpret them. She must have heard the
+strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my neighbor's
+chamber. The illuminated border she had traced round the page that held
+these notes took the place of the words they seemed to be aching for.
+Above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-hued, anxious and jaded
+and sullen, if you can imagine such an expression in water. On one side
+an Alpine needle, as it were, of black basalt, girdled with snow. On the
+other a threaded waterfall. The red morning-tint that shone in the drops
+had a strange look,--one would say the cliff was bleeding;--perhaps she
+did not mean it. Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey,
+with his wings spread over some unseen object.--And on the very
+next page a procession wound along, after the fashion of that on
+the title-page of Fuller's “Holy War,” in which I recognized without
+difficulty every boarder at our table in all the glory of the most
+resplendent caricature--three only excepted,--the Little Gentleman,
+myself, and one other.
+
+I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the
+girl's little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.--There is a
+left arm again, though;--no,--that is from the “Fighting Gladiator,” the
+“Jeune Heros combattant” of the Louvre;--there is the broad ring of the
+shield. From a cast, doubtless. [The separate casts of the “Gladiator's”
+ arm look immense; but in its place the limb looks light, almost
+slender,--such is the perfection of that miraculous marble. I never
+felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on that
+statue.]--Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the
+humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she
+worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty
+or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A
+dromedary flashing up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean sailed by the
+“ship of the desert.” A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy
+in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter. [The buffalo is the lion
+of the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough
+collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast. And
+here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering curves
+in their bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood under their white
+feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons standing on one foot
+like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold stare of
+monumental effigies.--A very odd page indeed! Not a creature in it
+without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look
+at. You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe
+she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she
+strives to look at in the light of one of Nature's eccentric curves,
+belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong
+to the conic sections, though we cannot see them as symmetrical and
+entire figures, like the circle and ellipse. At any rate, I cannot help
+referring this paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in
+her head connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the
+moulding.--That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine. I
+believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,--if
+it does not really get freed or half freed from her own. Did you ever
+see a case of catalepsy? You know what I mean,--transient loss of sense,
+will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position in which they are
+put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure. She had been talking with
+him and listening to him one day when the boarders moved from the table
+nearly all at once. But she sat as before, her cheek resting on her
+hand, her amber eyes wide open and still. I went to her, she was
+breathing as usual, and her heart was beating naturally enough,--but she
+did not answer. I bent her arm; it was as plastic as softened wax, and
+kept the place I gave it.--This will never do, though, and I sprinkled
+a few drops of water on her forehead. She started and looked round.--I
+have been in a dream,--she said;--I feel as if all my strength were in
+this arm;--give me your hand!--She took my right hand in her left, which
+looked soft and white enough, but--Good Heaven! I believe she will crack
+my bones! All the nervous power in her body must have flashed through
+those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,--she who
+could hardly glove herself when in her common health. Iris turned pale,
+and the tears came to her eyes;--she saw she had given pain. Then she
+trembled, and might have fallen but for me;--the poor little soul had
+been in one of those trances that belong to the spiritual pathology of
+higher natures, mostly those of women.
+
+To come back to this wondrous book of Iris. Two pages faced each other
+which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind. On the
+left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked with a single
+bird. No trace of earth, but still the winged creature seemed to be
+soaring upward and upward. Facing it, one of those black dungeons such
+as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured. I am sure she must have
+seen those awful prisons of his, out of which the Opium-Eater got
+his nightmare vision, described by another as “cemeteries of departed
+greatness, where monstrous and forbidden things are crawling and twining
+their slimy convolutions among mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and
+mutilated inscriptions.” Such a black dungeon faced the page that held
+the blue sky and the single bird; at the bottom of it something was
+coiled,--what, and whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not
+make out.
+
+I told you the young girl's soul was in this book. As I turned over the
+last leaves I could not help starting. There were all sorts of faces
+among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders that ran
+round the pages. They had mostly the outline of childish or womanly or
+manly beauty, without very distinct individuality. But at last it seemed
+to me that some of them were taking on a look not wholly unfamiliar to
+me; there were features that did not seem new.--Can it be so? Was there
+ever such innocence in a creature so full of life? She tells her heart's
+secrets as a three-years-old child betrays itself without need of being
+questioned! This was no common miss, such as are turned out in
+scores from the young-lady-factories, with parchments warranting them
+accomplished and virtuous,--in case anybody should question the fact. I
+began to understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret
+of a real femme incomprise?--for such there are, though they are not the
+ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.
+
+Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the
+far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards
+for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them.
+A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. I have
+frequently seen children, long exercised by pain and exhaustion, whose
+features had a strange look of advanced age. Too often one meets such in
+our charitable institutions. Their faces are saddened and wrinkled, as
+if their few summers were threescore years and ten.
+
+And so, many youthful poets have written as if their hearts were old
+before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool
+and saddening as that of evening in more common lives. The profound
+melancholy of those lines of Shelley,
+
+     “I could lie down like a tired child
+      And weep away the life of care
+      Which I have borne and yet must bear.”
+
+came from a heart, as he says, “too soon grown old,”--at twenty-six
+years, as dull people count time, even when they talk of poets.
+
+I know enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,--only this gift
+of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as well as
+in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of feeling and
+imagery that takes me by surprise. And then besides, and most of all, I
+am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy confidence in me. Perhaps
+I owe it to my--Well, no matter! How one must love the editor who first
+calls him the venerable So-and-So!
+
+--I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down. The world is always
+ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what
+to do with genius. Talent is a docile creature. It bows its head meekly
+while the world slips the collar over it. It backs into the shafts like
+a lamb. It draws its load cheerfully, and is patient of the bit and of
+the whip. But genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood
+makes it hard to train.
+
+Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius,--namely, that
+it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will, and therefore
+more distinctly human in its character. Genius, on the other hand, is
+much more like those instincts which govern the admirable movements of
+the lower creatures, and therefore seems to have something of the
+lower or animal character. A goose flies by a chart which the Royal
+Geographical Society could not mend. A poet, like the goose, sails
+without visible landmarks to unexplored regions of truth, which
+philosophy has yet to lay down on its atlas. The philosopher gets his
+track by observation; the poet trusts to his inner sense, and makes the
+straighter and swifter line.
+
+And yet, to look at it in another light, is not even the lowest instinct
+more truly divine than any voluntary human act done by the suggestion
+of reason? What is a bee's architecture but an unobstructed divine
+thought?--what is a builder's approximative rule but an obstructed
+thought of the Creator, a mutilated and imperfect copy of some absolute
+rule Divine Wisdom has established, transmitted through a human soul as
+an image through clouded glass?
+
+Talent is a very common family-trait; genius belongs rather to
+individuals;--just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family, but
+rarely a whole brood of either. Talent is often to be envied, and genius
+very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of
+dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual
+insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's
+vested ideas,--blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible private
+truth.
+
+--What is the use of my weighing out antitheses in this way, like a
+rhetorical grocer?--You know twenty men of talent, who are making their
+way in the world; you may, perhaps, know one man of genius, and very
+likely do not want to know any more. For a divine instinct, such as
+drives the goose southward and the poet heavenward, is a hard thing to
+manage, and proves too strong for many whom it possesses. It must have
+been a terrible thing to have a friend like Chatterton or Burns. And
+here is a being who certainly has more than talent, at once poet and
+artist in tendency, if not yet fairly developed,--a woman, too;--and
+genius grafted on womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem,
+as you may see a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which
+cannot keep pace with its evolution.
+
+I think now you know something of this young person. She wants nothing
+but an atmosphere to expand in. Now and then one meets with a nature
+for which our hard, practical New England life is obviously utterly
+incompetent. It comes up, as a Southern seed, dropped by accident in one
+of our gardens, finds itself trying to grow and blow into flower among
+the homely roots and the hardy shrubs that surround it. There is no
+question that certain persons who are born among us find themselves many
+degrees too far north. Tropical by organization, they cannot fight for
+life with our eastern and northwestern breezes without losing the
+color and fragrance into which their lives would have blossomed in
+the latitude of myrtles and oranges. Strange effects are produced by
+suffering any living thing to be developed under conditions such as
+Nature had not intended for it. A French physiologist confined some
+tadpoles under water in the dark. Removed from the natural stimulus of
+light, they did not develop legs and arms at the proper period of their
+growth, and so become frogs; they swelled and spread into gigantic
+tadpoles. I have seen a hundred colossal human tadpoles, overgrown
+Zarvce or embryos; nay, I am afraid we Protestants should look on a
+considerable proportion of the Holy Father's one hundred and thirty-nine
+millions as spiritual larvae, sculling about in the dark by the aid
+of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs, and
+breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven into the
+lungs made to receive it. Of course we never try to keep young souls
+in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or two of legs
+by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been bred and fed!
+Never! Never. Never?
+
+Now to go back to our plant. You may know, that, for the earlier stages
+of development of almost any vegetable, you only want air, water, light,
+and warmth. But by-and-by, if it is to have special complex principles
+as a part of its organization, they must be supplied by the soil;--your
+pears will crack, if the root of the tree gets no iron,--your
+asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do. Just at the period of
+adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to come into flower and to
+set its fruit. Then it is that many young natures, having exhausted
+the spiritual soil round them of all it contains of the elements
+they demand, wither away, undeveloped and uncolored, unless they are
+transplanted.
+
+Pray for these dear young souls! This is the second natural birth;--for
+I do not speak of those peculiar religious experiences which form the
+point of transition in many lives between the consciousness of a general
+relation to the Divine nature and a special personal relation. The
+litany should count a prayer for them in the list of its supplications;
+masses should be said for them as for souls in purgatory; all good
+Christians should remember them as they remember those in peril through
+travel or sickness or in warfare.
+
+I would transport this child to Rome at once, if I had my will. She
+should ripen under an Italian sun. She should walk under the frescoed
+vaults of palaces, until her colors deepened to those of Venetian
+beauties, and her forms were perfected into rivalry with the Greek
+marbles, and the east wind was out of her soil. Has she not exhausted
+this lean soil of the elements her growing nature requires?
+
+I do not know. The magnolia grows and comes into full flower on Cape
+Ann, many degrees out of its proper region. I was riding once along that
+delicious road between the hills and the sea, when we passed a thicket
+where there seemed to be a chance of finding it. In five minutes I had
+fallen on the trees in full blossom, and filled my arms with the sweet,
+resplendent flowers. I could not believe I was in our cold, northern
+Essex, which, in the dreary season when I pass its slate-colored,
+unpainted farm-houses, and huge, square, windy, 'squire-built
+“mansions,” looks as brown and unvegetating as an old rug with its
+patterns all trodden out and the colored fringe worn from all its
+border.
+
+If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a poet
+or a painter come to his full growth here just as well? Yes, but if
+the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak of Nature
+springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders, is there not
+as much reason to think the perfumed flower of imaginative genius will
+find it hard to be born and harder to spread its leaves in the clear,
+cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone of humanity?
+
+Take the poet. On the one hand, I believe that a person with the
+poetical faculty finds material everywhere. The grandest objects of
+sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations. The sky,
+the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death love, the hope and vision
+of eternity,--these are images that write themselves in poetry in every
+soul which has anything of the divine gift.
+
+On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished life,
+in distinction from a rich and suggestive one. Which our common New
+England life might be considered, I will not decide. But there are some
+things I think the poet misses in our western Eden. I trust it is not
+unpatriotic to mention them in this point of view as they come before us
+in so many other aspects.
+
+There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which we
+grow. At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked up an
+Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow. At Canoe Meadow, in the Berkshire
+Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads. So everywhere Indian
+arrowheads. Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who knows?
+who cares? There is no history to the red race,--there is hardly an
+individual in it;--a few instincts on legs and holding a tomahawk--there
+is the Indian of all time. The story of one red ant is the story of all
+red ants. So, the poet, in trying to wing his way back through the life
+that has kindled, flitted, and faded along our watercourses and on our
+southern hillsides for unknown generations, finds nothing to breathe or
+fly in; he meets
+
+    “A vast vacuity! all unawares,
+     Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
+     Ten thousand fathom deep.”
+
+But think of the Old World,--that part of it which is the seat of
+ancient civilization! The stakes of the Britons' stockades are still
+standing in the bed of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's
+bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of
+the Caesars. In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of
+yesterday,--Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding newcomer, as
+we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls of Fiesole or
+Volterra. It makes a man human to live on these old humanized soils.
+He cannot help marching in step with his kind in the rear of such a
+procession. They say a dead man's hand cures swellings, if laid on them.
+There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the Past to take down our
+tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.
+Rousseau came out of one of his sad self-torturing fits, as he cast his
+eye on the arches of the old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.
+
+I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving railroad
+village. The new “depot,” the smartly-painted pine houses, the spacious
+brick hotel, the white meeting-house, and the row of youthful and leggy
+trees before it, are exhilarating. They speak of progress, and the time
+when there shall be a city, with a His Honor the Mayor, in the place of
+their trim but transient architectural growths. Pardon me, if I prefer
+the pyramids. They seem to me crystals formed from a stronger solution
+of humanity than the steeple of the new meeting-house. I may be wrong,
+but the Tiber has a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the
+Pons Alius, even more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles
+eddying round the piles of West Boston Bridge.
+
+Then, again, we Yankees are a kind of gypsies,--a mechanical and
+migratory race. A poet wants a home. He can dispense with an apple-parer
+and a reaping-machine. I feel this more for others than for myself, for
+the home of my birth and childhood has been as yet exempted from the
+change which has invaded almost everything around it.
+
+--Pardon me a short digression. To what small things our memory and our
+affections attach themselves! I remember, when I was a child, that
+one of the girls planted some Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs in the southwest
+corner of our front-yard. Well, I left the paternal roof and wandered
+in other lands, and learned to think in the words of strange people.
+But after many years, as I looked on the little front-yard again, it
+occurred to me that there used to be some Star-of-Bethlehems in the
+southwest corner. The grass was tall there, and the blade of the plant
+is very much like grass, only thicker and glossier. Even as Tully
+parted the briers and brambles when he hunted for the sphere-containing
+cylinder that marked the grave of Archimedes, so did I comb the grass
+with my fingers for my monumental memorial-flower. Nature had stored my
+keepsake tenderly in her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were
+there; they are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they
+are by the shade of the elms and rooted in the matted turf.
+
+Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial
+as that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you
+remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone with a
+whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the
+back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory. This
+intussusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful
+storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in the
+material structure of the thinking centre itself. In the very core of
+the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the soul, is a small
+mineral deposit, consisting, as I have seen it in the microscope, of
+grape-like masses of crystalline matter.
+
+But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the
+Star-of-Bethlehems, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest
+home-feeling. Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the dwelling
+of pleasant old Neighbor Walrus. I remember the sweet honeysuckle that I
+saw in flower against the wall of his house a few months ago, as long
+as I remember the sky and stars. That clump of peonies, butting their
+purple heads through the soil every spring in just the same circle, and
+by-and-by unpacking their hard balls of buds in flowers big enough
+to make a double handful of leaves, has come up in just that place,
+Neighbor Walrus tells me, for more years than I have passed on this
+planet. It is a rare privilege in our nomadic state to find the home of
+one's childhood and its immediate neighborhood thus unchanged. Many born
+poets, I am afraid, flower poorly in song, or not at all, because they
+have been too often transplanted.
+
+Then a good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;--their
+voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery
+without elasticity or oil. I wish it were fair to print a letter a young
+girl, about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since. “I am *** ***
+***,” she says, and tells her whole name outright. Ah!--said I, when I
+read that first frank declaration,--you are one of the right sort!--She
+was. A winged creature among close-clipped barn door fowl. How tired
+the poor girl was of the dull life about her,--the old woman's “skeleton
+hand” at the window opposite, drawing her curtains,--“Ma'am shooing away
+the hens,”--the vacuous country eyes staring at her as only country
+eyes can stare,--a routine of mechanical duties, and the soul's
+half-articulated cry for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,--pray for
+her, and for all such! Faith often cures their longings; but it is so
+hard to give a soul to heaven that has not first been trained in the
+fullest and sweetest human affections! Too often they fling their hearts
+away on unworthy objects. Too often they pine in a secret discontent,
+which spreads its leaden cloud over the morning of their youth. The
+immeasurable distance between one of these delicate natures and the
+average youths among whom is like to be her only choice makes one's
+heart ache. How many women are born too finely organized in sense and
+soul for the highway they must walk with feet unshod! Life is adjusted
+to the wants of the stronger sex. There are plenty of torrents to be
+crossed in its journey; but their stepping-stones are measured by the
+stride of man, and not of woman.
+
+Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart. So says the
+great medical authority, Laennec. Incurable cases of this kind used
+to find their hospitals in convents. We have the disease in New
+England,--but not the hospitals. I don't like to think of it. I will not
+believe our young Iris is going to die out in this way. Providence will
+find her some great happiness, or affliction, or duty,--and which would
+be best for her, I cannot tell. One thing is sure: the interest she
+takes in her little neighbor is getting to be more engrossing than ever.
+Something is the matter with him, and she knows it, and I think worries
+herself about it.
+
+I wonder sometimes how so fragile and distorted a frame has kept the
+fiery spirit that inhabits it so long its tenant. He accounts for it in
+his own way.
+
+The air of the Old World is good for nothing, he said, one day.--Used
+up, Sir,--breathed over and over again. You must come to this side, Sir,
+for an atmosphere fit to breathe nowadays. Did not worthy Mr. Higginson
+say that a breath of New England's air is better than a sup of Old
+England's ale? I ought to have died when I was a boy, Sir; but I could
+n't die in this Boston air,--and I think I shall have to go to New York
+one of these days, when it's time for me to drop this bundle,--or to New
+Orleans, where they have the yellow fever,--or to Philadelphia, where
+they have so many doctors.
+
+This was some time ago; but of late he has seemed, as I have before
+said, to be ailing. An experienced eye, such as I think I may call mine,
+can tell commonly whether a man is going to die, or not, long before he
+or his friends are alarmed about him. I don't like it.
+
+Iris has told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her
+family, and that she is afraid she has it. Those who are so endowed
+look upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him. According to the
+degree to which it covers him, his death will be near or more remote. It
+is an awful faculty; but science gives one too much like it. Luckily
+for our friends, most of us who have the scientific second-sight school
+ourselves not to betray our knowledge by word or look.
+
+Day by day, as the Little Gentleman comes to the table, it seems to me
+that the shadow of some approaching change falls darker and darker over
+his countenance. Nature is struggling with something, and I am afraid
+she is under in the wrestling-match. You do not care much, perhaps, for
+my particular conjectures as to the nature of his difficulty. I should
+say, however, from the sudden flushes to which he is subject, and
+certain other marks which, as an expert, I know how to interpret, that
+his heart was in trouble; but then he presses his hand to the right
+side, as if there were the centre of his uneasiness.
+
+When I say difficulty about the heart, I do not mean any of those
+sentimental maladies of that organ which figure more largely in romances
+than on the returns which furnish our Bills of Mortality. I mean some
+actual change in the organ itself, which may carry him off by slow and
+painful degrees, or strike him down with one huge pang and only time
+for a single shriek,--as when the shot broke through the brave Captain
+Nolan's breast, at the head of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and with
+a loud cry he dropped dead from his saddle.
+
+I thought it only fair to say something of what I apprehended to
+some who were entitled to be warned. The landlady's face fell when I
+mentioned my fears.
+
+Poor man!--she said.--And will leave the best room empty! Has n't he got
+any sisters or nieces or anybody to see to his things, if he should be
+took away? Such a sight of cases, full of everything! Never thought
+of his failin' so suddin. A complication of diseases, she expected.
+Liver-complaint one of 'em?
+
+After this first involuntary expression of the too natural selfish
+feelings, (which we must not judge very harshly, unless we happen to
+be poor widows ourselves, with children to keep filled, covered, and
+taught,--rents high,--beef eighteen to twenty cents per pound,)--after
+this first squeak of selfishness, followed by a brief movement of
+curiosity, so invariable in mature females, as to the nature of the
+complaint which threatens the life of a friend or any person who may
+happen to be mentioned as ill,--the worthy soul's better feelings
+struggled up to the surface, and she grieved for the doomed invalid,
+until a tear or two came forth and found their way down a channel worn
+for them since the early days of her widowhood.
+
+Oh, this dreadful, dreadful business of being the prophet of evil! Of
+all the trials which those who take charge of others' health and lives
+have to undergo, this is the most painful. It is all so plain to the
+practised eye!--and there is the poor wife, the doting mother, who has
+never suspected anything, or at least has clung always to the hope which
+you are just going to wrench away from her!--I must tell Iris that I
+think her poor friend is in a precarious state. She seems nearer to him
+than anybody.
+
+I did tell her. Whatever emotion it produced, she kept a still face,
+except, perhaps, a little trembling of the lip.--Could I be certain that
+there was any mortal complaint?--Why, no, I could not be certain; but it
+looked alarming to me.--He shall have some of my life,--she said.
+
+I suppose this to have been a fancy of hers, or a kind of magnetic power
+she could give out;--at any rate, I cannot help thinking she wills her
+strength away from herself, for she has lost vigor and color from that
+day. I have sometimes thought he gained the force she lost; but this may
+have been a whim, very probably.
+
+One day she came suddenly to me, looking deadly pale. Her lips moved,
+as if she were speaking; but I could not at first hear a word. Her hair
+looked strangely, as if lifting itself, and her eyes were full of wild
+light. She sunk upon a chair, and I thought was falling into one of her
+trances. Something had frozen her blood with fear; I thought, from
+what she said, half audibly, that she believed she had seen a shrouded
+figure.
+
+That night, at about eleven o'clock, I was sent for to see the Little
+Gentleman, who was taken suddenly ill. Bridget, the servant, went before
+me with a light. The doors were both unfastened, and I found myself
+ushered, without hindrance, into the dim light of the mysterious
+apartment I had so longed to enter.
+
+I found these stanzas in the young girl's book among many others. I give
+them as characterizing the tone of her sadder moments.
+
+
+               UNDER THE VIOLETS.
+
+     Her hands are cold; her face is white;
+     No more her pulses come and go;
+     Her eyes are shut to life and light;
+     Fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
+     And lay her where the violets blow.
+
+     But not beneath a graven stone,
+     To plead for tears with alien eyes;
+     A slender cross of wood alone
+     Shall say, that here a maiden lies
+     In peace beneath the peaceful skies.
+
+     And gray old trees of hugest limb
+     Shall wheel their circling shadows round
+     To make the scorching sunlight dim
+     That drinks the greenness from the ground,
+     And drop their dead leaves on her mound.
+
+     When o'er their boughs the squirrels run,
+     And through their leaves the robins call,
+     And, ripening in the autumn sun,
+     The acorns and the chestnuts fall,
+     Doubt not that she will heed them all.
+
+     For her the morning choir shall sing
+     Its matins from the branches high,
+     And every minstrel voice of spring,
+     That trills beneath the April sky,
+     Shall greet her with its earliest cry.
+
+     When, turning round their dial-track,
+     Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
+     Her little mourners, clad in black,
+     The crickets, sliding through the grass,
+     Shall pipe for her an evening mass.
+
+     At last the rootlets of the trees
+     Shall find the prison where she lies,
+     And bear the buried dust they seize
+     In leaves and blossoms to the skies.
+     So may the soul that warmed it rise!
+
+     If any, born of kindlier blood,
+     Should ask, What maiden lies below?
+     Say only this: A tender bud,
+     That tried to blossom in the snow,
+     Lies withered where the violets blow.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+You will know, perhaps, in the course of half an hour's reading, what
+has been haunting my hours of sleep and waking for months. I cannot
+tell, of course, whether you are a nervous person or not. If, however,
+you are such a person,--if it is late at night,--if all the rest of the
+household have gone off to bed,--if the wind is shaking your windows as
+if a human hand were rattling the sashes,--if your candle or lamp is low
+and will soon burn out,--let me advise you to take up some good quiet
+sleepy volume, or attack the “Critical Notices” of the last Quarterly
+and leave this to be read by daylight, with cheerful voices round, and
+people near by who would hear you, if you slid from your chair and came
+down in a lump on the floor.
+
+I do not say that your heart will beat as mine did, I am willing to
+confess, when I entered the dim chamber. Did I not tell you that I was
+sensitive and imaginative, and that I had lain awake with thinking what
+were the strange movements and sounds which I heard late at night in my
+little neighbor's apartment? It had come to that pass that I was truly
+unable to separate what I had really heard from what I had dreamed in
+those nightmares to which I have been subject, as before mentioned. So,
+when I walked into the room, and Bridget, turning back, closed the door
+and left me alone with its tenant, I do believe you could have grated a
+nutmeg on my skin, such a “goose-flesh” shiver ran over it. It was not
+fear, but what I call nervousness,--unreasoning, but irresistible; as
+when, for instance, one looking at the sun going down says, “I will
+count fifty before it disappears”; and as he goes on and it becomes
+doubtful whether he will reach the number, he gets strangely flurried,
+and his imagination pictures life and death and heaven and hell as the
+issues depending on the completion or non-completion of the fifty he is
+counting. Extreme curiosity will excite some people as much as fear, or
+what resembles fear, acts on some other less impressible natures.
+
+I may find myself in the midst of strange facts in this little
+conjurer's room. Or, again, there may be nothing in this poor invalid's
+chamber but some old furniture, such as they say came over in the
+Mayflower. All this is just what I mean to, find out while I am looking
+at the Little Gentleman, who has suddenly become my patient. The
+simplest things turn out to be unfathomable mysteries; the most
+mysterious appearances prove to be the most commonplace objects in
+disguise.
+
+I wonder whether the boys who live in Roxbury and Dorchester are ever
+moved to tears or filled with silent awe as they look upon the rocks
+and fragments of “puddingstone” abounding in those localities. I have
+my suspicions that those boys “heave a stone” or “fire a brickbat,”
+ composed of the conglomerate just mentioned, without any more tearful or
+philosophical contemplations than boys of less favored regions expend on
+the same performance. Yet a lump of puddingstone is a thing to look at,
+to think about, to study over, to dream upon, to go crazy with, to beat
+one's brains out against. Look at that pebble in it. From what cliff was
+it broken? On what beach rolled by the waves of what ocean? How and
+when imbedded in soft ooze, which itself became stone, and by-and-by
+was lifted into bald summits and steep cliffs, such as you may see on
+Meetinghouse-Hill any day--yes, and mark the scratches on their faces
+left when the boulder-carrying glaciers planed the surface of the
+continent with such rough tools that the storms have not worn the marks
+out of it with all the polishing of ever so many thousand years?
+
+Or as you pass a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it any
+bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little
+worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to
+the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish. One of these specks
+magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its
+centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and
+by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,--life
+beginning in the microcosm, as in the great worlds of the firmament,
+with the revolution that turns the surface in ceaseless round to the
+source of life and light.
+
+A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk! Before you have solved their
+mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified slag,
+or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces. Mysteries are common
+enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and Dorchester think
+of “brickbats” and the spawn of creatures that live in roadside puddles.
+
+But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly plain,
+when we can get at them so as to turn them over. How many ghosts that
+“thick men's blood with cold” prove to be shirts hung out to dry!
+How many mermaids have been made out of seals! How many times have
+horse-mackerels been taken for the sea-serpent!
+
+--Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the matter
+with the patient. That is what I say to myself, as I draw a chair to the
+bedside. The bed is an old-fashioned, dark mahogany four-poster. It was
+never that which made the noise of something moving. It is too heavy to
+be pushed about the room.--The Little Gentleman was sitting, bolstered
+up by pillows, with his hands clasped and their united palms resting
+on the back of the head, one of the three or four positions specially
+affected by persons whose breathing is difficult from disease of the
+heart or other causes.
+
+Sit down, Sir,--he said,--sit down! I have come to the hill Difficulty,
+Sir, and am fighting my way up.--His speech was laborious and
+interrupted.
+
+Don't talk,--I said,--except to answer my questions.--And I proceeded
+to “prospect” for the marks of some local mischief, which you know is
+at the bottom of all these attacks, though we do not always find it.
+I suppose I go to work pretty much like other professional folks of my
+temperament. Thus:
+
+Wrist, if you please.--I was on his right side, but he presented his
+left wrist, crossing it over the other.--I begin to count, holding watch
+in left hand. One, two, three, four,--What a handsome hand! wonder if
+that splendid stone is a carbuncle.--One, two, three, four, five, six,
+seven,--Can't see much, it is so dark, except one white object.--One,
+two, three, four,--Hang it! eighty or ninety in the minute, I
+guess.--Tongue, if you please.--Tongue is put out. Forget to look at it,
+or, rather, to take any particular notice of it;--but what is that white
+object, with the long arm stretching up as if pointing to the sky,
+just as Vesalius and Spigelius and those old fellows used to put their
+skeletons? I don't think anything of such objects, you know; but what
+should he have it in his chamber for? As I had found his pulse irregular
+and intermittent, I took out a stethoscope, which is a pocket-spyglass
+for looking into people's chests with your ears, and laid it over the
+place where the heart beats. I missed the usual beat of the organ.--How
+is this?--I said,--where is your heart gone to?--He took the stethoscope
+and shifted it across to the right side; there was a displacement of the
+organ.--I am ill-packed,--he said;--there was no room for my heart in
+its place as it is with other men.--God help him!
+
+It is hard to draw the line between scientific curiosity and the desire
+for the patient's sake to learn all the details of his condition. I must
+look at this patient's chest, and thump it and listen to it. For this is
+a case of ectopia cordis, my boy,--displacement of the heart; and it
+is n't every day you get a chance to overhaul such an interesting
+malformation. And so I managed to do my duty and satisfy my curiosity
+at the same time. The torso was slight and deformed; the right arm
+attenuated,--the left full, round, and of perfect symmetry. It had
+run away with the life of the other limbs,--a common trick enough of
+Nature's, as I told you before. If you see a man with legs withered from
+childhood, keep out of the way of his arms, if you have a quarrel with
+him. He has the strength of four limbs in two; and if he strikes you, it
+is an arm-blow plus a kick administered from the shoulder instead of the
+haunch, where it should have started from.
+
+Still examining him as a patient, I kept my eyes about me to search
+all parts of the chamber and went on with the double process, as
+before.--Heart hits as hard as a fist,--bellows-sound over mitral valves
+(professional terms you need not attend to).--What the deuse is that
+long case for? Got his witch grandmother mummied in it? And three big
+mahogany presses,--hey?--A diabolical suspicion came over me which I had
+had once before,--that he might be one of our modern alchemists,--you
+understand, make gold, you know, or what looks like it, sometimes with
+the head of a king or queen or of Liberty to embellish one side of the
+piece.--Don't I remember hearing him shut a door and lock it once? What
+do you think was kept under that lock? Let's have another look at his
+hand, to see if there are any calluses.
+
+One can tell a man's business, if it is a handicraft, very often by
+just taking a look at his open hand. Ah! Four calluses at the end of the
+fingers of the right hand. None on those of the left. Ah, ha! What do
+those mean?
+
+All this seems longer in the telling, of course, than it was in fact.
+While I was making these observations of the objects around me, I was
+also forming my opinion as to the kind of case with which I had to deal.
+
+There are three wicks, you know, to the lamp of a man's life: brain,
+blood, and breath. Press the brain a little, its light goes out,
+followed by both the others. Stop the heart a minute and out go all
+three of the wicks. Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently the
+fluid ceases to supply the other centres of flame, and all is
+soon stagnation, cold, and darkness. The “tripod of life” a French
+physiologist called these three organs. It is all clear enough which leg
+of the tripod is going to break down here. I could tell you exactly
+what the difficulty is;--which would be as intelligible and amusing as a
+watchmaker's description of a diseased timekeeper to a ploughman. It is
+enough to say, that I found just what I expected to, and that I think
+this attack is only the prelude of more serious consequences,--which
+expression means you very well know what.
+
+And now the secrets of this life hanging on a thread must surely come
+out. If I have made a mystery where there was none, my suspicions will
+be shamed, as they have often been before. If there is anything strange,
+my visits will clear it up.
+
+I sat an hour or two by the side of the Little Gentleman's bed, after
+giving him some henbane to quiet his brain, and some foxglove, which an
+imaginative French professor has called the “Opium of the Heart.” Under
+their influence he gradually fell into an uneasy, half-waking slumber,
+the body fighting hard for every breath, and the mind wandering off in
+strange fancies and old recollections, which escaped from his lips in
+broken sentences.
+
+--The last of 'em,--he said,--the last of 'em all,--thank God! And the
+grave he lies in will look just as well as if he had been straight. Dig
+it deep, old Martin, dig it deep,--and let it be as long as other
+folks' graves. And mind you get the sods flat, old man,--flat as ever a
+straight-backed young fellow was laid under. And then, with a good tall
+slab at the head, and a foot-stone six foot away from it, it'll look
+just as if there was a man underneath.
+
+A man! Who said he was a man? No more men of that pattern to bear his
+name!--Used to be a good-looking set enough.--Where 's all the manhood
+and womanhood gone to since his great-grandfather was the strongest
+man that sailed out of the town of Boston, and poor Leah there the
+handsomest woman in Essex, if she was a witch?
+
+--Give me some light,--he said,--more light. I want to see the picture.
+
+He had started either from a dream or a wandering reverie. I was not
+unwilling to have more light in the apartment, and presently had lighted
+an astral lamp that stood on a table.--He pointed to a portrait hanging
+against the wall.--Look at her,--he said,--look at her! Wasn't that a
+pretty neck to slip a hangman's noose over?
+
+The portrait was of a young woman, something more than twenty years old,
+perhaps. There were few pictures of any merit painted in New England
+before the time of Smibert, and I am at a loss to know what artist
+could have taken this half-length, which was evidently from life. It was
+somewhat stiff and flat, but the grace of the figure and the sweetness
+of the expression reminded me of the angels of the early Florentine
+painters. She must have been of some consideration, for she was dressed
+in paduasoy and lace with hanging sleeves, and the old carved frame
+showed how the picture had been prized by its former owners. A proud eye
+she had, with all her sweetness.--I think it was that which hanged her,
+as his strong arm hanged Minister George Burroughs;--but it may have
+been a little mole on one cheek, which the artist had just hinted as a
+beauty rather than a deformity. You know, I suppose, that nursling imps
+addict themselves, after the fashion of young opossums, to these little
+excrescences. “Witch-marks” were good evidence that a young woman was
+one of the Devil's wet-nurses;--I should like to have seen you make fun
+of them in those days!--Then she had a brooch in her bodice, that might
+have been taken for some devilish amulet or other; and she wore a ring
+upon one of her fingers, with a red stone in it, that flamed as if the
+painter had dipped his pencil in fire;--who knows but that it was given
+her by a midnight suitor fresh from that fierce element, and licensed
+for a season to leave his couch of flame to tempt the unsanctified
+hearts of earthly maidens and brand their cheeks with the print of his
+scorching kisses?
+
+She and I,--he said, as he looked steadfastly at the canvas,--she and I
+are the last of 'em.--She will stay, and I shall go. They never painted
+me,--except when the boys used to make pictures of me with chalk on the
+board-fences. They said the doctors would want my skeleton when I was
+dead.--You are my friend, if you are a doctor,--a'n't you?
+
+I just gave him my hand. I had not the heart to speak.
+
+I want to lie still,--he said,--after I am put to bed upon the hill
+yonder. Can't you have a great stone laid over me, as they did over the
+first settlers in the old burying-ground at Dorchester, so as to keep
+the wolves from digging them up? I never slept easy over the sod;--I
+should like to lie quiet under it. And besides,--he said, in a kind of
+scared whisper,--I don't want to have my bones stared at, as my body has
+been. I don't doubt I was a remarkable case; but, for God's sake, oh,
+for God's sake, don't let 'em make a show of the cage I have been shut
+up in and looked through the bars of for so many years.
+
+I have heard it said that the art of healing makes men hard-hearted and
+indifferent to human suffering. I am willing to own that there is
+often a professional hardness in surgeons, just as there is in
+theologians,--only much less in degree than in these last. It does not
+commonly improve the sympathies of a man to be in the habit of thrusting
+knives into his fellow-creatures and burning them with red-hot irons,
+any more than it improves them to hold the blinding-white cantery of
+Gehenna by its cool handle and score and crisp young souls with it
+until they are scorched into the belief of--Transubstantiation or the
+Immaculate Conception. And, to say the plain truth, I think there are
+a good many coarse people in both callings. A delicate nature will
+not commonly choose a pursuit which implies the habitual infliction of
+suffering, so readily as some gentler office. Yet, while I am writing
+this paragraph, there passes by my window, on his daily errand of duty,
+not seeing me, though I catch a glimpse of his manly features through
+the oval glass of his chaise, as he drives by, a surgeon of skill and
+standing, so friendly, so modest, so tenderhearted in all his ways,
+that, if he had not approved himself at once adroit and firm, one would
+have said he was of too kindly a mould to be the minister of pain, even
+if he were saving pain.
+
+You may be sure that some men, even among those who have chosen the task
+of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more thoughtful and
+truly compassionate in the midst of their cruel experience. They become
+less nervous, but more sympathetic. They have a truer sensibility for
+others' pain, the more they study pain and disease in the light of
+science. I have said this without claiming any special growth in
+humanity for myself, though I do hope I grow tenderer in my feelings
+as I grow older. At any rate, this was not a time in which professional
+habits could keep down certain instincts of older date than these.
+
+This poor little man's appeal to my humanity against the supposed
+rapacity of Science, which he feared would have her “specimen,” if his
+ghost should walk restlessly a thousand years, waiting for his bones
+to be laid in the dust, touched my heart. But I felt bound to speak
+cheerily.
+
+--We won't die yet awhile, if we can help it,--I said,--and I trust we
+can help it. But don't be afraid; if I live longest, I will see that
+your resting place is kept sacred till the dandelions and buttercups
+blow over you.
+
+He seemed to have got his wits together by this time, and to have a
+vague consciousness that he might have been saying more than he meant
+for anybody's ears.--I have been talking a little wild, Sir, eh? he
+said.--There is a great buzzing in my head with those drops of yours,
+and I doubt if my tongue has not been a little looser than I would have
+it, Sir. But I don't much want to live, Sir; that's the truth of the
+matter, and it does rather please me to think that fifty years from now
+nobody will know that the place where I lie does n't hold as stout and
+straight a man as the best of 'em that stretch out as if they were proud
+of the room they take. You may get me well, if you can, Sir, if you
+think it worth while to try; but I tell you there has been no time for
+this many a year when the smell of fresh earth was not sweeter to me
+than all the flowers that grow out of it. There's no anodyne like your
+good clean gravel, Sir. But if you can keep me about awhile, and it
+amuses you to try, you may show your skill upon me, if you like. There
+is a pleasure or two that I love the daylight for, and I think the night
+is not far off, at best.--I believe I shall sleep now; you may leave me,
+and come, if you like, in the morning.
+
+Before I passed out, I took one more glance round the apartment. The
+beautiful face of the portrait looked at me, as portraits often do, with
+a frightful kind of intelligence in its eyes. The drapery fluttered on
+the still outstretched arm of the tall object near the window;--a crack
+of this was open, no doubt, and some breath of wind stirred the hanging
+folds. In my excited state, I seemed to see something ominous in that
+arm pointing to the heavens. I thought of the figures in the Dance of
+Death at Basle, and that other on the panels of the covered Bridge at
+Lucerne, and it seemed to me that the grim mask who mingles with every
+crowd and glides over every threshold was pointing the sick man to his
+far home, and would soon stretch out his bony hand and lead him or drag
+him on the unmeasured journey towards it.
+
+The fancy had possession of me, and I shivered again as when I first
+entered the chamber. The picture and the shrouded shape; I saw only
+these two objects. They were enough. The house was deadly still, and the
+night-wind, blowing through an open window, struck me as from a field of
+ice, at the moment I passed into the creaking corridor. As I turned into
+the common passage, a white figure, holding a lamp, stood full before
+me. I thought at first it was one of those images made to stand in
+niches and hold a light in their hands. But the illusion was momentary,
+and my eyes speedily recovered from the shock of the bright flame and
+snowy drapery to see that the figure was a breathing one. It was Iris,
+in one of her statue-trances. She had come down, whether sleeping or
+waking, I knew not at first, led by an instinct that told her she was
+wanted,--or, possibly, having overheard and interpreted the sound of our
+movements,--or, it may be, having learned from the servant that there
+was trouble which might ask for a woman's hand. I sometimes think women
+have a sixth sense, which tells them that others, whom they cannot see
+or hear, are in suffering. How surely we find them at the bedside of the
+dying! How strongly does Nature plead for them, that we should draw our
+first breath in their arms, as we sigh away our last upon their faithful
+breasts!
+
+With white, bare feet, her hair loosely knotted, clad as the starlight
+knew her, and the morning when she rose from slumber, save that she had
+twisted a scarf round her long dress, she stood still as a stone before
+me, holding in one hand a lighted coil of waxtaper, and in the other
+a silver goblet. I held my own lamp close to her, as if she had been a
+figure of marble, and she did not stir. There was no breach of propriety
+then, to scare the Poor Relation with and breed scandal out of. She had
+been “warned in a dream,” doubtless suggested by her waking knowledge
+and the sounds which had reached her exalted sense. There was nothing
+more natural than that she should have risen and girdled her waist, and
+lighted her taper, and found the silver goblet with “Ex dono pupillorum”
+ on it, from which she had taken her milk and possets through all
+her childish years, and so gone blindly out to find her place at the
+bedside,--a Sister of Charity without the cap and rosary; nay, unknowing
+whither her feet were leading her, and with wide blank eyes seeing
+nothing but the vision that beckoned her along.--Well, I must wake her
+from her slumber or trance.--I called her name, but she did not heed my
+voice.
+
+The Devil put it into my head that I would kiss one handsome young girl
+before I died, and now was my chance. She never would know it, and I
+should carry the remembrance of it with me into the grave, and a rose
+perhaps grow out of my dust, as a brier did out of Lord Lovers, in
+memory of that immortal moment! Would it wake her from her trance? and
+would she see me in the flush of my stolen triumph, and hate and despise
+me ever after? Or should I carry off my trophy undetected, and always
+from that time say to myself, when I looked upon her in the glory of
+youth and the splendor of beauty, “My lips have touched those roses
+and made their sweetness mine forever”? You think my cheek was flushed,
+perhaps, and my eyes were glittering with this midnight flash of
+opportunity. On the contrary, I believe I was pale, very pale, and
+I know that I trembled. Ah, it is the pale passions that are the
+fiercest,--it is the violence of the chill that gives the measure of the
+fever! The fighting-boy of our school always turned white when he went
+out to a pitched battle with the bully of some neighboring village; but
+we knew what his bloodless cheeks meant,--the blood was all in his stout
+heart,--he was a slight boy, and there was not enough to redden his face
+and fill his heart both at once.
+
+Perhaps it is making a good deal of a slight matter, to tell the
+internal conflicts in the heart of a quiet person something more than
+juvenile and something less than senile, as to whether he should be
+guilty of an impropriety, and, if he were, whether he would get caught
+in his indiscretion. And yet the memory of the kiss that Margaret of
+Scotland gave to Alain Chartier has lasted four hundred years, and
+put it into the head of many an ill-favored poet, whether Victoria, or
+Eugenie, would do as much by him, if she happened to pass him when he
+was asleep. And have we ever forgotten that the fresh cheek of the young
+John Milton tingled under the lips of some high-born Italian beauty,
+who, I believe, did not think to leave her card by the side of the
+slumbering youth, but has bequeathed the memory of her pretty deed to
+all coming time? The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon,
+but its echo lasts a deal longer.
+
+There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of
+mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is taking an
+enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance
+slip through his fingers. Iris woke up, of her own accord, before I had
+made up my mind what I was going to do about it.
+
+When I remember how charmingly she looked, I don't blame myself at
+all for being tempted; but if I had been fool enough to yield to the
+impulse, I should certainly have been ashamed to tell of it. She did not
+know what to make of it, finding herself there alone, in such guise, and
+me staring at her. She looked down at her white robe and bare feet, and
+colored,--then at the goblet she held in her hand, then at the taper;
+and at last her thoughts seemed to clear up.
+
+I know it all,--she said.--He is going to die, and I must go and sit by
+him. Nobody will care for him as I shall, and I have nobody else to care
+for.
+
+I assured her that nothing was needed for him that night but rest, and
+persuaded her that the excitement of her presence could only do harm.
+Let him sleep, and he would very probably awake better in the morning.
+There was nothing to be said, for I spoke with authority; and the young
+girl glided away with noiseless step and sought her own chamber.
+
+The tremor passed away from my limbs, and the blood began to burn in my
+cheeks. The beautiful image which had so bewitched me faded gradually
+from my imagination, and I returned to the still perplexing mysteries of
+my little neighbor's chamber.
+
+All was still there now. No plaintive sounds, no monotonous murmurs,
+no shutting of windows and doors at strange hours, as if something
+or somebody were coming in or going out, or there was something to be
+hidden in those dark mahogany presses. Is there an inner apartment that
+I have not seen? The way in which the house is built might admit of it.
+As I thought it over, I at once imagined a Bluebeard's chamber. Suppose,
+for instance, that the narrow bookshelves to the right are really only a
+masked door, such as we remember leading to the private study of one
+of our most distinguished townsmen, who loved to steal away from his
+stately library to that little silent cell. If this were lighted
+from above, a person or persons might pass their days there without
+attracting attention from the household, and wander where they pleased
+at night,--to Copp's-Hill burial-ground, if they liked,--I said to
+myself, laughing, and pulling the bed-clothes over my head. There is
+no logic in superstitious-fancies any more than in dreams. A she-ghost
+wouldn't want an inner chamber to herself. A live woman, with a valuable
+soprano voice, wouldn't start off at night to sprain her ankles over the
+old graves of the North-End cemetery.
+
+It is all very easy for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this page
+in the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and anserine
+unchristian names, because I had these fancies running through my
+head. I don't care much for your abuse. The question is not, what it
+is reasonable for a man to think about, but what he actually does think
+about, in the dark, and when he is alone, and his whole body seems but
+one great nerve of hearing, and he sees the phosphorescent flashes of
+his own eyeballs as they turn suddenly in the direction of the last
+strange noise,--what he actually does think about, as he lies and
+recalls all the wild stories his head is full of, his fancy hinting the
+most alarming conjectures to account for the simplest facts about him,
+his common-sense laughing them to scorn the next minute, but his mind
+still returning to them, under one shape or another, until he gets very
+nervous and foolish, and remembers how pleasant it used to be to have
+his mother come and tuck him up and go and sit within call, so that she
+could hear him at any minute, if he got very much scared and wanted her.
+Old babies that we are!
+
+Daylight will clear up all that lamp-light has left doubtful. I longed
+for the morning to come, for I was more curious than ever. So, between
+my fancies and anticipations, I had but a poor night of it, and came
+down tired to the breakfast-table. My visit was not to be made until
+after this morning hour; there was nothing urgent, so the servant was
+ordered to tell me.
+
+It was the first breakfast at which the high chair at the side of Iris
+had been unoccupied.--You might jest as well take away that chair,--said
+our landlady,--he'll never want it again. He acts like a man that 's
+struck with death, 'n' I don't believe he 'll ever come out of his
+chamber till he 's laid out and brought down a corpse.--These good women
+do put things so plainly! There were two or three words in her short
+remark that always sober people, and suggest silence or brief moral
+reflections.
+
+--Life is dreadful uncerting,--said the Poor Relation,--and pulled in
+her social tentacles to concentrate her thoughts on this fact of human
+history.
+
+--If there was anything a fellah could do,--said the young man John, so
+called,--a fellah 'd like the chance o' helpin' a little cripple like
+that. He looks as if he couldn't turn over any handier than a turtle
+that's laid on his back; and I guess there a'n't many people that know
+how to lift better than I do. Ask him if he don't want any watchers. I
+don't mind settin' up any more 'n a cat-owl. I was up all night twice
+last month.
+
+[My private opinion is, that there was no small amount of punch absorbed
+on those two occasions, which I think I heard of at the time];--but the
+offer is a kind one, and it is n't fair to question how he would like
+sitting up without the punch and the company and the songs and smoking.
+He means what he says, and it would be a more considerable achievement
+for him to sit quietly all night by a sick man than for a good many
+other people. I tell you this odd thing: there are a good many persons,
+who, through the habit of making other folks uncomfortable, by finding
+fault with all their cheerful enjoyments, at last get up a kind
+of hostility to comfort in general, even in their own persons. The
+correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves
+as we hate our neighbors. Look at old misers; first they starve their
+dependants, and then themselves. So I think it more for a lively young
+fellow to be ready to play nurse than for one of those useful but
+forlorn martyrs who have taken a spite against themselves and love to
+gratify it by fasting and watching.
+
+--The time came at last for me to make my visit. I found Iris sitting
+by the Little Gentleman's pillow. To my disappointment, the room was
+darkened. He did not like the light, and would have the shutters kept
+nearly closed. It was good enough for me; what business had I to be
+indulging my curiosity, when I had nothing to do but to exercise such
+skill as I possessed for the benefit of my patient? There was not much
+to be said or done in such a case; but I spoke as encouragingly as I
+could, as I think we are always bound to do. He did not seem to pay any
+very anxious attention, but the poor girl listened as if her own life
+and more than her own life were depending on the words I uttered. She
+followed me out of the room, when I had got through my visit.
+
+How long?--she said.
+
+Uncertain. Any time; to-day,--next week, next month,--I answered.--One
+of those cases where the issue is not doubtful, but may be sudden or
+slow.
+
+The women of the house were kind, as women always are in trouble. But
+Iris pretended that nobody could spare the time as well as she, and kept
+her place, hour after hour, until the landlady insisted that she'd be
+killin' herself, if she begun at that rate, 'n' haf to give up, if she
+didn't want to be clean beat out in less 'n a week.
+
+At the table we were graver than common. The high chair was set back
+against the wall, and a gap left between that of the young girl and
+her nearest neighbor's on the right. But the next morning, to our great
+surprise, that good-looking young Marylander had very quietly moved his
+own chair to the vacant place. I thought he was creeping down that way,
+but I was not prepared for a leap spanning such a tremendous parenthesis
+of boarders as this change of position included. There was no denying
+that the youth and maiden were a handsome pair, as they sat side by
+side. But whatever the young girl may have thought of her new neighbor
+she never seemed for a moment to forget the poor little friend who had
+been taken from her side. There are women, and even girls, with whom it
+is of no use to talk. One might as well reason with a bee as to the form
+of his cell, or with an oriole as to the construction of his swinging
+nest, as try to stir these creatures from their own way of doing their
+own work. It was not a question with Iris, whether she was entitled by
+any special relation or by the fitness of things to play the part of a
+nurse. She was a wilful creature that must have her way in this matter.
+And it so proved that it called for much patience and long endurance
+to carry through the duties, say rather the kind offices, the painful
+pleasures, which she had chosen as her share in the household where
+accident had thrown her. She had that genius of ministration which is
+the special province of certain women, marked even among their helpful
+sisters by a soft, low voice, a quiet footfall, a light hand, a cheering
+smile, and a ready self-surrender to the objects of their care, which
+such trifles as their own food, sleep, or habits of any kind never
+presume to interfere with. Day after day, and too often through the long
+watches of the night, she kept her place by the pillow.
+
+That girl will kill herself over me, Sir,--said the poor Little
+Gentleman to me, one day,--she will kill herself, Sir, if you don't
+call in all the resources of your art to get me off as soon as may be. I
+shall wear her out, Sir, with sitting in this close chamber and watching
+when she ought to be sleeping, if you leave me to the care of Nature
+without dosing me.
+
+This was rather strange pleasantry, under the circumstances. But there
+are certain persons whose existence is so out of parallel with the
+larger laws in the midst of which it is moving, that life becomes to
+them as death and death as life.--How am I getting along?--he said,
+another morning. He lifted his shrivelled hand, with the death's-head
+ring on it, and looked at it with a sad sort of complacency. By this one
+movement, which I have seen repeatedly of late, I know that his thoughts
+have gone before to another condition, and that he is, as it were,
+looking back on the infirmities of the body as accidents of the past.
+For, when he was well, one might see him often looking at the
+handsome hand with the flaming jewel on one of its fingers. The single
+well-shaped limb was the source of that pleasure which in some form or
+other Nature almost always grants to her least richly endowed children.
+Handsome hair, eyes, complexion, feature, form, hand, foot, pleasant
+voice, strength, grace, agility, intelligence,--how few there are that
+have not just enough of one at least of these gifts to show them that
+the good Mother, busy with her millions of children, has not quite
+forgotten them! But now he was thinking of that other state, where, free
+from all mortal impediments, the memory of his sorrowful burden
+should be only as that of the case he has shed to the insect whose
+“deep-damasked wings” beat off the golden dust of the lily-anthers, as
+he flutters in the ecstasy of his new life over their full-blown summer
+glories.
+
+No human being can rest for any time in a state of equilibrium, where
+the desire to live and that to depart just balance each other. If one
+has a house, which he has lived and always means to live in, he pleases
+himself with the thought of all the conveniences it offers him, and
+thinks little of its wants and imperfections. But once having made up
+his mind to move to a better, every incommodity starts out upon him,
+until the very ground-plan of it seems to have changed in his mind,
+and his thoughts and affections, each one of them packing up its little
+bundle of circumstances, have quitted their several chambers and nooks
+and migrated to the new home, long before its apartments are ready to
+receive their coming tenant. It is so with the body. Most persons have
+died before they expire,--died to all earthly longings, so that the
+last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already
+deserted mansion. The fact of the tranquillity with which the great
+majority of dying persons await this locking of those gates of life
+through which its airy angels have been going and coming, from the
+moment of the first cry, is familiar to those who have been often
+called upon to witness the last period of life. Almost always there is a
+preparation made by Nature for unearthing a soul, just as on the smaller
+scale there is for the removal of a milktooth. The roots which hold
+human life to earth are absorbed before it is lifted from its place.
+Some of the dying are weary and want rest, the idea of which is almost
+inseparable in the universal mind from death. Some are in pain, and want
+to be rid of it, even though the anodyne be dropped, as in the
+legend, from the sword of the Death-Angel. Some are stupid, mercifully
+narcotized that they may go to sleep without long tossing about. And
+some are strong in faith and hope, so that, as they draw near the next
+world, they would fair hurry toward it, as the caravan moves faster over
+the sands when the foremost travellers send word along the file that
+water is in sight. Though each little party that follows in a foot-track
+of its own will have it that the water to which others think they are
+hastening is a mirage, not the less has it been true in all ages and for
+human beings of every creed which recognized a future, that those who
+have fallen worn out by their march through the Desert have dreamed at
+least of a River of Life, and thought they heard its murmurs as they lay
+dying.
+
+The change from the clinging to the present to the welcoming of the
+future comes very soon, for the most part, after all hope of life is
+extinguished, provided this be left in good degree to Nature, and not
+insolently and cruelly forced upon those who are attacked by illness,
+on the strength of that odious foreknowledge often imparted by science,
+before the white fruit whose core is ashes, and which we call death,
+has set beneath the pallid and drooping flower of sickness. There is a
+singular sagacity very often shown in a patient's estimate of his own
+vital force. His physician knows the state of his material frame well
+enough, perhaps,--that this or that organ is more or less impaired or
+disintegrated; but the patient has a sense that he can hold out so much
+longer,--sometimes that he must and will live for a while, though by the
+logic of disease he ought to die without any delay.
+
+The Little Gentleman continued to fail, until it became plain that his
+remaining days were few. I told the household what to expect. There was
+a good deal of kind feeling expressed among the boarders, in various
+modes, according to their characters and style of sympathy. The
+landlady was urgent that he should try a certain nostrum which had saved
+somebody's life in jest sech a case. The Poor Relation wanted me to
+carry, as from her, a copy of “Allein's Alarm,” etc. I objected to the
+title, reminding her that it offended people of old, so that more than
+twice as many of the book were sold when they changed the name to “A
+Sure Guide to Heaven.” The good old gentleman whom I have mentioned
+before has come to the time of life when many old men cry easily, and
+forget their tears as children do.--He was a worthy gentleman,--he
+said,--a very worthy gentleman, but unfortunate,--very unfortunate.
+Sadly deformed about the spine and the feet. Had an impression that the
+late Lord Byron had some malformation of this kind. Had heerd there was
+something the matter with the ankle-j'ints of that nobleman, but he was
+a man of talents. This gentleman seemed to be a man of talents.
+Could not always agree with his statements,--thought he was a little
+over-partial to this city, and had some free opinions; but was sorry
+to lose him,--and if--there was anything--he--could--. In the midst of
+these kind expressions, the gentleman with the diamond, the Koh-i-noor,
+as we called him, asked, in a very unpleasant sort of way, how the old
+boy was likely to cut up,--meaning what money our friend was going to
+leave behind.
+
+The young fellow John spoke up, to the effect that this was a diabolish
+snobby question, when a man was dying and not dead.--To this the
+Koh-i-noor replied, by asking if the other meant to insult him. Whereto
+the young man John rejoined that he had no particul'r intentions one way
+or t'other.-The Kohi-noor then suggested the young man's stepping out
+into the yard, that he, the speaker, might “slap his chops.”--Let 'em
+alone, said young Maryland,--it 'll soon be over, and they won't hurt
+each other much.--So they went out.
+
+The Koh-i-noor entertained the very common idea, that, when one quarrels
+with another, the simple thing to do is to knock the man down, and there
+is the end of it. Now those who have watched such encounters are aware
+of two things: first, that it is not so easy to knock a man down as it
+is to talk about it; secondly, that, if you do happen to knock a man
+down, there is a very good chance that he will be angry, and get up and
+give you a thrashing.
+
+So the Koh-i-noor thought he would begin, as soon as they got into the
+yard, by knocking his man down, and with this intention swung his arm
+round after the fashion of rustics and those unskilled in the noble art,
+expecting the young fellow John to drop when his fist, having completed
+a quarter of a circle, should come in contact with the side of that
+young man's head. Unfortunately for this theory, it happens that a blow
+struck out straight is as much shorter, and therefore as much quicker
+than the rustic's swinging blow, as the radius is shorter than the
+quarter of a circle. The mathematical and mechanical corollary was, that
+the Koh-i-noor felt something hard bring up suddenly against his right
+eye, which something he could have sworn was a paving-stone, judging by
+his sensations; and as this threw his person somewhat backwards, and the
+young man John jerked his own head back a little, the swinging blow had
+nothing to stop it; and as the Jewel staggered between the hit he got
+and the blow he missed, he tripped and “went to grass,” so far as the
+back-yard of our boardinghouse was provided with that vegetable. It was
+a signal illustration of that fatal mistake, so frequent in young and
+ardent natures with inconspicuous calves and negative pectorals, that
+they can settle most little quarrels on the spot by “knocking the man
+down.”
+
+We are in the habit of handling our faces so carefully, that a heavy
+blow, taking effect on that portion of the surface, produces a most
+unpleasant surprise, which is accompanied with odd sensations, as
+of seeing sparks, and a kind of electrical or ozone-like odor,
+half-sulphurous in character, and which has given rise to a very vulgar
+and profane threat sometimes heard from the lips of bullies. A person
+not used to pugilistic gestures does not instantly recover from this
+surprise. The Koh-i-noor exasperated by his failure, and still a little
+confused by the smart hit he had received, but furious, and confident
+of victory over a young fellow a good deal lighter than himself, made
+a desperate rush to bear down all before him and finish the contest
+at once. That is the way all angry greenhorns and incompetent persons
+attempt to settle matters. It does n't do, if the other fellow is only
+cool, moderately quick, and has a very little science. It didn't do this
+time; for, as the assailant rushed in with his arms flying everywhere,
+like the vans of a windmill, he ran a prominent feature of his face
+against a fist which was travelling in the other direction, and
+immediately after struck the knuckles of the young man's other fist a
+severe blow with the part of his person known as the epigastrium to one
+branch of science and the bread-basket to another. This second round
+closed the battle. The Koh-i-noor had got enough, which in such cases
+is more than as good as a feast. The young fellow asked him if he was
+satisfied, and held out his hand. But the other sulked, and muttered
+something about revenge.--Jest as ye like,--said the young man
+John.--Clap a slice o' raw beefsteak on to that mouse o' yours 'n' 't'll
+take down the swellin'. (Mouse is a technical term for a bluish, oblong,
+rounded elevation occasioned by running one's forehead or eyebrow
+against another's knuckles.) The young fellow was particularly pleased
+that he had had an opportunity of trying his proficiency in the art of
+self-defence without the gloves. The Koh-i-noor did not favor us with
+his company for a day or two, being confined to his chamber, it was
+said, by a slight feverish, attack. He was chop-fallen always after
+this, and got negligent in his person. The impression must have been
+a deep one; for it was observed, that, when he came down again, his
+moustache and whiskers had turned visibly white about the roots. In
+short, it disgraced him, and rendered still more conspicuous a tendency
+to drinking, of which he had been for some time suspected. This, and the
+disgust which a young lady naturally feels at hearing that her lover
+has been “licked by a fellah not half his size,” induced the landlady's
+daughter to take that decided step which produced a change in the
+programme of her career I may hereafter allude to.
+
+I never thought he would come to good, when I heard him attempting
+to sneer at an unoffending city so respectable as Boston. After a
+man begins to attack the State-House, when he gets bitter about the
+Frog-Pond, you may be sure there is not much left of him. Poor Edgar Poe
+died in the hospital soon after he got into this way of talking; and
+so sure as you find an unfortunate fellow reduced to this pass, you had
+better begin praying for him, and stop lending him money, for he is
+on his last legs. Remember poor Edgar! He is dead and gone; but the
+State-House has its cupola fresh-gilded, and the Frog-Pond has got a
+fountain that squirts up a hundred feet into the air and glorifies that
+humble sheet with a fine display of provincial rainbows.
+
+--I cannot fulfil my promise in this number. I expected to gratify
+your curiosity, if you have become at all interested in these puzzles,
+doubts, fancies, whims, or whatever you choose to call them, of mine.
+Next month you shall hear all about it.
+
+--It was evening, and I was going to the sick-chamber. As I paused at
+the door before entering, I heard a sweet voice singing. It was not the
+wild melody I had sometimes heard at midnight:--no, this was the voice
+of Iris, and I could distinguish every word. I had seen the verses in
+her book; the melody was new to me. Let me finish my page with them.
+
+
+               HYMN OF TRUST.
+
+     O Love Divine, that stooped to share
+     Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,
+     On Thee we cast each earthborn care,
+     We smile at pain while Thou art near!
+
+     Though long the weary way we tread,
+     And sorrow crown each lingering year,
+     No path we shun, no darkness dread,
+     Our hearts still whispering, Thou art near!
+
+     When drooping pleasure turns to grief,
+     And trembling faith is changed to fear,
+     The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf
+     Shall softly tell us, Thou art near!
+
+     On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
+     O Love Divine, forever dear,
+     Content to suffer, while we know,
+     Living and dying, Thou art near!
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+A young fellow, born of good stock, in one of the more thoroughly
+civilized portions of these United States of America, bred in good
+principles, inheriting a social position which makes him at his ease
+everywhere, means sufficient to educate him thoroughly without taking
+away the stimulus to vigorous exertion, and with a good opening in some
+honorable path of labor, is the finest sight our private satellite has
+had the opportunity of inspecting on the planet to which she belongs. In
+some respects it was better to be a young Greek. If we may trust the old
+marbles, my friend with his arm stretched over my head, above there, (in
+plaster of Paris,) or the discobolus, whom one may see at the principal
+sculpture gallery of this metropolis,--those Greek young men were
+of supreme beauty. Their close curls, their elegantly set heads,
+column-like necks, straight noses, short, curled lips, firm chins,
+deep chests, light flanks, large muscles, small joints, were finer than
+anything we ever see. It may well be questioned whether the human shape
+will ever present itself again in a race of such perfect symmetry. But
+the life of the youthful Greek was local, not planetary, like that of
+the young American. He had a string of legends, in place of our Gospels.
+He had no printed books, no newspaper, no steam caravans, no forks, no
+soap, none of the thousand cheap conveniences which have become matters
+of necessity to our modern civilization. Above all things, if he aspired
+to know as well as to enjoy, he found knowledge not diffused everywhere
+about him, so that a day's labor would buy him more wisdom than a
+year could master, but held in private hands, hoarded in precious
+manuscripts, to be sought for only as gold is sought in narrow fissures,
+and in the beds of brawling streams. Never, since man came into this
+atmosphere of oxygen and azote, was there anything like the condition of
+the young American of the nineteenth century. Having in possession or in
+prospect the best part of half a world, with all its climates and soils
+to choose from; equipped with wings of fire and smoke than fly with
+him day and night, so that he counts his journey not in miles, but in
+degrees, and sees the seasons change as the wild fowl sees them in his
+annual flights; with huge leviathans always ready to take him on their
+broad backs and push behind them with their pectoral or caudal fins the
+waters that seam the continent or separate the hemispheres; heir of all
+old civilizations, founder of that new one which, if all the prophecies
+of the human heart are not lies, is to be the noblest, as it is the
+last; isolated in space from the races that are governed by dynasties
+whose divine right grows out of human wrong, yet knit into the most
+absolute solidarity with mankind of all times and places by the one
+great thought he inherits as his national birthright; free to form and
+express his opinions on almost every subject, and assured that he will
+soon acquire the last franchise which men withhold from man,--that
+of stating the laws of his spiritual being and the beliefs he accepts
+without hindrance except from clearer views of truth,--he seems to want
+nothing for a large, wholesome, noble, beneficent life. In fact, the
+chief danger is that he will think the whole planet is made for him,
+and forget that there are some possibilities left in the debris of the
+old-world civilization which deserve a certain respectful consideration
+at his hands.
+
+The combing and clipping of this shaggy wild continent are in some
+measure done for him by those who have gone before. Society has
+subdivided itself enough to have a place for every form of talent. Thus,
+if a man show the least sign of ability as a sculptor or a painter, for
+instance, he finds the means of education and a demand for his services.
+Even a man who knows nothing but science will be provided for, if
+he does not think it necessary to hang about his birthplace all his
+days,--which is a most unAmerican weakness. The apron-strings of an
+American mother are made of India-rubber. Her boy belongs where he is
+wanted; and that young Marylander of ours spoke for all our young men,
+when he said that his home was wherever the stars and stripes blew over
+his head.
+
+And that leads me to say a few words of this young gentleman, who
+made that audacious movement lately which I chronicled in my last
+record,--jumping over the seats of I don't know how many boarders to
+put himself in the place which the Little Gentleman's absence had left
+vacant at the side of Iris. When a young man is found habitually at the
+side of any one given young lady,--when he lingers where she stays, and
+hastens when she leaves,--when his eyes follow her as she moves and rest
+upon her when she is still,--when he begins to grow a little timid,
+he who was so bold, and a little pensive, he who was so gay, whenever
+accident finds them alone,--when he thinks very often of the given young
+lady, and names her very seldom,--
+
+What do you say about it, my charming young expert in that sweet science
+in which, perhaps, a long experience is not the first of qualifications?
+
+--But we don't know anything about this young man, except that he is
+good-looking, and somewhat high-spirited, and strong-limbed, and has a
+generous style of nature,--all very promising, but by no means proving
+that he is a proper lover for Iris, whose heart we turned inside out
+when we opened that sealed book of hers.
+
+Ah, my dear young friend! When your mamma then, if you will believe it,
+a very slight young lady, with very pretty hair and figure--came and
+told her mamma that your papa had--had--asked No, no, no! she could n't
+say it; but her mother--oh the depth of maternal sagacity!--guessed it
+all without another word!--When your mother, I say, came and told her
+mother she was engaged, and your grandmother told your grandfather, how
+much did they know of the intimate nature of the young gentleman to whom
+she had pledged her existence? I will not be so hard as to ask how much
+your respected mamma knew at that time of the intimate nature of
+your respected papa, though, if we should compare a young
+girl's man-as-she-thinks-him with a forty-summered matron's
+man-as-she-finds-him, I have my doubts as to whether the second would be
+a facsimile of the first in most cases.
+
+The idea that in this world each young person is to wait until he or she
+finds that precise counterpart who alone of all creation was meant for
+him or her, and then fall instantly in love with it, is pretty enough,
+only it is not Nature's way. It is not at all essential that all pairs
+of human beings should be, as we sometimes say of particular couples,
+“born for each other.” Sometimes a man or a woman is made a great deal
+better and happier in the end for having had to conquer the faults of
+the one beloved, and make the fitness not found at first, by gradual
+assimilation. There is a class of good women who have no right to marry
+perfectly good men, because they have the power of saving those who
+would go to ruin but for the guiding providence of a good wife. I have
+known many such cases. It is the most momentous question a woman is
+ever called upon to decide, whether the faults of the man she loves are
+beyond remedy and will drag her down, or whether she is competent to be
+his earthly redeemer and lift him to her own level.
+
+A person of genius should marry a person of character. Genius does not
+herd with genius. The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never found in
+company. They don't care for strange scents,--they like plain animals
+better than perfumed ones. Nay, if you will have the kindness to notice,
+Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the personal peculiarity by
+which her lord is so widely known.
+
+Now when genius allies itself with character, the world is very apt to
+think character has the best of the bargain. A brilliant woman marries a
+plain, manly fellow, with a simple intellectual mechanism;--we have all
+seen such cases. The world often stares a good deal and wonders. She
+should have taken that other, with a far more complex mental machinery.
+She might have had a watch with the philosophical compensation-balance,
+with the metaphysical index which can split a second into tenths, with
+the musical chime which can turn every quarter of an hour into melody.
+She has chosen a plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all.
+
+Let her alone! She knows what she is about. Genius has an infinitely
+deeper reverence for character than character can have for genius. To
+be sure, genius gets the world's praise, because its work is a tangible
+product, to be bought, or had for nothing. It bribes the common voice to
+praise it by presents of speeches, poems, statues, pictures, or whatever
+it can please with. Character evolves its best products for home
+consumption; but, mind you, it takes a deal more to feed a family for
+thirty years than to make a holiday feast for our neighbors once or
+twice in our lives. You talk of the fire of genius. Many a blessed
+woman, who dies unsung and unremembered, has given out more of the real
+vital heat that keeps the life in human souls, without a spark flitting
+through her humble chimney to tell the world about it, than would set a
+dozen theories smoking, or a hundred odes simmering, in the brains of
+so many men of genius. It is in latent caloric, if I may borrow a
+philosophical expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out the
+life that warms them. Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse hardly
+warms her thin fingers,--but she has melted all the ice out of the
+hearts of those young Gracchi, and her lost heat is in the blood of her
+youthful heroes. We are always valuing the soul's temperature by the
+thermometer of public deed or word. Yet the great sun himself, when he
+pours his noonday beams upon some vast hyaline boulder, rent from the
+eternal ice-quarries, and floating toward the tropics, never warms it
+a fraction above the thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit that marked the
+moment when the first drop trickled down its side.
+
+How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the law
+that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong, to
+get as low as the earth will let it! That is genius. But what is this
+transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and the rainbow,
+to that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the same yesterday,
+to-day, and forever, (if the universe be eternal,)--the great outspread
+hand of God himself, forcing all things down into their places, and
+keeping them there? Such, in smaller proportion, is the force of
+character to the fitful movements of genius, as they are or have been
+linked to each other in many a household, where one name was historic,
+and the other, let me say the nobler, unknown, save by some faint
+reflected ray, borrowed from its lustrous companion.
+
+Oftentimes, as I have lain swinging on the water, in the swell of the
+Chelsea ferry-boats, in that long, sharp-pointed, black cradle in which
+I love to let the great mother rock me, I have seen a tall ship glide by
+against the tide, as if drawn by some invisible towline, with a hundred
+strong arms pulling it. Her sails hung unfilled, her streamers were
+drooping, she had neither side-wheel nor stern-wheel; still she moved
+on, stately, in serene triumph, as if with her own life. But I knew that
+on the other side of the ship, hidden beneath the great hulk that swam
+so majestically, there was a little toiling steam-tug, with heart of
+fire and arms of iron, that was hugging it close and dragging it bravely
+on; and I knew, that, if the little steam-tug untwined her arms and
+left the tall ship, it would wallow and roll about, and drift hither and
+thither, and go off with the refluent tide, no man knows whither. And
+so I have known more than one genius, high-decked, full-freighted,
+wide-sailed, gay-pennoned, that, but for the bare toiling arms, and
+brave, warm, beating heart of the faithful little wife, that nestled
+close in his shadow, and clung to him, so that no wind or wave could
+part them, and dragged him on against all the tide of circumstance,
+would soon have gone down the stream and been heard of no more.--No,
+I am too much a lover of genius, I sometimes think, and too often get
+impatient with dull people, so that, in their weak talk, where nothing
+is taken for granted, I look forward to some future possible state of
+development, when a gesture passing between a beatified human soul and
+an archangel shall signify as much as the complete history of a planet,
+from the time when it curdled to the time when its sun was burned out.
+And yet, when a strong brain is weighed with a true heart, it seems to
+me like balancing a bubble against a wedge of gold.
+
+--It takes a very true man to be a fitting companion for a woman of
+genius, but not a very great one. I am not sure that she will not
+embroider her ideal better on a plain ground than on one with a
+brilliant pattern already worked in its texture. But as the very essence
+of genius is truthfulness, contact with realities, (which are always
+ideas behind shows of form or language,) nothing is so contemptible
+as falsehood and pretence in its eyes. Now it is not easy to find a
+perfectly true woman, and it is very hard to find a perfectly true man.
+And a woman of genius, who has the sagacity to choose such a one as her
+companion, shows more of the divine gift in so doing than in her finest
+talk or her most brilliant work of letters or of art.
+
+I have been a good while coming at a secret, for which I wished to
+prepare you before telling it. I think there is a kindly feeling growing
+up between Iris and our young Marylander. Not that I suppose there is
+any distinct understanding between them, but that the affinity which has
+drawn him from the remote corner where he sat to the side of the young
+girl is quietly bringing their two natures together. Just now she is all
+given up to another; but when he no longer calls upon her daily thoughts
+and cares, I warn you not to be surprised, if this bud of friendship
+open like the evening primrose, with a sound as of a sudden stolen kiss,
+and lo! the flower of full-blown love lies unfolded before you.
+
+And now the days had come for our little friend, whose whims and
+weaknesses had interested us, perhaps, as much as his better traits, to
+make ready for that long journey which is easier to the cripple than
+to the strong man, and on which none enters so willingly as he who has
+borne the life-long load of infirmity during his earthly pilgrimage. At
+this point, under most circumstances, I would close the doors and draw
+the veil of privacy before the chamber where the birth which we call
+death, out of life into the unknown world, is working its mystery. But
+this friend of ours stood alone in the world, and, as the last act of
+his life was mainly in harmony with the rest of its drama, I do not here
+feel the force of the objection commonly lying against that death-bed
+literature which forms the staple of a certain portion of the press. Let
+me explain what I mean, so that my readers may think for themselves a
+little, before they accuse me of hasty expressions.
+
+The Roman Catholic Church has certain formulas for its dying children,
+to which almost all of them attach the greatest importance. There is
+hardly a criminal so abandoned that he is not anxious to receive the
+“consolations of religion” in his last hours. Even if he be senseless,
+but still living, I think that the form is gone through with, just as
+baptism is administered to the unconscious new-born child. Now we do not
+quarrel with these forms. We look with reverence and affection upon all
+symbols which give peace and comfort to our fellow-creatures. But the
+value of the new-born child's passive consent to the ceremony is null,
+as testimony to the truth of a doctrine. The automatic closing of a
+dying man's lips on the consecrated wafer proves nothing in favor of the
+Real Presence, or any other dogma. And, speaking generally, the evidence
+of dying men in favor of any belief is to be received with great
+caution.
+
+They commonly tell the truth about their present feelings, no doubt. A
+dying man's deposition about anything he knows is good evidence. But
+it is of much less consequence what a man thinks and says when he is
+changed by pain, weakness, apprehension, than what he thinks when he is
+truly and wholly himself. Most murderers die in a very pious frame of
+mind, expecting to go to glory at once; yet no man believes he shall
+meet a larger average of pirates and cut-throats in the streets of the
+New Jerusalem than of honest folks that died in their beds.
+
+Unfortunately, there has been a very great tendency to make capital of
+various kinds out of dying men's speeches. The lies that have been put
+into their mouths for this purpose are endless. The prime minister,
+whose last breath was spent in scolding his nurse, dies with a
+magnificent apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter. Addison
+gets up a tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,--or somebody makes
+the posthumous dying epigram for him. The incoherent babble of green
+fields is translated into the language of stately sentiment. One would
+think, all that dying men had to do was to say the prettiest thing
+they could,--to make their rhetorical point,--and then bow themselves
+politely out of the world.
+
+Worse than this is the torturing of dying people to get their evidence
+in favor of this or that favorite belief. The camp-followers of
+proselyting sects have come in at the close of every life where they
+could get in, to strip the languishing soul of its thoughts, and carry
+them off as spoils. The Roman Catholic or other priest who insists on
+the reception of his formula means kindly, we trust, and very commonly
+succeeds in getting the acquiescence of the subject of his spiritual
+surgery, but do not let us take the testimony of people who are in the
+worst condition to form opinions as evidence of the truth or falsehood
+of that which they accept. A lame man's opinion of dancing is not good
+for much. A poor fellow who can neither eat nor drink, who is sleepless
+and full of pains, whose flesh has wasted from him, whose blood is like
+water, who is gasping for breath, is not in a condition to judge fairly
+of human life, which in all its main adjustments is intended for men in
+a normal, healthy condition. It is a remark I have heard from the wise
+Patriarch of the Medical Profession among us, that the moral condition
+of patients with disease above the great breathing-muscle, the
+diaphragm, is much more hopeful than that of patients with disease below
+it, in the digestive organs. Many an honest ignorant man has given
+us pathology when he thought he was giving us psychology. With
+this preliminary caution I shall proceed to the story of the Little
+Gentleman's leaving us.
+
+When the divinity-student found that our fellow-boarder was not likely
+to remain long with us, he, being a young man of tender conscience
+and kindly nature, was not a little exercised on his behalf. It was
+undeniable that on several occasions the Little Gentleman had expressed
+himself with a good deal of freedom on a class of subjects which,
+according to the divinity-student, he had no right to form an opinion
+upon. He therefore considered his future welfare in jeopardy.
+
+The Muggletonian sect have a very odd way of dealing with people. If
+I, the Professor, will only give in to the Muggletonian doctrine, there
+shall be no question through all that persuasion that I am competent to
+judge of that doctrine; nay, I shall be quoted as evidence of its truth,
+while I live, and cited, after I am dead, as testimony in its behalf.
+But if I utter any ever so slight Anti-Muggletonian sentiment, then I
+become incompetent to form any opinion on the matter. This, you cannot
+fail to observe, is exactly the way the pseudo-sciences go to work,
+as explained in my Lecture on Phrenology. Now I hold that he whose
+testimony would be accepted in behalf of the Muggletonian doctrine has a
+right to be heard against it. Whoso offers me any article of belief for
+my signature implies that I am competent to form an opinion upon it; and
+if my positive testimony in its favor is of any value, then my negative
+testimony against it is also of value.
+
+I thought my young friend's attitude was a little too much like that of
+the Muggletonians. I also remarked a singular timidity on his part
+lest somebody should “unsettle” somebody's faith,--as if faith did not
+require exercise as much as any other living thing, and were not all the
+better for a shaking up now and then. I don't mean that it would be fair
+to bother Bridget, the wild Irish girl, or Joice Heth, the centenarian,
+or any other intellectual non-combatant; but all persons who proclaim a
+belief which passes judgment on their neighbors must be ready to have it
+“unsettled,” that is, questioned, at all times and by anybody,--just
+as those who set up bars across a thoroughfare must expect to have them
+taken down by every one who wants to pass, if he is strong enough.
+
+Besides, to think of trying to water-proof the American mind against the
+questions that Heaven rains down upon it shows a misapprehension of our
+new conditions. If to question everything be unlawful and dangerous, we
+had better undeclare our independence at once; for what the Declaration
+means is the right to question everything, even the truth of its own
+fundamental proposition.
+
+The old-world order of things is an arrangement of locks and canals,
+where everything depends on keeping the gates shut, and so holding
+the upper waters at their level; but the system under which the young
+republican American is born trusts the whole unimpeded tide of life
+to the great elemental influences, as the vast rivers of the continent
+settle their own level in obedience to the laws that govern the planet
+and the spheres that surround it.
+
+The divinity-student was not quite up to the idea of the commonwealth,
+as our young friend the Marylander, for instance, understood it. He
+could not get rid of that notion of private property in truth, with the
+right to fence it in, and put up a sign-board, thus:
+
+               ALL TRESPASSERS ARE WARNED OFF THESE
+                              GROUNDS!
+
+He took the young Marylander to task for going to the Church of the
+Galileans, where he had several times accompanied Iris of late.
+
+I am a Churchman,--the young man said,--by education and habit. I love
+my old Church for many reasons, but most of all because I think it
+has educated me out of its own forms into the spirit of its highest
+teachings. I think I belong to the “Broad Church,” if any of you can
+tell what that means.
+
+I had the rashness to attempt to answer the question myself.--Some
+say the Broad Church means the collective mass of good people of all
+denominations. Others say that such a definition is nonsense; that
+a church is an organization, and the scattered good folks are no
+organization at all. They think that men will eventually come together
+on the basis of one or two or more common articles of belief, and form
+a great unity. Do they see what this amounts to? It means an equal
+division of intellect! It is mental agrarianism! a thing that never
+was and never will be until national and individual idiosyncrasies have
+ceased to exist. The man of thirty-nine beliefs holds the man of one
+belief a pauper; he is not going to give up thirty-eight of them for
+the sake of fraternizing with the other in the temple which bears on
+its front, “Deo erexit Voltaire.” A church is a garden, I have heard it
+said, and the illustration was neatly handled. Yes, and there is no such
+thing as a broad garden. It must be fenced in, and whatever is fenced in
+is narrow. You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing together
+in it, except by the forcing system, which is a mighty narrow piece of
+business. You can't make a village or a parish or a family think alike,
+yet you suppose that you can make a world pinch its beliefs or pad
+them to a single pattern! Why, the very life of an ecclesiastical
+organization is a life of induction, a state of perpetually disturbed
+equilibrium kept up by another charged body in the neighborhood. If the
+two bodies touch and share their respective charges, down goes the index
+of the electrometer!
+
+Do you know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to himself?
+Smith is always a Smithite. He takes in exactly Smith's-worth of
+knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity. And Brown has
+from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to excommunicate him,
+to anonymous-article him, because he did not take in Brown's-worth of
+knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity. He cannot do it, any more than a
+pint-pot can hold a quart, or a quart-pot be filled by a pint. Iron is
+essentially the same everywhere and always; but the sulphate of iron is
+never the same as the carbonate of iron. Truth is invariable; but the
+Smithate of truth must always differ from the Brownate of truth.
+
+The wider the intellect, the larger and simpler the expressions in which
+its knowledge is embodied. The inferior race, the degraded and enslaved
+people, the small-minded individual, live in the details which to larger
+minds and more advanced tribes of men reduce themselves to axioms and
+laws. As races and individual minds must always differ just as sulphates
+and carbonates do, I cannot see ground for expecting the Broad Church
+to be founded on any fusion of intellectual beliefs, which of course
+implies that those who hold the larger number of doctrines as essential
+shall come down to those who hold the smaller number. These doctrines
+are to the negative aristocracy what the quarterings of their coats are
+to the positive orders of nobility.
+
+The Broad Church, I think, will never be based on anything that requires
+the use of language. Freemasonry gives an idea of such a church, and a
+brother is known and cared for in a strange land where no word of
+his can be understood. The apostle of this church may be a deaf mute
+carrying a cup of cold water to a thirsting fellow-creature. The cup
+of cold water does not require to be translated for a foreigner to
+understand it. I am afraid the only Broad Church possible is one that
+has its creed in the heart, and not in the head,--that we shall know
+its members by their fruits, and not by their words. If you say this
+communion of well-doers is no church, I can only answer, that all
+organized bodies have their limits of size, and that when we find a man
+a hundred feet high and thirty feet broad across the shoulders, we will
+look out for an organization that shall include all Christendom.
+
+Some of us do practically recognize a Broad Church and a Narrow Church,
+however. The Narrow Church may be seen in the ship's boats of humanity,
+in the long boat, in the jolly boat, in the captain's gig, lying off the
+poor old vessel, thanking God that they are safe, and reckoning how soon
+the hulk containing the mass of their fellow-creatures will go down. The
+Broad Church is on board, working hard at the pumps, and very slow to
+believe that the ship will be swallowed up with so many poor people in
+it, fastened down under the hatches ever since it floated.
+
+--All this, of course, was nothing but my poor notion about these
+matters. I am simply an “outsider,” you know; only it doesn't do very
+well for a nest of Hingham boxes to talk too much about outsiders and
+insiders!
+
+After this talk of ours, I think these two young people went pretty
+regularly to the Church of the Galileans. Still they could not keep away
+from the sweet harmonies and rhythmic litanies of Saint Polycarp on the
+great Church festival-days; so that, between the two, they were so much
+together, that the boarders began to make remarks, and our landlady said
+to me, one day, that, though it was noon of her business, them that had
+eyes couldn't help seein' that there was somethin' goin', on between
+them two young people; she thought the young man was a very likely young
+man, though jest what his prospecs was was unbeknown to her; but she
+thought he must be doing well, and rather guessed he would be able
+to take care of a femily, if he didn't go to takin' a house; for a
+gentleman and his wife could board a great deal cheaper than they could
+keep house;--but then that girl was nothin' but a child, and wouldn't
+think of bein' married this five year. They was good boarders, both of
+'em, paid regular, and was as pooty a couple as she ever laid eyes on.
+
+--To come back to what I began to speak of before,--the divinity-student
+was exercised in his mind about the Little Gentleman, and, in the
+kindness of his heart,--for he was a good young man,--and in the
+strength of his convictions,--for he took it for granted that he and
+his crowd were right, and other folks and their crowd were wrong,--he
+determined to bring the Little Gentleman round to his faith before he
+died, if he could. So he sent word to the sick man, that he should be
+pleased to visit him and have some conversation with him; and received
+for answer that he would be welcome.
+
+The divinity-student made him a visit, therefore and had a somewhat
+remarkable interview with him, which I shall briefly relate, without
+attempting to justify the positions taken by the Little Gentleman. He
+found him weak, but calm. Iris sat silent by his pillow.
+
+After the usual preliminaries, the divinity-student said; in a kind way,
+that he was sorry to find him in failing health, that he felt concerned
+for his soul, and was anxious to assist him in making preparations for
+the great change awaiting him.
+
+I thank you, Sir,--said the Little Gentleman, permit me to ask you, what
+makes you think I am not ready for it, Sir, and that you can do anything
+to help me, Sir?
+
+I address you only as a fellow-man,--said the divinity-student,--and
+therefore a fellow-sinner.
+
+I am not a man, Sir!--said the Little Gentleman.--I was born into this
+world the wreck of a man, and I shall not be judged with a race to
+which I do not belong. Look at this!--he said, and held up his withered
+arm.--See there!--and he pointed to his misshapen extremities.--Lay your
+hand here!--and he laid his own on the region of his misplaced heart.--I
+have known nothing of the life of your race. When I first came to my
+consciousness, I found myself an object of pity, or a sight to show. The
+first strange child I ever remember hid its face and would not come near
+me. I was a broken-hearted as well as broken-bodied boy. I grew into the
+emotions of ripening youth, and all that I could have loved shrank from
+my presence. I became a man in years, and had nothing in common with
+manhood but its longings. My life is the dying pang of a worn-out race,
+and I shall go down alone into the dust, out of this world of men and
+women, without ever knowing the fellowship of the one or the love of the
+other. I will not die with a lie rattling in my throat. If another
+state of being has anything worse in store for me, I have had a long
+apprenticeship to give me strength that I may bear it. I don't believe
+it, Sir! I have too much faith for that. God has not left me wholly
+without comfort, even here. I love this old place where I was born;--the
+heart of the world beats under the three hills of Boston, Sir! I love
+this great land, with so many tall men in it, and so many good, noble
+women.--His eyes turned to the silent figure by his pillow.--I have
+learned to accept meekly what has been allotted to me, but I cannot
+honestly say that I think my sin has been greater than my suffering. I
+bear the ignorance and the evil-doing of whole generations in my single
+person. I never drew a breath of air nor took a step that was not a
+punishment for another's fault. I may have had many wrong thoughts, but
+I cannot have done many wrong deeds,--for my cage has been a narrow one,
+and I have paced it alone. I have looked through the bars and seen the
+great world of men busy and happy, but I had no part in their doings.
+I have known what it was to dream of the great passions; but since
+my mother kissed me before she died, no woman's lips have pressed my
+cheek,--nor ever will.
+
+--The young girl's eyes glittered with a sudden film, and almost without
+a thought, but with a warm human instinct that rushed up into her
+face with her heart's blood, she bent over and kissed him. It was the
+sacrament that washed out the memory of long years of bitterness, and I
+should hold it an unworthy thought to defend her. The Little Gentleman
+repaid her with the only tear any of us ever saw him shed.
+
+The divinity-student rose from his place, and, turning away from the
+sick man, walked to the other side of the room, where he bowed his head
+and was still. All the questions he had meant to ask had faded from
+his memory. The tests he had prepared by which to judge of his
+fellow-creature's fitness for heaven seemed to have lost their virtue.
+He could trust the crippled child of sorrow to the Infinite Parent.
+The kiss of the fair-haired girl had been like a sign from heaven, that
+angels watched over him whom he was presuming but a moment before to
+summon before the tribunal of his private judgment. Shall I pray with
+you?--he said, after a pause. A little before he would have said, Shall
+I pray for you?--The Christian religion, as taught by its Founder, is
+full of sentiment. So we must not blame the divinity-student, if he was
+overcome by those yearnings of human sympathy which predominate so
+much more in the sermons of the Master than in the writings of his
+successors, and which have made the parable of the Prodigal Son the
+consolation of mankind, as it has been the stumbling-block of all
+exclusive doctrines.
+
+Pray!--said the Little Gentleman.
+
+The divinity-student prayed, in low, tender tones,
+
+Iris and the Little Gentleman that God would look on his servant lying
+helpless at the feet of his mercy; that He would remember his long years
+of bondage in the flesh; that He would deal gently with the bruised
+reed. Thou hast visited the sins of the fathers upon this their child.
+Oh, turn away from him the penalties of his own transgressions! Thou
+hast laid upon him, from infancy, the cross which thy stronger children
+are called upon to take up; and now that he is fainting under it, be
+Thou his stay, and do Thou succor him that is tempted! Let his manifold
+infirmities come between him and Thy judgment; in wrath remember mercy!
+If his eyes are not opened to all Thy truth, let Thy compassion lighten
+the darkness that rests upon him, even as it came through the word of
+thy Son to blind Bartimeus, who sat by the wayside, begging!
+
+Many more petitions he uttered, but all in the same subdued tone
+of tenderness. In the presence of helpless suffering, and in the
+fast-darkening shadow of the Destroyer, he forgot all but his Christian
+humanity, and cared more about consoling his fellow-man than making a
+proselyte of him.
+
+This was the last prayer to which the Little Gentleman ever listened.
+Some change was rapidly coming over him during this last hour of which
+I have been speaking. The excitement of pleading his cause before his
+self-elected spiritual adviser,--the emotion which overcame him, when
+the young girl obeyed the sudden impulse of her feelings and pressed
+her lips to his cheek,--the thoughts that mastered him while the
+divinity-student poured out his soul for him in prayer, might well hurry
+on the inevitable moment. When the divinity-student had uttered his last
+petition, commending him to the Father through his Son's intercession,
+he turned to look upon him before leaving his chamber. His face was
+changed.--There is a language of the human countenance which we all
+understand without an interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the
+rudest savage that ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect. By the
+stillness of the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless
+eyes, by the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints,
+by the contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul
+is soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its
+windows and putting out its fires.--Such was the aspect of the face
+upon which the divinity-student looked, after the brief silence which
+followed his prayer. The change had been rapid, though not that abrupt
+one which is liable to happen at any moment in these cases.--The sick
+man looked towards him.--Farewell,--he said,--I thank you. Leave me
+alone with her.
+
+When the divinity-student had gone, and the Little Gentleman found
+himself alone with Iris, he lifted his hand to his neck, and took from
+it, suspended by a slender chain, a quaint, antique-looking key,--the
+same key I had once seen him holding. He gave this to her, and pointed
+to a carved cabinet opposite his bed, one of those that had so attracted
+my curious eyes and set me wondering as to what it might contain.
+
+Open it,--he said,--and light the lamp.--The young girl walked to the
+cabinet and unlocked the door. A deep recess appeared, lined with black
+velvet, against which stood in white relief an ivory crucifix. A silver
+lamp hung over it. She lighted the lamp and came back to the bedside.
+The dying man fixed his eyes upon the figure of the dying Saviour.--Give
+me your hand, he said; and Iris placed her right hand in his left. So
+they remained, until presently his eyes lost their meaning, though they
+still remained vacantly fixed upon the white image. Yet he held the
+young girl's hand firmly, as if it were leading him through some
+deep-shadowed valley and it was all he could cling to. But presently an
+involuntary muscular contraction stole over him, and his terrible dying
+grasp held the poor girl as if she were wedged in an engine of torture.
+She pressed her lips together and sat still. The inexorable hand held
+her tighter and tighter, until she felt as if her own slender fingers
+would be crushed in its gripe. It was one of the tortures of the
+Inquisition she was suffering, and she could not stir from her place.
+Then, in her great anguish, she, too, cast her eyes upon that dying
+figure, and, looking upon its pierced hands and feet and side and
+lacerated forehead, she felt that she also must suffer uncomplaining.
+In the moment of her sharpest pain she did not forget the duties of
+her under office, but dried the dying man's moist forehead with her
+handkerchief, even while the dews of agony were glistening on her own.
+How long this lasted she never could tell. Time and thirst are two
+things you and I talk about; but the victims whom holy men and righteous
+judges used to stretch on their engines knew better what they meant than
+you or I!--What is that great bucket of water for? said the Marchioness
+de Brinvilliers, before she was placed on the rack.--For you to
+drink,--said the torturer to the little woman.--She could not think that
+it would take such a flood to quench the fire in her and so keep her
+alive for her confession. The torturer knew better than she.
+
+After a time not to be counted in minutes, as the clock measures,
+--without any warning,--there came a swift change of his features; his
+face turned white, as the waters whiten when a sudden breath passes over
+their still surface; the muscles instantly relaxed, and Iris, released
+at once from her care for the sufferer and from his unconscious grasp,
+fell senseless, with a feeble cry,--the only utterance of her long
+agony.
+
+Perhaps you sometimes wander in through the iron gates of the Copp's
+Hill burial-ground. You love to stroll round among the graves that crowd
+each other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit. You
+love to lean on the freestone slab which lies over the bones of the
+Mathers,--to read the epitaph of stout William Clark, “Despiser of Sorry
+Persons and little Actions,”--to stand by the stone grave of sturdy
+Daniel Malcolm and look upon the splintered slab that tells the old
+rebel's story,--to kneel by the triple stone that says how the three
+Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died on the same day
+and lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a moving ballad, by the
+late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen in his autobiography, which will
+explain the secret of the triple gravestone; though the old philosopher
+has made a mistake, unless the stone is wrong.
+
+Not very far from that you will find a fair mound, of dimensions fit
+to hold a well-grown man. I will not tell you the inscription upon the
+stone which stands at its head; for I do not wish you to be sure of the
+resting-place of one who could not bear to think that he should be known
+as a cripple among the dead, after being pointed at so long among the
+living. There is one sign, it is true, by which, if you have been a
+sagacious reader of these papers, you will at once know it; but I fear
+you read carelessly, and must study them more diligently before you will
+detect the hint to which I allude.
+
+The Little Gentleman lies where he longed to lie, among the old
+names and the old bones of the old Boston people. At the foot of his
+resting-place is the river, alive with the wings and antennae of its
+colossal water-insects; over opposite are the great war-ships, and the
+heavy guns, which, when they roar, shake the soil in which he lies; and
+in the steeple of Christ Church, hard by, are the sweet chimes which are
+the Boston boy's Ranz des Vaches, whose echoes follow him all the world
+over.
+
+                         In Pace!
+
+I, told you a good while ago that the Little Gentleman could not do a
+better thing than to leave all his money, whatever it might be, to the
+young girl who has since that established such a claim upon him. He did
+not, however. A considerable bequest to one of our public institutions
+keeps his name in grateful remembrance. The telescope through which he
+was fond of watching the heavenly bodies, and the movements of which had
+been the source of such odd fancies on my part, is now the property of a
+Western College. You smile as you think of my taking it for a fleshless
+human figure, when I saw its tube pointing to the sky, and thought it
+was an arm, under the white drapery thrown over it for protection. So do
+I smile now; I belong to the numerous class who are prophets after the
+fact, and hold my nightmares very cheap by daylight.
+
+I have received many letters of inquiry as to the sound resembling a
+woman's voice, which occasioned me so many perplexities. Some thought
+there was no question that he had a second apartment, in which he had
+made an asylum for a deranged female relative. Others were of opinion
+that he was, as I once suggested, a “Bluebeard” with patriarchal
+tendencies, and I have even been censured for introducing so Oriental an
+element into my record of boarding-house experience.
+
+Come in and see me, the Professor, some evening when I have nothing
+else to do, and ask me to play you Tartini's Devil's Sonata on that
+extraordinary instrument in my possession, well known to amateurs as one
+of the masterpieces of Joseph Guarnerius. The vox humana of the great
+Haerlem organ is very lifelike, and the same stop in the organ of the
+Cambridge chapel might be mistaken in some of its tones for a human
+voice; but I think you never heard anything come so near the cry of
+a prima donna as the A string and the E string of this instrument. A
+single fact will illustrate the resemblance. I was executing some tours
+de force upon it one evening, when the policeman of our district rang
+the bell sharply, and asked what was the matter in the house. He
+had heard a woman's screams,--he was sure of it. I had to make the
+instrument sing before his eyes before he could be satisfied that he had
+not heard the cries of a woman. The instrument was bequeathed to me by
+the Little Gentleman. Whether it had anything to do with the sounds I
+heard coming from his chamber, you can form your own opinion;--I have no
+other conjecture to offer. It is not true that a second apartment with
+a secret entrance was found; and the story of the veiled lady is the
+invention of one of the Reporters.
+
+Bridget, the housemaid, always insisted that he died a Catholic. She had
+seen the crucifix, and believed that he prayed on his knees before it.
+The last circumstance is very probably true; indeed, there was a
+spot worn on the carpet just before this cabinet which might be thus
+accounted for. Why he, whose whole life was a crucifixion, should not
+love to look on that divine image of blameless suffering, I cannot see;
+on the contrary, it seems to me the most natural thing in the world
+that he should. But there are those who want to make private property of
+everything, and can't make up their minds that people who don't think as
+they do should claim any interest in that infinite compassion expressed
+in the central figure of the Christendom which includes us all.
+
+The divinity-student expressed a hope before the boarders that he should
+meet him in heaven.--The question is, whether he'll meet you,--said the
+young fellow John, rather smartly. The divinity-student had n't thought
+of that.
+
+However, he is a worthy young man, and I trust I have shown him in a
+kindly and respectful light. He will get a parish by-and-by; and, as he
+is about to marry the sister of an old friend,--the Schoolmistress, whom
+some of us remember,--and as all sorts of expensive accidents happen
+to young married ministers, he will be under bonds to the amount of his
+salary, which means starvation, if they are forfeited, to think all
+his days as he thought when he was settled,--unless the majority of
+his people change with him or in advance of him. A hard ease, to which
+nothing could reconcile a man, except that the faithful discharge of
+daily duties in his personal relations with his parishioners will make
+him useful enough in his way, though as a thinker he may cease to exist
+before he has reached middle age.
+
+--Iris went into mourning for the Little Gentleman. Although, as I
+have said, he left the bulk of his property, by will, to a public
+institution, he added a codicil, by which he disposed of various pieces
+of property as tokens of kind remembrance. It was in this way I became
+the possessor of the wonderful instrument I have spoken of, which had
+been purchased for him out of an Italian convent. The landlady was
+comforted with a small legacy. The following extract relates to Iris:
+“in consideration of her manifold acts of kindness, but only in token
+of grateful remembrance, and by no means as a reward for services which
+cannot be compensated, a certain messuage, with all the land thereto
+appertaining, situated in ______ Street, at the North End, so called, of
+Boston, aforesaid, the same being the house in which I was born, but
+now inhabited by several families, and known as 'The Rookery.'” Iris had
+also the crucifix, the portrait, and the red-jewelled ring. The funeral
+or death's-head ring was buried with him.
+
+It was a good while, after the Little Gentleman was gone, before our
+boarding-house recovered its wonted cheerfulness. There was a flavor in
+his whims and local prejudices that we liked, even while we smiled
+at them. It was hard to see the tall chair thrust away among useless
+lumber, to dismantle his room, to take down the picture of Leah, the
+handsome Witch of Essex, to move away the massive shelves that held the
+books he loved, to pack up the tube through which he used to study the
+silent stars, looking down at him like the eyes of dumb creatures, with
+a kind of stupid half-consciousness that did not worry him as did the
+eyes of men and women,--and hardest of all to displace that sacred
+figure to which his heart had always turned and found refuge, in the
+feelings it inspired, from all the perplexities of his busy brain. It
+was hard, but it had to be done.
+
+And by-and-by we grew cheerful again, and the breakfast-table wore
+something of its old look. The Koh-i-noor, as we named the gentleman
+with the diamond, left us, however, soon after that “little mill,” as
+the young fellow John called it, where he came off second best. His
+departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the landlady's daughter,
+inclosing a lock of purple hair which she “had valued as a pledge of
+affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the vows he had breathed,”
+ speedily followed by another, inclosing the landlady's bill. The next
+morning he was missing, as were his limited wardrobe and the trunk that
+held it. Three empty bottles of Mrs. Allen's celebrated preparation,
+each of them asserting, on its word of honor as a bottle, that its
+former contents were “not a dye,” were all that was left to us of the
+Koh-i-noor.
+
+From this time forward, the landlady's daughter manifested a decided
+improvement in her style of carrying herself before the boarders. She
+abolished the odious little flat, gummy side-curl. She left off various
+articles of “jewelry.” She began to help her mother in some of her
+household duties. She became a regular attendant on the ministrations
+of a very worthy clergyman, having been attracted to his meetin' by
+witnessing a marriage ceremony in which he called a man and a woman a
+“gentleman” and a “lady,”--a stroke of gentility which quite overcame
+her. She even took a part in what she called a Sabbath school, though
+it was held on Sunday, and by no means on Saturday, as the name she
+intended to utter implied. All this, which was very sincere, as I
+believe, on her part, and attended with a great improvement in her
+character, ended in her bringing home a young man, with straight, sandy
+hair, brushed so as to stand up steeply above his forehead, wearing a
+pair of green spectacles, and dressed in black broadcloth. His personal
+aspect, and a certain solemnity of countenance, led me to think he
+must be a clergyman; and as Master Benjamin Franklin blurted out before
+several of us boarders, one day, that “Sis had got a beau,” I was
+pleased at the prospect of her becoming a minister's wife. On inquiry,
+however, I found that the somewhat solemn look which I had noticed was
+indeed a professional one, but not clerical. He was a young undertaker,
+who had just succeeded to a thriving business. Things, I believe, are
+going on well at this time of writing, and I am glad for the landlady's
+daughter and her mother. Sextons and undertakers are the cheerfullest
+people in the world at home, as comedians and circus-clowns are the most
+melancholy in their domestic circle.
+
+As our old boarding-house is still in existence, I do not feel at
+liberty to give too minute a statement of the present condition of each
+and all of its inmates. I am happy to say, however, that they are all
+alive and well, up to this time. That amiable old gentleman who sat
+opposite to me is growing older, as old men will, but still smiles
+benignantly on all the boarders, and has come to be a kind of father to
+all of them,--so that on his birthday there is always something like
+a family festival. The Poor Relation, even, has warmed into a filial
+feeling towards him, and on his last birthday made him a beautiful
+present, namely, a very handsomely bound copy of Blair's celebrated
+poem, “The Grave.”
+
+The young man John is still, as he says, “in fustrate fettle.” I saw
+him spar, not long since, at a private exhibition, and do himself great
+credit in a set-to with Henry Finnegass, Esq., a professional gentleman
+of celebrity. I am pleased to say that he has been promoted to an upper
+clerkship, and, in consequence of his rise in office, has taken
+an apartment somewhat lower down than number “forty-'leven,” as he
+facetiously called his attic. Whether there is any truth, or not, in the
+story of his attachment to, and favorable reception by, the daughter of
+the head of an extensive wholesale grocer's establishment, I will not
+venture an opinion; I may say, however, that I have met him repeatedly
+in company with a very well-nourished and high-colored young lady, who,
+I understand, is the daughter of the house in question.
+
+Some of the boarders were of opinion that Iris did not return the
+undisguised attentions of the handsome young Marylander. Instead of
+fixing her eyes steadily on him, as she used to look upon the Little
+Gentleman, she would turn them away, as if to avoid his own. They often
+went to church together, it is true; but nobody, of course, supposes
+there is any relation between religious sympathy and those wretched
+“sentimental” movements of the human heart upon which it is commonly
+agreed that nothing better is based than society, civilization,
+friendship, the relation of husband and wife, and of parent and child,
+and which many people must think were singularly overrated by the
+Teacher of Nazareth, whose whole life, as I said before, was full of
+sentiment, loving this or that young man, pardoning this or that sinner,
+weeping over the dead, mourning for the doomed city, blessing, and
+perhaps kissing, the little children, so that the Gospels are still
+cried over almost as often as the last work of fiction!
+
+But one fine June morning there rumbled up to the door of our
+boarding-house a hack containing a lady inside and a trunk on the
+outside. It was our friend the lady-patroness of Miss Iris, the same who
+had been called by her admiring pastor “The Model of all the Virtues.”
+ Once a week she had written a letter, in a rather formal hand, but full
+of good advice, to her young charge. And now she had come to carry her
+away, thinking that she had learned all she was likely to learn
+under her present course of teaching. The Model, however, was to stay
+awhile,--a week, or more,--before they should leave together.
+
+Iris was obedient, as she was bound to be. She was respectful, grateful,
+as a child is with a just, but not tender parent. Yet something was
+wrong. She had one of her trances, and became statue-like, as before,
+only the day after the Model's arrival. She was wan and silent, tasted
+nothing at table, smiled as if by a forced effort, and often looked
+vaguely away from those who were looking at her, her eyes just glazed
+with the shining moisture of a tear that must not be allowed to gather
+and fall. Was it grief at parting from the place where her strange
+friendship had grown up with the Little Gentleman? Yet she seemed to
+have become reconciled to his loss, and rather to have a deep feeling of
+gratitude that she had been permitted to care for him in his last weary
+days.
+
+The Sunday after the Model's arrival, that lady had an attack of
+headache, and was obliged to shut herself up in a darkened room alone.
+Our two young friends took the opportunity to go together to the
+Church of the Galileans. They said but little going,--“collecting their
+thoughts” for the service, I devoutly hope. My kind good friend the
+pastor preached that day one of his sermons that make us all feel like
+brothers and sisters, and his text was that affectionate one from John,
+“My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in
+deed and in truth.” When Iris and her friend came out of church, they
+were both pale, and walked a space without speaking.
+
+At last the young man said,--You and I are not little children, Iris!
+
+She looked in his face an instant, as if startled, for there was
+something strange in the tone of his voice. She smiled faintly, but
+spoke never a word.
+
+In deed and in truth, Iris,---
+
+What shall a poor girl say or do, when a strong man falters in his
+speech before her, and can do nothing better than hold out his hand to
+finish his broken sentence?
+
+The poor girl said nothing, but quietly laid her ungloved hand in
+his,--the little soft white hand which had ministered so tenderly and
+suffered so patiently.
+
+The blood came back to the young man's cheeks, as he lifted it to his
+lips, even as they walked there in the street, touched it gently with
+them, and said, “It is mine!”
+
+Iris did not contradict him.
+
+The seasons pass by so rapidly, that I am startled to think how much
+has happened since these events I was describing. Those two young
+people would insist on having their own way about their own affairs,
+notwithstanding the good lady, so justly called the Model, insisted that
+the age of twenty-five years was as early as any discreet young lady
+should think of incurring the responsibilities, etc., etc. Long
+before Iris had reached that age, she was the wife of a young Maryland
+engineer, directing some of the vast constructions of his native
+State,--where he was growing rich fast enough to be able to decline that
+famous Russian offer which would have made him a kind of nabob in a
+few years. Iris does not write verse often, nowadays, but she sometimes
+draws. The last sketch of hers I have seen in my Southern visits was of
+two children, a boy and girl, the youngest holding a silver goblet,
+like the one she held that evening when I--I was so struck with her
+statue-like beauty. If in the later, summer months you find the grass
+marked with footsteps around that grave on Copp's Hill I told you of,
+and flowers scattered over it, you may be sure that Iris is here on her
+annual visit to the home of her childhood and that excellent lady whose
+only fault was, that Nature had written out her list of virtues an ruled
+paper, and forgotten to rub out the lines.
+
+One thing more I must mention. Being on the Common, last Sunday, I
+was attracted by the cheerful spectacle of a well-dressed and somewhat
+youthful papa wheeling a very elegant little carriage containing a stout
+baby. A buxom young lady watched them from one of the stone seats,
+with an interest which could be nothing less than maternal. I at once
+recognized my old friend, the young fellow whom we called John. He was
+delighted to see me, introduced me to “Madam,” and would have the lusty
+infant out of the carriage, and hold him up for me to look at.
+
+Now, then,--he said to the two-year-old,--show the gentleman how you hit
+from the shoulder. Whereupon the little imp pushed his fat fist straight
+into my eye, to his father's intense satisfaction.
+
+Fust-rate little chap,--said the papa.--Chip of the old block. Regl'r
+little Johnny, you know.
+
+I was so much pleased to find the young fellow settled in life, and
+pushing about one of “them little articles” he had seemed to want so
+much, that I took my “punishment” at the hands of the infant pugilist
+with great equanimity.--And how is the old boarding-house?--I asked.
+
+A 1,--he answered.--Painted and papered as good as new. Gabs in all the
+rooms up to the skyparlors. Old woman's layin' up money, they say.
+Means to send Ben Franklin to college. Just then the first bell rang for
+church, and my friend, who, I understand, has become a most exemplary
+member of society, said he must be off to get ready for meetin', and
+told the young one to “shake dada,” which he did with his closed fist,
+in a somewhat menacing manner. And so the young man John, as we used to
+call him, took the pole of the miniature carriage, and pushed the small
+pugilist before him homewards, followed, in a somewhat leisurely way, by
+his pleasant-looking lady-companion, and I sent a sigh and a smile after
+him.
+
+That evening, as soon as it was dark, I could not help going round by
+the old boarding-house. The “gahs” was lighted, but the curtains, or
+more properly, the painted shades; were not down. And so I stood there
+and looked in along the table where the boarders sat at the evening
+meal,--our old breakfast-table, which some of us feel as if we knew so
+well. There were new faces at it, but also old and familiar ones.--The
+landlady, in a wonderfully smart cap, looking young, comparatively
+speaking, and as if half the wrinkles had been ironed out of her
+forehead.--Her daughter, in rather dressy half-mourning, with a vast
+brooch of jet, got up, apparently, to match the gentleman next her, who
+was in black costume and sandy hair,--the last rising straight from
+his forehead, like the marble flame one sometimes sees at the top of a
+funeral urn.--The Poor Relation, not in absolute black, but in a stuff
+with specks of white; as much as to say, that, if there were any more
+Hirams left to sigh for her, there were pin-holes in the night of her
+despair, through which a ray of hope might find its way to an adorer.
+--Master Benjamin Franklin, grown taller of late, was in the act of
+splitting his face open with a wedge of pie, so that his features were
+seen to disadvantage for the moment.--The good old gentleman was sitting
+still and thoughtful. All at once he turned his face toward the window
+where I stood, and, just as if he had seen me, smiled his benignant
+smile. It was a recollection of some past pleasant moment; but it fell
+upon me like the blessing of a father.
+
+I kissed my hand to them all, unseen as I stood in the outer darkness;
+and as I turned and went my way, the table and all around it faded into
+the realm of twilight shadows and of midnight dreams.
+
+                  --------------
+
+And so my year's record is finished. The Professor has talked less than
+his predecessor, but he has heard and seen more. Thanks to all those
+friends who from time to time have sent their messages of kindly
+recognition and fellow-feeling! Peace to all such as may have been
+vexed in spirit by any utterance these pages have repeated! They will,
+doubtless, forget for the moment the difference in the hues of truth we
+look at through our human prisms, and join in singing (inwardly) this
+hymn to the Source of the light we all need to lead us, and the warmth
+which alone can make us all brothers.
+
+
+               A SUN-DAY HYMN.
+
+     Lord of all being! throned afar,
+     Thy glory flames from sun and star,
+     Centre and soul of every sphere,
+     Yet to each loving heart how near!
+
+     Sun of our life, thy quickening ray
+     Sheds on our path the glow of day;
+     Star of our hope, thy softened light
+     Cheers the long watches of the night.
+
+     Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn;
+     Our noontide is thy gracious dawn;
+     Our rainbow arch thy mercy's sign;
+     All, save the clouds of sin, are thine!
+
+     Lord of all life, below, above,
+     Whose light is truth, whose warmth is love,
+     Before thy ever-blazing throne
+     We ask no lustre of our own.
+
+     Grant us thy truth to make us free,
+     And kindling hearts that burn for thee,
+     Till all thy living altars claim
+     One holy light, one heavenly flame.
+     One holy light, one heavenly flame.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROFESSOR AT BREAKFAST TABLE ***
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Professor at the Breakfast Table, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd7; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
+
+[The Physician and Poet--Not the Jurist O. W. Holmes, Jr.]
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+
+Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
+
+Release Date: August 15, 2006 [EBook #2665]
+Last Updated: February 18, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROFESSOR AT BREAKFAST TABLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <h1>
+      THE PROFESSOR<br /> AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br /> <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION. </a><br /><br />
+        <a href="#link2H_PREF2"> PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION </a><br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0003"> <b>THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.</b> </a>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> I </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> II </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> III&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> V </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> VI&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> VII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> VIII&nbsp;&nbsp; </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> IX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#linkten"> X </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> XI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> XII&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a quarter
+      of a century since these papers were written. Statements which were true
+      then are not necessarily true now. Thus, the speed of the trotting horse
+      has been so much developed that the record of the year when the fastest
+      time to that date was given must be very considerably altered, as may be
+      seen by referring to a note on page 49 of the &ldquo;Autocrat.&rdquo; No doubt many
+      other statements and opinions might be more or less modified if I were
+      writing today instead of having written before the war, when the world and
+      I were both more than a score of years younger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These papers followed close upon the track of the &ldquo;Autocrat.&rdquo; They had to
+      endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected, which is a
+      formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest. Paradise Regained
+      and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are enough to warn every
+      one who has made a jingle fair hit with his arrow of the danger of missing
+      when he looses &ldquo;his fellow of the selfsame flight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There is good reason why it should be so. The first juice that runs of
+      itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and tastes of
+      the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press the flow betrays
+      the flavor of the skin. If there is any freshness in the original idea of
+      the work, if there is any individuality in the method or style of a new
+      author, or of an old author on a new track, it will have lost much of its
+      first effect when repeated. Still, there have not been wanting readers who
+      have preferred this second series of papers to the first. The new papers
+      were more aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that reason found a
+      heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper antagonism in
+      others. It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks they called
+      forth. Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of temper at this
+      time from those who do not accept them were treated as if they were the
+      utterances of a nihilist incendiary. It required the exercise of some
+      forbearance not to recriminate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a line
+      accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one when he
+      is all ready to be vexed or indignant! One day, in the time when I was
+      young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of &ldquo;Tom Jones,&rdquo; and
+      glance at the title-page. There was one of those little engravings
+      opposite, which bore the familiar name of &ldquo;T. Uwins,&rdquo; as I remember it,
+      and under it the words &ldquo;Mr. Partridge bore all this patiently.&rdquo; How many
+      times, when, after rough usage from ill-mannered critics, my own
+      vocabulary of vituperation was simmering in such a lively way that it
+      threatened to boil and lift its lid and so boil over, those words have
+      calmed the small internal effervescence! There is very little in them and
+      very little of them; and so there is not much in a linchpin considered by
+      itself, but it often keeps a wheel from coming off and prevents what might
+      be a catastrophe. The chief trouble in offering such papers as these to
+      the readers of to-day is that their heresies have become so familiar among
+      intelligent people that they have too commonplace an aspect. All the
+      lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear so differently from the way in
+      which they presented themselves when these papers were written that it is
+      hard to recognize that we and our fellow-passengers are still in the same
+      old vessel sailing the same unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet
+      unseen harbor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in these papers
+      to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index Expurgatorius; and
+      if they are medicated with a few questionable dogmas or antidogmas, the
+      public has become used to so much rougher treatments, that what was once
+      an irritant may now act as an anodyne, and the reader may nod over pages
+      which, when they were first written, would have waked him into a paroxysm
+      of protest and denunciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      November, 1882.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PREF2" id="link2H_PREF2">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades, and
+      if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten years. The
+      first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps apologetic, in
+      the expectation of attacks from various quarters. If the book is in some
+      points in advance of public opinion, it is natural that the writer should
+      try to smooth the way to the reception of his more or less aggressive
+      ideas. He wishes to convince, not to offend,&mdash;to obtain a hearing for
+      his thought, not to stir up angry opposition in those who do not accept
+      it. There is commonly an anxious look about a first Preface. The author
+      thinks he shall be misapprehended about this or that matter, that his
+      well-meant expressions will probably be invidiously interpreted by those
+      whom he looks upon as prejudiced critics, and if he deals with living
+      questions that he will be attacked as a destructive by the conservatives
+      and reproached for his timidity by the noisier radicals. The first
+      Preface, therefore, is likely to be the weakest part of a work containing
+      the thoughts of an honest writer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time the writer has cooled down from his excitement,&mdash;has got
+      over his apprehensions, is pleased to find that his book is still read,
+      and that he must write a new Preface. He comes smiling to his task. How
+      many things have explained themselves in the ten or twenty or thirty years
+      since he came before his untried public in those almost plaintive
+      paragraphs in which he introduced himself to his readers,&mdash;for the
+      Preface writer, no matter how fierce a combatant he may prove, comes on to
+      the stage with his shield on his right arm and his sword in his left hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Professor at the Breakfast-Table came out in the &ldquo;Atlantic Monthly&rdquo;
+       and introduced itself without any formal Preface. A quarter of a century
+      later the Preface of 1882, which the reader has just had laid before him,
+      was written. There is no mark of worry, I think, in that. Old opponents
+      had come up and shaken hands with the author they had attacked or
+      denounced. Newspapers which had warned their subscribers against him were
+      glad to get him as a contributor to their columns. A great change had come
+      over the community with reference to their beliefs. Christian believers
+      were united as never before in the feeling that, after all, their common
+      object was to elevate the moral and religious standard of humanity. But
+      within the special compartments of the great Christian fold the marks of
+      division have pronounced themselves in the most unmistakable manner. As an
+      example we may take the lines of cleavage which have shown themselves in
+      the two great churches, the Congregational and the Presbyterian, and the
+      very distinct fissure which is manifest in the transplanted Anglican
+      church of this country. Recent circumstances have brought out the fact of
+      the great change in the dogmatic communities which has been going on
+      silently but surely. The licensing of a missionary, the transfer of a
+      Professor from one department to another, the election of a Bishop,&mdash;each
+      of these movements furnishes evidence that there is no such thing as an
+      air-tight reservoir of doctrinal finalities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The folding-doors are wide open to every Protestant to enter all the
+      privileged precincts and private apartments of the various exclusive
+      religious organizations. We may demand the credentials of every creed and
+      catechise all the catechisms. So we may discuss the gravest questions
+      unblamed over our morning coffee-cups or our evening tea-cups. There is no
+      rest for the Protestant until he gives up his legendary anthropology and
+      all its dogmatic dependencies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is only incidentally, however, that the Professor at the
+      Breakfast-Table handles matters which are the subjects of religious
+      controversy. The reader who is sensitive about having his fixed beliefs
+      dealt with as if they were open to question had better skip the pages
+      which look as if they would disturb his complacency. &ldquo;Faith&rdquo; is the most
+      precious of possessions, and it dislikes being meddled with. It means, of
+      course, self-trust,&mdash;that is, a belief in the value of our own
+      opinion of a doctrine, of a church, of a religion, of a Being, a belief
+      quite independent of any evidence that we can bring to convince a jury of
+      our fellow beings. Its roots are thus inextricably entangled with those of
+      self-love and bleed as mandrakes were said to, when pulled up as weeds.
+      Some persons may even at this late day take offence at a few opinions
+      expressed in the following pages, but most of these passages will be read
+      without loss of temper by those who disagree with them, and by-and-by they
+      may be found too timid and conservative for intelligent readers, if they
+      are still read by any.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BEVERLY FARM, MASS., June 18, 1891. O. W. H.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      THE PROFESSOR<br /> AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.
+    </h1>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+             What he said, what he heard, and what he saw.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
+      statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a universal
+      formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table. It would have
+      had a grand effect. For this purpose I fixed my eyes on a certain
+      divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few phrases, and then
+      forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of being.&mdash;I will thank
+      you for the sugar,&mdash;I said.&mdash;Man is a dependent creature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a small favor to ask,&mdash;said the divinity-student,&mdash;and
+      passed the sugar to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Life is a great bundle of little things,&mdash;I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram of the
+      sugar question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You smile,&mdash;I said.&mdash;Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle
+      of great things?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back with a
+      pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches.&mdash;Life is a great bundle
+      of great things,&mdash;he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (NOW, THEN!) The great end of being, after all, is....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hold on!&mdash;said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be
+      John, and nothing else,&mdash;for that is what they all call him,&mdash;hold
+      on! the Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
+      pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs about
+      the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing the bait and
+      hook intended for flounders. On being drawn from the water, it exposes an
+      immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a surface so full of spines,
+      ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the naturalists have not been able to
+      count them without quarrelling about the number, and that the colored
+      youth, whose sport they spoil, do not like to touch them, and especially
+      to tread on them, unless they happen to have shoes on, to cover the thick
+      white soles of their broad black feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked round
+      the table with curiosity to see what it meant. At the further end of it I
+      saw a head, and a&mdash;a small portion of a little deformed body, mounted
+      on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a fair level enough for
+      him to get at his food. His whole appearance was so grotesque, I felt for
+      a minute as if there was a showman behind him who would pull him down
+      presently and put up Judy, or the hangman, or the Devil, or some other
+      wooden personage of the famous spectacle. I contrived to lose the first of
+      his sentence, but what I heard began so:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to
+      come down from the tents on section and Independence days with their pails
+      to get water to make egg-pop with. Born in Boston; went to school in
+      Boston as long as the boys would let me.&mdash;The little man groaned,
+      turned, as if to look around, and went on.&mdash;Ran away from school one
+      day to see Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a logger-head. That was
+      in flip days, when there were always two three loggerheads in the fire.
+      I'm a Boston boy, I tell you,&mdash;born at North End, and mean to be
+      buried on Copp's Hill, with the good old underground people,&mdash;the
+      Worthylakes, and the rest of 'em. Yes,&mdash;up on the old hill, where
+      they buried Captain Daniel Malcolm in a stone grave, ten feet deep, to
+      keep him safe from the red-coats, in those old times when the world was
+      frozen up tight and there was n't but one spot open, and that was right
+      over Faneuil all,&mdash;and black enough it looked, I tell you! There 's
+      where my bones shall lie, Sir, and rattle away when the big guns go off at
+      the Navy Yard opposite! You can't make me ashamed of the old place! Full
+      crooked little streets;&mdash;I was born and used to run round in one of
+      'em&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I should think so,&mdash;said that young man whom I hear them call
+      &ldquo;John,&rdquo;&mdash;softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but
+      thinking in a half-whisper, evidently.&mdash;I should think so; and got
+      kinked up, turnin' so many corners.&mdash;The little man did not hear what
+      was said, but went on,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened,
+      and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free
+      speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead men,&mdash;I
+      don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their steeples!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?&mdash;said a person with black
+      whiskers and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too
+      massive, and a diamond pin so very large that the most trusting nature
+      might confess an inward suggestion,&mdash;of course, nothing amounting to
+      a suspicion. For this is a gentleman from a great city, and sits next to
+      the landlady's daughter, who evidently believes in him, and is the object
+      of his especial attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How high?&mdash;said the little man.&mdash;As high as the first step of
+      the stairs that lead to the New Jerusalem. Is n't that high enough?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is,&mdash;I said.&mdash;The great end of being is to harmonize man with
+      the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be
+      so still. But who shall tune the pitch-pipe? Quis cus-(On the whole, as
+      this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a foreign language,
+      might not be familiar to all the boarders, I thought I would not finish
+      it.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Go to the Bible!&mdash;said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced,
+      sharp-eyed, sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress,
+      appearing as if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated itself as
+      a bit of economy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You speak well, Madam,&mdash;I said;&mdash;yet there is room for a gloss
+      or commentary on what you say. &ldquo;He who would bring back the wealth of the
+      Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.&rdquo; What you bring away from
+      the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.&mdash;Benjamin
+      Franklin! Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring me down the
+      small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will find lying under
+      the &ldquo;Cruden's Concordance.&rdquo; [The boy took a large bite, which left a very
+      perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-butter he held, and departed on
+      his errand, with the portable fraction of his breakfast to sustain him on
+      the way.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Here it is. &ldquo;Go to the Bible. A Dissertation, etc., etc. By J. J.
+      Flournoy. Athens, Georgia, 1858.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have judiciously
+      delivered. You may be interested, Madam, to know what are the conclusions
+      at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia, has arrived. You shall
+      hear, Madam. He has gone to the Bible, and he has come back from the
+      Bible, bringing a remedy for existing social evils, which, if it is the
+      real specific, as it professes to be, is of great interest to humanity,
+      and to the female part of humanity in particular. It is what he calls
+      TRIGAMY, Madam, or the marrying of three wives, so that &ldquo;good old men&rdquo; may
+      be solaced at once by the companionship of the wisdom of maturity, and of
+      those less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities which are found at
+      an earlier period of life. He has followed your precept, Madam; I hope you
+      accept his conclusions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact, &ldquo;all
+      abroad,&rdquo; after the delivery of this &ldquo;counter&rdquo; of mine, that I left her to
+      recover her wits, and went on with the conversation, which I was beginning
+      to get pretty well in hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
+      effect I had produced. First, she was a little stunned at having her
+      argument knocked over. Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
+      tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion. Thirdly.&mdash;I
+      don't like to say what I thought. Something seemed to have pleased her
+      fancy. Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into fashion, there
+      would be three times as many chances to enjoy the luxury of saying, &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+       is more than I, can tell you. I may as well mention that B. F. came to me
+      after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet for &ldquo;a lady,&rdquo;&mdash;one of the
+      boarders, he said,&mdash;looking as if he had a secret he wished to be
+      relieved of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I continued.&mdash;If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up
+      in the faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the
+      end of all reason. If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for truth
+      with its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no presumption in
+      favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of our inheriting it.
+      Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair chance to become a
+      convert to a better religion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in the
+      mind by changing the word which stands for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I don't know what you mean by &ldquo;depolarizing&rdquo; an idea,&mdash;said
+      the divinity-student.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I will tell you,&mdash;I said.&mdash;When a given symbol which represents
+      a thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes
+      a change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron. It
+      becomes magnetic in its relations,&mdash;it is traversed by strange forces
+      which did not belong to it. The word, and consequently the idea it
+      represents, is polarized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in print,
+      consists entirely of polarized words. Borrow one of these from another
+      language and religion, and you will find it leaves all its magnetism
+      behind it. Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo mythology. Even a
+      priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy Pundit would shut his
+      ears and run away from you in horror, if you should say it aloud. What do
+      you care for O'm? If you wanted to get the Pundit to look at his religion
+      fairly, you must first depolarize this and all similar words for him. The
+      argument for and against new translations of the Bible really turns on
+      this. Skepticism is afraid to trust its truths in depolarized words, and
+      so cries out against a new translation. I think, myself, if every idea our
+      Book contains could be shelled out of its old symbol and put into a new,
+      clean, unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of reading it as
+      philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it,&mdash;which we do not
+      and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the &ldquo;Gayatri&rdquo; as a fair man
+      and lover of truth should do. When society has once fairly dissolved the
+      New Testament, which it never has done yet, it will perhaps crystallize it
+      over again in new forms of language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,&mdash;said the
+      young fellow near me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening&mdash;I replied, calmly.
+      &mdash;It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
+      observers from two very different points of view. If you wish to get the
+      distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two observations
+      from remote points of the earth's orbit,&mdash;in midsummer and midwinter,
+      for instance. To get the parallax of heavenly truths, you must take an
+      observation from the position of the laity as well as of the clergy.
+      Teachers and students of theology get a certain look, certain conventional
+      tones of voice, a clerical gait, a professional neckcloth, and habits of
+      mind as professional as their externals. They are scholarly men and read
+      Bacon, and know well enough what the &ldquo;idols of the tribe&rdquo; are. Of course
+      they have their false gods, as all men that follow one exclusive calling
+      are prone to do.&mdash;The clergy have played the part of the flywheel in
+      our modern civilization. They have never suffered it to stop. They have
+      often carried on its movement, when other moving powers failed, by the
+      momentum stored in their vast body. Sometimes, too, they have kept it back
+      by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the bones of some
+      old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that yields the bread of
+      life. But the mainspring of the world's onward religious movement is not
+      in them, nor in any one body of men, let me tell you. It is the people
+      that makes the clergy, and not the clergy that makes the people. Of
+      course, the profession reacts on its source with variable energy.&mdash;But
+      there never was a guild of dealers or a company of craftsmen that did not
+      need sharp looking after.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time since,
+      must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in Harvard College
+      yard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Bonfire?&mdash;shrieked the little man.&mdash;The bonfire when
+      Robert Calef's book was burned?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same,&mdash;I said,&mdash;when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book
+      was burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
+      President of the College and Minister of the Gospel. You remember the old
+      witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef, trader of
+      Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what a set of fools
+      and worse than fools they were&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Remember it?&mdash;said the little man.&mdash;I don't think I shall forget
+      it, as long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what
+      it wears. There was a ring on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      May I look at it?&mdash;I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Where it is,&mdash;said the little man;&mdash;it will never come off, till
+      it falls off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the table, and
+      dropped himself, standing, to the floor,&mdash;his head being only a
+      little above the level of the table, as he stood. With pain and labor,
+      lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his sticks, he took
+      a few steps from his place,&mdash;his motions and the deadbeat of the
+      misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and ear the malformation
+      which is called in learned language talipes varus, or inverted club-foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stop! stop!&mdash;I said,&mdash;let me come to you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with an
+      ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair. I
+      walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his right hand,
+      with the ring upon it. The ring had been put on long ago, and could not
+      pass the misshapen joint. It was one of those funeral rings which used to
+      be given to relatives and friends after the decease of persons of any note
+      or importance. Beneath a round fit of glass was a death's head. Engraved
+      on one side of this, &ldquo;L. B. AEt. 22,&rdquo;&mdash;on the other, &ldquo;Ob. 1692&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      My grandmother's grandmother,&mdash;said the little man.&mdash;Hanged for
+      a witch. It does n't seem a great while ago. I knew my grandmother, and
+      loved her. Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief Justice Sewall
+      hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.&mdash;That was
+      Salem, though, and not Boston. No, not Boston. Robert Calef, the Boston
+      merchant, it was that blew them all to&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never mind where he blew them to,&mdash;I said; for the little man was
+      getting red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
+      conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
+      its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of talking
+      over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are plenty of
+      praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,&mdash;above all, who has
+      found out, by living into the pith and core of life, that all of the Deity
+      which can be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to the
+      Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of
+      throbbing human life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness in
+      which the soul's being consists,&mdash;an incandescent point in the
+      filament connecting the negative pole of a past eternity with the positive
+      pole of an eternity that is to come,&mdash;that all of the Deity which any
+      human book can hold is to this larger Deity of the working battery of the
+      universe only as the films in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams
+      and curdled lumps of ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin placers,&mdash;Oh!&mdash;I
+      was saying that a man who lives out-of-doors, among live people, gets some
+      things into his head he might not find in the index of his &ldquo;Body of
+      Divinity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I tell you what,&mdash;the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
+      their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the bottom
+      of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street Church and
+      look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch another such spire
+      across it without spanning the chasm,&mdash;that idea, I say, is pretty
+      nearly worn out. Now when a civilization or a civilized custom falls into
+      senile dementia, there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it comes as
+      plagues come, from a breath,&mdash;as fires come, from a spark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, look at medicine. Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin prescriptions,
+      shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long, &ldquo;curing&rdquo; patients by
+      drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling, selling lies at a guinea
+      apiece,&mdash;a routine, in short, of giving unfortunate sick people a
+      mess of things either too odious to swallow or too acrid to hold, or, if
+      that were possible, both at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
+      country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,&mdash;and
+      that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of
+      eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded! I did not
+      bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old folios in
+      calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the proprietor, of a
+      &ldquo;Wood and Bache,&rdquo; and a shelf of peppered sheepskin reprints by
+      Philadelphia Editors. Besides, many of the profession and I know a little
+      something of each other, and you don't think I am such a simpleton as to
+      lose their good opinion by saying what the better heads among them would
+      condemn as unfair and untrue? Now mark how the great plague came on the
+      generation of drugging doctors, and in what form it fell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy and
+      incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler in
+      erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction (founded the
+      immortal system) of Homoeopathy. I am very fair, you see,&mdash;you can
+      help yourself to either of these sets of phrases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general an
+      effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a good
+      thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was produced
+      by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist). Not that the
+      wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the routinists
+      and their employers, the &ldquo;general practitioners,&rdquo; who lived by selling
+      pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers, had to recognize
+      that people could get well, unpoisoned. These dumb cattle would not learn
+      it of themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell on them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
+      theology? I will tell you, then. It is Spiritualism. While some are crying
+      out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are laughing at it as
+      an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with it as a mere trick of
+      interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism is quietly undermining the
+      traditional ideas of the future state which have been and are still
+      accepted,&mdash;not merely in those who believe in it, but in the general
+      sentiment of the community, to a larger extent than most good people seem
+      to be aware of. It need n't be true, to do this, any more than Homoeopathy
+      need, to do its work. The Spiritualists have some pretty strong instincts
+      to pry over, which no doubt have been roughly handled by theologians at
+      different times. And the Nemesis of the pulpit comes, in a shape it little
+      thought of, beginning with the snap of a toe-joint, and ending with such a
+      crack of old beliefs that the roar of it is heard in all the ministers'
+      studies of Christendom? Sir, you cannot have people of cultivation, of
+      pure character, sensible enough in common things, large-hearted women,
+      grave judges, shrewd business-men, men of science, professing to be in
+      communication with the spiritual world and keeping up constant intercourse
+      with it, without its gradually reacting on the whole conception of that
+      other life. It is the folly of the world, constantly, which confounds its
+      wisdom. Not only out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the
+      mouths of fools and cheats, we may often get our truest lessons. For the
+      fool's judgment is a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the cheat
+      watches the clouds and sets his weathercock by them,&mdash;so that one
+      shall often see by their pointing which way the winds of heaven are
+      blowing, when the slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call the
+      Temples of Wisdom are turning to all points of the compass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Amen!&mdash;said the young fellow called John&mdash;Ten minutes by
+      the watch. Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up
+      their left foot!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty seconds. His
+      countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant. I think it was
+      simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a youthful playfulness,
+      that led him to this outbreak. I have often noticed that even quiet
+      horses, on a sharp November morning, when their coats are beginning to get
+      the winter roughness, will give little sportive demi-kicks, with slight
+      sudden elevation of the subsequent region of the body, and a sharp short
+      whinny,&mdash;by no means intending to put their heels through the dasher,
+      or to address the driver rudely, but feeling, to use a familiar word,
+      frisky. This, I think, is the physiological condition of the young person,
+      John. I noticed, however, what I should call a palpebral spasm, affecting
+      the eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if it were intended for the
+      facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to suspect a disposition to be
+      satirical on his part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Resuming the conversation, I remarked,&mdash;I am, ex officio, as a
+      Professor, a conservative. For I don't know any fruit that clings to its
+      tree so faithfully, not even a &ldquo;froze-'n'-thaw&rdquo; winter-apple, as a
+      Professor to the bough of which his chair is made. You can't shake him
+      off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off. Hence, by a chain of
+      induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism generally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once find
+      yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop your
+      Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher than in
+      the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of facts and
+      swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you are in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight in a
+      profession. Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in, through
+      India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and general knowledge
+      will leak in, though a profession were covered with twenty thicknesses of
+      sheepskin diplomas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and common
+      manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the people, Sir,
+      some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with trip-hammers, and some
+      of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with a whish! like
+      air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on the lumps of
+      nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of them&mdash;like
+      Aaron's calf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up and
+      keep all the soul's windows down,&mdash;to shut out the sun from the east
+      and the wind from the west,&mdash;to let the rats run free in the cellar,
+      and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the spiders weave their
+      lace before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus is bred out of our
+      neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or rave in its delirium,&mdash;I,
+      Sir, am a bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the barricades, my friends, rather
+      than a conservative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Were you born in Boston, Sir?&mdash;said the little man,&mdash;looking
+      eager and excited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was not,&mdash;I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It's a pity,&mdash;it's a pity,&mdash;said the little man;&mdash;it 's the
+      place to be born in. But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you
+      can come and live here. Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science
+      and the American Union, was n't ashamed to be born here. Jim Otis, the
+      father of American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod marshes
+      awhile, but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough. Joe Warren,
+      the first bloody ruffed-shirt of the Revolution, was as good as born here.
+      Parson Charming strolled along this way from Newport, and stayed here.
+      Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;&mdash;we'd have made a man of him,&mdash;poor,
+      dear, good old Christian heathen! There he lies, as peaceful as a young
+      baby, in the old burying-ground! I've stood on the slab many a time. Meant
+      well,&mdash;meant well. Juggernaut. Parson Charming put a little oil on
+      one linchpin, and slipped it out so softly, the first thing they knew
+      about it was the wheel of that side was down. T' other fellow's at work
+      now, but he makes more noise about it. When the linchpin comes out on his
+      side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the old
+      cart, and they pretend to say that there are valuable things in it which
+      may get hurt. Hope not,&mdash;hope not. But this is the great Macadamizing
+      place,&mdash;always cracking up something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cracking up Boston folks,&mdash;said the gentleman with the diamond-pin,
+      whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's Turk
+      used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if it went by
+      cogwheels.&mdash;Cracking up all sorts of things,&mdash;native and foreign
+      vermin included,&mdash;said the little man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
+      application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if the
+      Koh-i-noor had been so disposed. The little man uttered it with the
+      distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to exclaim,
+      E-chec! so that it must have been heard. The party supposed to be
+      interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-bladeful of
+      something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt, interfered with the
+      reply he would have made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
+      pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,&mdash;meaning, I
+      suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders. I think our
+      small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I undertake
+      to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too magisterially. I
+      won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when I have been in company
+      with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have been guilty of the same
+      kind of usurpation which my friend openly justified. But I maintain, that
+      I, the Professor, am a good listener. If a man can tell me a fact which
+      subtends an appreciable angle in the horizon of thought, I am as receptive
+      as the contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren. If, when I
+      am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good story, I
+      will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the fifth
+      &ldquo;says he,&rdquo; and listen like a three-years' child, as the author of the &ldquo;Old
+      Sailor&rdquo; says. I had rather hear one of those grand elemental laughs from
+      either of our two Georges, (fictitious names, Sir or Madam,) glisten to
+      one of those old playbills of our College days, in which &ldquo;Tom and Jerry&rdquo;
+       (&ldquo;Thomas and Jeremiah,&rdquo; as the old Greek Professor was said to call it)
+      was announced to be brought on the stage with whole force of the Faculty,
+      read by our Frederick, (no such person, of course,) than say the best
+      things I might by any chance find myself capable of saying. Of course, if
+      I come across a real thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing
+      talker, I enjoy the luxury of sitting still for a while as much as
+      another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,&mdash;things he did not
+      mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
+      sometimes. Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
+      thought. I can't answer for what will turn up. If I could, it would n't be
+      talking, but &ldquo;speaking my piece.&rdquo; Better, I think, the hearty abandonment
+      of one's self to the suggestions of the moment at the risk of an
+      occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it escapes, but just
+      one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of never saying a foolish
+      thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;What shall I do with this little man?&mdash;There is only one thing
+      to do,&mdash;and that is to let him talk when he will. The day of the
+      &ldquo;Autocrat's&rdquo; monologues is over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;My friend,&mdash;said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said,
+      the boarders call &ldquo;John,&rdquo;&mdash;My friend,&mdash;I said, one morning,
+      after breakfast,&mdash;can you give me any information respecting the
+      deformed person who sits at the other end of the table?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What! the Sculpin?&mdash;said the young fellow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,&mdash;I said,
+      &mdash;and double talipes varus,&mdash;I beg your pardon,&mdash;with two
+      club-feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?&mdash;said the
+      young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you may
+      have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge, when they
+      show how they would punish an adversary, themselves protected by this
+      rotating guard,&mdash;the middle knuckle, meantime, thumb-supported,
+      fiercely prominent, death-threatening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is,&mdash;said I.&mdash;But would you have the kindness to tell me if
+      you know anything about this deformed person?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About the Sculpin?&mdash;said the young fellow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My good friend,&mdash;said I,&mdash;I am sure, by your countenance, you
+      would not hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by
+      Nature to be spared by his fellows. Even in speaking of him to others, I
+      could wish that you might not employ a term which implies contempt for
+      what should inspire only pity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A fellah 's no business to be so crooked,&mdash;said the young man called
+      John.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, yes,&mdash;I said, thoughtfully,&mdash;the strong hate the weak. It's
+      all right. The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to the
+      individual. Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down. Wholesale
+      moral arrangements are so different from retail!&mdash;I understand the
+      instinct, my friend,&mdash;it is cosmic,&mdash;it is planetary,&mdash;it
+      is a conservative principle in creation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was speaking,
+      until it became as blank of vivid significance as the countenance of a
+      gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of eyes. He had not
+      taken my meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink, as he
+      answered,&mdash;Jest so. All right. A 1. Put her through. That's the way
+      to talk. Did you speak to me, Sir?&mdash;Here the young man struck up that
+      well-known song which I think they used to sing at Masonic festivals,
+      beginning, &ldquo;Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left you
+      Chrononhotonthologos?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I beg your pardon,&mdash;I said;&mdash;all I meant was, that men, as
+      temporary occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is
+      improved or injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a
+      natural dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as well as
+      of the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon the abode
+      spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future generations. This
+      is the final cause of the underlying brute instinct which we have in
+      common with the herds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I
+      thought I must try again.&mdash;It's a pity that families are kept up,
+      where there are such hereditary infirmities. Still, let us treat this poor
+      man fairly, and not call him names. Do you know what his name is?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know what the rest of 'em call him,&mdash;said the young fellow.&mdash;They
+      call him Little Boston. There's no harm in that, is there?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is an honorable term,&mdash;I replied.&mdash;But why Little Boston, in
+      a place where most are Bostonians?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,&mdash;said the
+      young fellow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;L. B. Ob. 1692.&rdquo;&mdash;Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him.
+      The ring he wears labels him well enough. There is stuff in the little
+      man, or he would n't stick so manfully by this crooked, crotchety old
+      town. Give him a chance.&mdash;You will drop the Sculpin, won't you?&mdash;I
+      said to the young fellow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Drop him?&mdash;he answered,&mdash;I ha'n't took him up yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, no,&mdash;the term,&mdash;I said,&mdash;the term. Don't call him so
+      any more, if you please. Call him Little Boston, if you like.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All right,&mdash;said the young fellow.&mdash;I would n't be hard on the
+      poor little&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
+      grammar. It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among the
+      Romans,&mdash;as of those designating a person following the sea, or given
+      to rural pursuits. It is classed by custom among the profane words; why,
+      it is hard to say,&mdash;but it is largely used in the street by those who
+      speak of their fellows in pity or in wrath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended fish
+      to the little man from that day forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Here we are, then, at our boarding&mdash;house. First, myself, the
+      Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right, looking
+      down, where the &ldquo;Autocrat&rdquo; used to sit. At the further end sits the
+      Landlady. At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-noor, or the
+      gentleman with the diamond. Opposite me is a Venerable Gentleman with a
+      bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little. The Divinity Student is
+      my neighbor on the right,&mdash;and further down, that Young Fellow of
+      whom I have repeatedly spoken. The Landlady's Daughter sits near the
+      Koh-i-noor, as I said. The Poor Relation near the Landlady. At the right
+      upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of whose name and history I have as
+      yet learned nothing. Next the further left-hand corner, near the lower end
+      of the table, sits the deformed person. The chair at his side, occupying
+      that corner, is empty. I need not specially mention the other boarders,
+      with the exception of Benjamin Franklin, the landlady's son, who sits near
+      his mother. We are a tolerably assorted set,&mdash;difference enough and
+      likeness enough; but still it seems to me there is something wanting. The
+      Landlady's Daughter is the prima donna in the way of feminine attractions.
+      I am not quite satisfied with this young lady. She wears more &ldquo;jewelry,&rdquo;
+       as certain young ladies call their trinkets, than I care to see on a
+      person in her position. Her voice is strident, her laugh too much like a
+      giggle, and she has that foolish way of dancing and bobbing like a
+      quill-float with a &ldquo;minnum&rdquo; biting the hook below it, which one sees and
+      weeps over sometimes in persons of more pretensions. I can't help hoping
+      we shall put something into that empty chair yet which will add the
+      missing string to our social harp. I hear talk of a rare Miss who is
+      expected. Something in the schoolgirl way, I believe. We shall see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution
+      which I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit of
+      all concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Professor,&mdash;said he, one day,&mdash;don't you think your brain will
+      run dry before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow?
+      Let me tell you what happened to me once. I put a little money into a
+      bank, and bought a check-book, so that I might draw it as I wanted, in
+      sums to suit. Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a pen was
+      as easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book seemed to be a
+      dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all the synonymes of
+      happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot. A check came back to
+      me at last with these two words on it,&mdash;NO FUNDS. My check-book was a
+      volume of waste-paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, Professor,&mdash;said he,&mdash;I have drawn something out of your
+      bank, you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's
+      currency without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NO FUNDS,&mdash;and
+      then where will you be, my boy? These little bits of paper mean your gold
+      and your silver and your copper, Professor; and you will certainly break
+      up and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to your metallic basis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is something in that,&mdash;said I.&mdash;Only I rather think life
+      can coin thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words. What if
+      one shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that falls of
+      a June evening on the leaves of his garden? Shall there be no more dew on
+      those leaves thereafter? Marry, yea,&mdash;many drops, large and round and
+      full of moonlight as those thou shalt have absterged!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here am I, the Professor,&mdash;a man who has lived long enough to have
+      plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,&mdash;which are not
+      always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April, or
+      rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against books as a
+      baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to decrepitude; with a
+      brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they are, as a limb which we call
+      &ldquo;asleep,&rdquo; because it is so particularly awake, is of pricking points;
+      presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps, not as yet tanned or ossified, to
+      finger-touch of all outward agencies; knowing nothing of the filmy threads
+      of this web of life in which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray
+      old spider to come along; contented enough with daily realities, but
+      twirling on his finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge
+      feeding with the fox oftener than with the stork,&mdash;loving better the
+      breadth of a fertilizing inundation than the depth of narrow artesian
+      well; finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of
+      the grammatophora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the movement of
+      the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation Hercules;&mdash;and
+      the question is, whether there is anything left for me, the Professor, to
+      suck out of creation, after my lively friend has had his straw in the
+      bung-hole of the Universe!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on, whether
+      he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes. As to
+      catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,&mdash;the
+      gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,&mdash;the excretion of mental
+      respiration,&mdash;that will depend on many things, as, on having a
+      favorable intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting receptacle.&mdash;I
+      sow more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel over the desert-sand
+      along which my lonely consciousness paces day and night, than I shall
+      throw into soil where it will germinate, in a year. All sorts of bodily
+      and mental perturbations come between us and the due projection of our
+      thought. The pulse-like &ldquo;fits of easy and difficult transmission&rdquo; seem to
+      reach even the transparent medium through which our souls are seen. We
+      know our humanity by its often intercepted rays, as we tell a revolving
+      light from a star or meteor by its constantly recurring obscuration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he ever
+      delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if he had told
+      all he knew. Braham came forward once to sing one of his most famous and
+      familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the first line of it;&mdash;he
+      told his mishap to the audience, and they screamed it at him in a chorus
+      of a thousand voices. Milton could not write to suit himself, except from
+      the autumnal to the vernal equinox. One in the clothing-business, who,
+      there is reason to suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great
+      poet's impressible temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers
+      one day without fitting him with a new garment. &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said he to a friend
+      of mine, who was standing by, &ldquo;if it hadn't been for that confounded
+      headache of mine this morning, I'd have had a coat on that man, in spite
+      of himself, before he left-the store.&rdquo; A passing throb, only,&mdash;but it
+      deranged the nice mechanism required to persuade the accidental human
+      being, X, into a given piece of broadcloth, A.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of transmission
+      of our ideas with want of ideas. I suppose that a man's mind does in time
+      form a neutral salt with the elements in the universe for which it has
+      special elective affinities. In fact, I look upon a library as a kind of
+      mental chemist's shop filled with the crystals of all forms and hues which
+      have come from the union of individual thought with local circumstances or
+      universal principles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there is an
+      end of his genius as a real solvent. No more effervescence and hissing
+      tumult&mdash;as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting alkaline
+      unbeliefs! No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets covered with
+      lies! No more taking up of dull earths, and turning them, first into clear
+      solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I, the Professor, am very much like other men: I shall not find out when I
+      have used up my affinities. What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when
+      she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make
+      critics out of the chips that were left! Painful as the task is, they
+      never fail to warn the author, in the most impressive manner, of the
+      probabilities of failure in what he has undertaken. Sad as the necessity
+      is to their delicate sensibilities, they never hesitate to advertise him
+      of the decline of his powers, and to press upon him the propriety of
+      retiring before he sinks into imbecility. Trusting to their kind offices,
+      I shall endeavor to fulfil&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Bridget enters and begins clearing the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The following poem is my (The Professor's) only contribution to the
+      great department of Ocean-Cable literature. As all the poets of this
+      country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the premium
+      offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Burns Centenary, (so called,
+      according to our Benjamin Franklin, because there will be nary a cent for
+      any of us,) poetry will be very scarce and dear. Consumers may,
+      consequently, be glad to take the present article, which, by the aid of a
+      Latin tutor&mdash;and a Professor of Chemistry, will be found intelligible
+      to the educated classes.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                       DE SAUTY
+
+              AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.
+
+              Professor.       Blue-Nose.
+
+     PROFESSOR.
+
+     Tell me, O Provincial! speak, Ceruleo-Nasal!
+     Lives there one De Sauty extant now among you,
+     Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
+     Holding talk with nations?
+
+     Is there a De Sauty, ambulant on Tellus,
+     Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in night-cap,
+     Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
+     Three times daily patent?
+
+     Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
+     Or is he a mythus,&mdash;ancient word for &ldquo;humbug,&rdquo;
+      &mdash;Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed
+     Romulus and Remus?
+
+     Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
+     Or a living product of galvanic action,
+     Like the status bred in Crosses flint-solution?
+     Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     BLUE-NOSE.
+
+     Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger,
+     Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster!
+     Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me,
+     Thou shalt hear them answered.
+
+     When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
+     At the polar focus of the wire electric
+     Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us
+     Called himself &ldquo;DE SAUTY.&rdquo;
+
+     As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
+     Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia,
+     So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
+     Sucking in the current.
+
+     When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,
+     Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,
+     And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
+     Said, &ldquo;All right!  DE SAUTY.&rdquo;
+
+     From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading
+     Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples
+     Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
+     Of &ldquo;All right!  DE SAUTY.&rdquo;
+
+     When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger,
+     Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,
+     Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
+     Of disintegration.
+
+     Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
+     Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
+     Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
+     There was no De Sauty.
+
+     Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
+     C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor.  Flu.  Sil.  Potassa,
+     Calc.  Sod.  Phosph.  Mag.  Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum,(?)
+     Such as man is made of.
+
+     Born of stream galvanic, with it he had perished!
+     There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
+     Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
+     Cry, &ldquo;All right!  DE SAUTY.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Back again!&mdash;A turtle&mdash;which means a tortoise&mdash;is fond of
+      his shell; but if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out of it. So
+      the boys say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a libel on the turtle. He grows to his shell, and his shell is in
+      his body as much as his body is in his shell.&mdash;I don't think there is
+      one of our boarders quite so testudineous as I am. Nothing but a
+      combination of motives, more peremptory than the coal on the turtle's
+      back, could have got me to leave the shelter of my carapace; and after
+      memorable interviews, and kindest hospitalities, and grand sights, and
+      huge influx of patriotic pride,&mdash;for every American owns all America,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          &ldquo;Creation's heir,&mdash;the world, the world is&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      his, if anybody's,&mdash;I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey
+      might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he were allowed to
+      resume his skeleton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent Cleopatra, and Dying Warrior,
+      whose classic outlines (reproduced in the calcined mineral of Lutetia)
+      crown my loaded shelves! Welcome, ye triumphs of pictorial art (repeated
+      by the magic graver) that look down upon me from the walls of my sacred
+      cell! Vesalius, as Titian drew him, high-fronted, still-eyed,
+      thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems a gentleman, with book and
+      carelessly-held eyeglass, marking him a scholar; thou, too, Jan Kuyper,
+      commonly called Jan Praktiseer, old man of a century and seven years
+      besides, father of twenty sons and two daughters, cut in copper by
+      Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on one of the Paris quais; and ye Three
+      Trees of Rembrandt, black in shadow against the blaze of light; and thou
+      Rosy Cottager of Sir Joshua, roses hinted by the peppery burin of
+      Bartolozzi; ye, too, of lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely for
+      unrenowned, Young Bull of Paulus Potter, and sleeping Cat of Cornelius
+      Visscher; welcome once more to my eyes! The old books look out from the
+      shelves, and I seem to read on their backs something asides their titles,&mdash;a
+      kind of solemn greeting. The crimson carpet flushes warm under my feet.
+      The arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair spins round with me, as if it were
+      giddy with pleasure; the vast recumbent fauteuil stretches itself out
+      under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine stretches in
+      after-dinner laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boarders were pleased to say that they were glad to get me back. One
+      of them ventured a compliment, namely,&mdash;that I talked as if I
+      believed what I said.&mdash;This was apparently considered something
+      unusual, by its being mentioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One who means to talk with entire sincerity,&mdash;I said,&mdash;always
+      feels himself in danger of two things, namely,&mdash;an affectation of
+      bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in &ldquo;Lear,&rdquo; and actual
+      rudeness. What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get
+      and to give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two
+      talkers as the time will let him. Life is short, and conversation apt to
+      run to mere words. Mr. Hue I think it is, who tells us some very good
+      stories about the way in which two Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up a
+      long talk without saying a word which has any meaning in it. Something
+      like this is occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall. The best
+      Chinese talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time to
+      time. Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery
+      glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de
+      Dantzic; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,&mdash;never a wave,
+      and never a calm; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or a
+      highly-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so gracefully, that
+      we find meaning for the music they make as we find faces in the coals and
+      fairy palaces in the clouds. There is something very odd, though, about
+      this mechanical talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine was
+      detached a long way from the station you were approaching? Well, you have
+      noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if the
+      locomotive were drawing them? Indeed, you would not have suspected that
+      you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if you had not seen
+      the engine running away from you on a side-track. Upon my conscience, I
+      believe some of these pretty women detach their minds entirely, sometimes,
+      from their talk,&mdash;and, what is more, that we never know the
+      difference. Their lips let off the fluty syllables just as their fingers
+      would sprinkle the music-drops from their pianos; unconscious habit turns
+      the phrase of thought into words just as it does that of music into notes.&mdash;Well,
+      they govern the world for all that, these sweet-lipped women,&mdash;because
+      beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The Bombazine wanted an explanation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madam,&mdash;said I,&mdash;wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty
+      is the promise of the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;All this, however, is not what I was going to say. Here am I,
+      suppose, seated&mdash;we will say at a dinner-table&mdash;alongside of an
+      intelligent Englishman. We look in each other's faces,&mdash;we exchange a
+      dozen words. One thing is settled: we mean not to offend each other,&mdash;to
+      be perfectly courteous,&mdash;more than courteous; for we are the
+      entertainer and the entertained, and cherish particularly amiable
+      feelings, to each other. The claret is good; and if our blood reddens a
+      little with its warm crimson, we are none the less kind for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't think people that talk over their victuals are like to say
+      anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with
+      strong drink before they begin jabberin'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bombazine uttered this with a sugary sourness, as if the words had
+      been steeped in a solution of acetate of lead.&mdash;The boys of my time
+      used to call a hit like this a &ldquo;side-winder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I must finish this woman.&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madam,&mdash;I said,&mdash;the Great Teacher seems to have been fond of
+      talking as he sat at meat. Because this was a good while ago, in a far-off
+      place, you forget what the true fact of it was,&mdash;that those were real
+      dinners, where people were hungry and thirsty, and where you met a very
+      miscellaneous company. Probably there was a great deal of loose talk among
+      the guests; at any rate, there was always wine, we may believe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever may be the hygienic advantages or disadvantages of wine,&mdash;and
+      I for one, except for certain particular ends, believe in water, and, I
+      blush to say it, in black tea,&mdash;there is no doubt about its being the
+      grand specific against dull dinners. A score of people come together in
+      all moods of mind and body. The problem is, in the space of one hour, more
+      or less, to bring them all into the same condition of slightly exalted
+      life. Food alone is enough for one person, perhaps,&mdash;talk, alone, for
+      another; but the grand equalizer and fraternizer, which works up the
+      radiators to their maximum radiation, and the absorbents to their maximum
+      receptivity, is now just where it was when
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed,
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;when six great vessels containing water, the whole amounting to
+      more than a hogshead-full, were changed into the best of wine. I once
+      wrote a song about wine, in which I spoke so warmly of it, that I was
+      afraid some would think it was written inter pocula; whereas it was
+      composed in the bosom of my family, under the most tranquillizing domestic
+      influences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The divinity-student turned towards me, looking mischievous.&mdash;Can
+      you tell me,&mdash;he said,&mdash;who wrote a song for a temperance
+      celebration once, of which the following is a verse?
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Alas for the loved one, too gentle and fair
+     The joys of the banquet to chasten and share!
+     Her eye lost its light that his goblet might shine,
+     And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his wine!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I did,&mdash;I answered.&mdash;What are you going to do about it?&mdash;I
+      will tell you another line I wrote long ago:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Don't be &ldquo;consistent,&rdquo;&mdash;but be simply true.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that the
+      truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with many facets
+      answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about them; secondly,
+      that society is always trying in some way or other to grind us down to a
+      single flat surface. It is hard work to resist this grinding-down action.&mdash;Now
+      give me a chance. Better eternal and universal abstinence than the
+      brutalities of those days that made wives and mothers and daughters and
+      sisters blush for those whom they should have honored, as they came
+      reeling home from their debauches! Yet better even excess than lying and
+      hypocrisy; and if wine is upon all our tables, let us praise it for its
+      color and fragrance and social tendency, so far as it deserves, and not
+      hug a bottle in the closet and pretend not to know the use of a wine-glass
+      at a public dinner! I think you will find that people who honestly mean to
+      be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try
+      to be &ldquo;consistent.&rdquo; But a great many things we say can be made to appear
+      contradictory, simply because they are partial views of a truth, and may
+      often look unlike at first, as a front view of a face and its profile
+      often do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I owe
+      him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he has often
+      spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend the &ldquo;Autocrat,&rdquo;&mdash;which
+      I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by omitting the very word which gives
+      it its significance,&mdash;the word fluid, intended to typify the mobility
+      of the restricted will,&mdash;holds it up, I say, as if it attacked the
+      reality of the self-determining principle, instead of illustrating its
+      limitations by an image. Now I will not explain any farther, still less
+      defend, and least of all attack, but simply quote a few lines from one of
+      my friend's poems, printed more than ten years ago, and ask the
+      distinguished gentleman where he has ever asserted more strongly or
+      absolutely the independent will of the &ldquo;subcreative centre,&rdquo; as my
+      heretical friend has elsewhere called man.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   &mdash;Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own
+     He rent a pillar from the eternal throne!
+   &mdash;Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
+     The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
+   &mdash;Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
+     Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and the
+      full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly consistent!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation with
+      the intelligent Englishman. We begin skirmishing with a few light ideas,&mdash;testing
+      for thoughts,&mdash;as our electro-chemical friend, De Sauty, if there
+      were such a person, would test for his current; trying a little
+      litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-paper for alkalies, as
+      chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging the lead, and looking at the
+      shells and sands it brings up to find out whether we are like to keep in
+      shallow water, or shall have to drop the deep-sea line;&mdash;in short,
+      seeing what we have to deal with. If the Englishman gets his H's pretty
+      well placed, he comes from one of the higher grades of the British social
+      order, and we shall find him a good companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, after all, here is a great fact between us. We belong to two
+      different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us, we are
+      talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall to talk
+      through. Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior fellow, incapable
+      of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I would let out the fact of
+      the real American feeling about Old-World folks. They are children to us
+      in certain points of view. They are playing with toys we have done with
+      for whole-generations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;FOOTNOTE: The more I have observed and
+      reflected, the more limited seems to me the field of action of the human
+      will. Every act of choice involves a special relation between the ego and
+      the conditions before it. But no man knows what forces are at work in the
+      determination of his ego. The bias which decides his choice between two or
+      more motives may come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he
+      knows nothing at all. He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of
+      reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is
+      self-determining. The Story of Elsie Yenner, written-soon after this book
+      was published, illustrates the direction in which my thought was moving.
+      'The imaginary subject of the story obeyed her will, but her will Obeyed
+      the mysterious antenatal poisoning influence.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet and the
+      feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with, we have not
+      quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and constantly than they
+      do. Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and masks, and lace-coats, and
+      gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases, which we laugh at honestly,
+      without affectation, that are still used in the Old-World puppet-shows. I
+      don't think we on our part ever understand the Englishman's concentrated
+      loyalty and specialized reverence. But then we do think more of a man, as
+      such, (barring some little difficulties about race and complexion which
+      the Englishman will touch us on presently,) than any people that ever
+      lived did think of him. Our reverence is a great deal wider, if it is less
+      intense. We have caste among us, to some extent; it is true; but there is
+      never a collar on the American wolf-dog such as you often see on the
+      English mastiff, notwithstanding his robust, hearty individuality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to me;
+      it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans swim
+      into each other's laps. The trouble is, it is so difficult to let out the
+      whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming to take a
+      personal character. But I never enjoy the Englishman so much as when he
+      talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the Peruvians. Then you
+      get the real British flavor, which the cosmopolite Englishman loses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren
+      interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each man
+      tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his opponent as
+      the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep. I follow
+      a slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current of my own
+      beneath it. Under both runs obscurely a consciousness belonging to a third
+      train of reflections, independent of the two others. I will try to write
+      out a Mental movement in three parts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A.&mdash;First voice, or Mental Soprano,&mdash;thought follows a woman
+      talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      B.&mdash;Second voice, or Mental Barytone,&mdash;my running accompaniment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      C.&mdash;Third voice, or Mental Basso,&mdash;low grumble of importunate
+      self-repeating idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A.&mdash;White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of
+      apple-blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most
+      delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      B.&mdash;Deuse take her! What a fool she is! Hear her chatter! (Look out
+      of window just here.&mdash;Two pages and a half of description, if it were
+      all written out, in one tenth of a second.)&mdash;Go ahead, old lady! (Eye
+      catches picture over fireplace.) There's that infernal family nose! Came
+      over in the &ldquo;Mayflower&rdquo; on the first old fool's face. Why don't they wear
+      a ring in it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      C.&mdash;You 'll be late at lecture,&mdash;late at lecture,&mdash;late,&mdash;late&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt through
+      the superincumbent strata, thus:&mdash;The usual single or double currents
+      shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with them,
+      disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,&mdash;Oh,
+      there! I knew there was something troubling me,&mdash;and the thought
+      which had been working through comes up to the surface clear, definite,
+      and articulates itself,&mdash;a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or an
+      unpleasant recollection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in
+      this, that they are both brimful. There is no space between consecutive
+      thoughts, or between the never-ending series of actions. All pack tight,
+      and mould their surfaces against each other, so that in the long run there
+      is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms of both thoughts and
+      actions, just as you find that cylinders crowded all become hexagonal
+      prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed into regular polyhedra.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man
+      ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by him. So, to
+      carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the layers of thought,
+      we may consider the mind as it moves among thoughts or events, like a
+      circus-rider whirling round with a great troop of horses. He can mount a
+      fact or an idea, and guide it more or less completely, but he cannot stop
+      it. So, as I said in another way at the beginning, he can stride two or
+      three thoughts at once, but not break their steady walk, trot, or gallop.
+      He can only take his foot from the saddle of one thought and put it on
+      that of another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;What is the saddle of a thought? Why, a word, of course.&mdash;Twenty
+      years after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to you
+      through the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and round
+      all that time without a rider.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no such
+      interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving thought upon
+      that of another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I should like to ask,&mdash;said the divinity-student,&mdash;since
+      we are getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things
+      are in contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always now to
+      something?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I thought it best not to hear this question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or
+      elsewhere. One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an
+      unfortunate truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,&mdash;as
+      helpless, apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an Egyptian
+      mummy. He then proceeds, with the air and method of a master, to take off
+      the bandages. Nothing can be neater than the way in which he does it. But
+      as he takes off layer after layer, the truth seems to grow smaller and
+      smaller, and some of its outlines begin to look like something we have
+      seen before. At last, when he has got them all off, and the truth struts
+      out naked, we recognize it as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance whom
+      we have known in the streets all our lives. The fact is, the philosopher
+      has coaxed the truth into his study and put all those bandages on; or
+      course it is not very hard for him to take them off. Still, a great many
+      people like to watch the process,&mdash;he does it so neatly!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dear! dear! I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see how
+      those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade are
+      abused by my fellow-vertebrates,&mdash;perhaps by myself. How they spar
+      for wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat
+      fighting attitude.&mdash;Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!&mdash;he
+      said,&mdash;and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the concave
+      palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball.&mdash;You small
+      boy there, hurry up that &ldquo;Webster's Unabridged!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked the
+      propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three words, of
+      which the two last were &ldquo;Webster's Unabridged,&rdquo; and the first was an
+      emphatic monosyllable.&mdash;Beg pardon,&mdash;he added,&mdash;forgot
+      myself. But let us have an English dictionary, if we are to have any. I
+      don't believe in clipping the coin of the realm, Sir! If I put a
+      weathercock on my house, Sir, I want it to tell which way the wind blows
+      up aloft,&mdash;off from the prairies to the ocean, or off from the ocean
+      to the prairies, or any way it wants to blow! I don't want a weathercock
+      with a winch in an old gentleman's study that he can take hold of and
+      turn, so that the vane shall point west when the great wind overhead is
+      blowing east with all its might, Sir! Wait till we give you a dictionary;
+      Sir! It takes Boston to do that thing, Sir!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Some folks think water can't run down-hill anywhere out of Boston,
+      &mdash;remarked the Koh-i-noor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't know what some folks think so well as I know what some fools say,&mdash;rejoined
+      the Little Gentleman.&mdash;If importing most dry goods made the best
+      scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for 'em.&mdash;Mr.
+      Webster could n't spell, Sir, or would n't spell, Sir,&mdash;at any rate,
+      he did n't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the owners of some
+      copyrights and the dignity of this noble language which we have inherited
+      from our English fathers. Language!&mdash;the blood of the soul, Sir! into
+      which our thoughts run and out of which they grow! We know what a word is
+      worth here in Boston. Young Sam Adams got up on the stage at Commencement,
+      out at Cambridge there, with his gown on, the Governor and Council looking
+      on in the name of his Majesty, King George the Second, and the girls
+      looking down out of the galleries, and taught people how to spell a word
+      that was n't in the Colonial dictionaries! R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e,
+      tance, Resistance! That was in '43, and it was a good many years before
+      the Boston boys began spelling it with their muskets;&mdash;but when they
+      did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old bedridden women in the
+      English almshouses heard every syllable! Yes, yes, yes,&mdash;it was a
+      good while before those other two Boston boys got the class so far along
+      that it could spell those two hard words, Independence and Union! I tell
+      you what, Sir, there are a thousand lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to
+      get a new word into a language that is worth speaking. We know what
+      language means too well here in Boston to play tricks with it. We never
+      make a new word til we have made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! then
+      we shaped the new mould of this continent, we had to make a few. When, by
+      God's permission, we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to
+      make a word or two. The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the
+      OCCIDENTAL,&mdash;this thirty-wasted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,&mdash;must
+      throw a little spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of
+      a new world's destiny!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair human
+      proportions. His feet must have been on the upper round of his high chair;
+      that was the only way I could account for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Puts her through fast-rate,&mdash;said the young fellow whom the boarders
+      call John.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said he
+      remembered Sam Adams as Governor. An old man in a brown coat. Saw him take
+      the Chair on Boston Common. Was a boy then, and remembers sitting on the
+      fence in front of the old Hancock house. Recollects he had a glazed
+      'lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking down on to the Common. Lalocks
+      flowered late that year, and he got a great bunch off from the bushes in
+      the Hancock front-yard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Them 'lection-buns are no go,&mdash;said the young man John, so called.&mdash;I
+      know the trick. Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an' he downs
+      the whole of it. In about an hour it swells up in his stomach as big as a
+      football, and his feedin' 's spilt for that day. That's the way to stop
+      off a young one from eatin' up all the 'lection dinner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Salem! Salem! not Boston,&mdash;shouted the little man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy Benjamin
+      Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the
+      bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Little Gentleman was holding a fork in his left hand. He stabbed a
+      boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it as if
+      it ought to shriek. It did not,&mdash;but he sat as if watching it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Language is a solemn thing,&mdash;I said.&mdash;It grows out of
+      life,&mdash;out of its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness.
+      Every language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is
+      enshrined. Because time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp angles
+      of its cornices, shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time? Let me tell
+      you what comes of meddling with things that can take care of themselves.&mdash;A
+      friend of mine had a watch given him, when he was a boy,&mdash;a &ldquo;bull's
+      eye,&rdquo; with a loose silver case that came off like an oyster-shell from its
+      contents; you know them,&mdash;the cases that you hang on your thumb,
+      while the core, or the real watch, lies in your hand as naked as a peeled
+      apple. Well, he began with taking off the case, and so on from one liberty
+      to another, until he got it fairly open, and there were the works, as good
+      as if they were alive,&mdash;crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and all the rest.
+      All right except one thing,&mdash;there was a confounded little hair had
+      got tangled round the balance-wheel. So my young Solomon got a pair of
+      tweezers, and caught hold of the hair very nicely, and pulled it right
+      out, without touching any of the wheels,&mdash;when,&mdash;buzzzZZZ! and
+      the watch had done up twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph time!&mdash;The
+      English language was wound up to run some thousands of years, I trust; but
+      if everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is a hair, our
+      grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a hair-spring,
+      and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down, as so many other
+      dialects have done before it. I can't stand this meddling any better than
+      you, Sir. But we have a great deal to be proud of in the lifelong labors
+      of that old lexicographer, and we must n't be ungrateful. Besides, don't
+      let us deceive ourselves,&mdash;the war of the dictionaries is only a
+      disguised rivalry of cities, colleges, and especially of publishers. After
+      all, it is likely that the language will shape itself by larger forces
+      than phonography and dictionary-making. You may spade up the ocean as much
+      as you like, and harrow it afterwards, if you can,&mdash;but the moon will
+      still lead the tides, and the winds will form their surface.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Do you know Richardson's Dictionary?&mdash;I said to my neighbor
+      the divinity-student.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Haow?&mdash;said the divinity-student.&mdash;He colored, as he noticed on
+      my face a twitch in one of the muscles which tuck up the corner of the
+      mouth, (zygomaticus major,) and which I could not hold back from making a
+      little movement on its own account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too late.&mdash;A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown
+      colt. Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps, better,&mdash;but
+      caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his earlier ways of
+      life. Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue half their lives,
+      return to the language of their childhood in their dying hours. Gentlemen
+      in fine linen, and scholars in large libraries, taken by surprise, or in a
+      careless moment, will sometimes let slip a word they knew as boys in
+      homespun and have not spoken since that time,&mdash;but it lay there under
+      all their culture. That is one way you may know the country-boys after
+      they have grown rich or celebrated; another is by the odd old family
+      names, particularly those of the Hebrew prophets, which the good old
+      people have saddled them with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English
+      dictionary,&mdash;said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as
+      sitting at the right upper corner of the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I turned and looked him full in the face,&mdash;for the pure, manly
+      intonations arrested me. The voice was youthful, but full of character.&mdash;I
+      suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in the matter of
+      voice.&mdash;Hear this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in her
+      father's chaise in a street of this town of Boston. She overheard a little
+      girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken with the tones of her
+      voice. Nothing would satisfy her but she must have that little girl come
+      and live in her father's house. So the child came, being then nine years
+      old. Until her marriage she remained under the same roof with the young
+      lady. Her children became successively inmates of the lady's dwelling; and
+      now, seventy years, or thereabouts, since the young lady heard the child
+      singing, one of that child's children and one of her grandchildren are
+      with her in that home, where she, no longer young, except in heart, passes
+      her peaceful days.&mdash;Three generations linked together by so light a
+      breath of accident!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I liked&mdash;the sound of this youth's voice, I said, and his look when I
+      came to observe him a little more closely. His complexion had something
+      better than the bloom and freshness which had first attracted me;&mdash;it
+      had that diffused tone which is a sure index of wholesome, lusty life. A
+      fine liberal style of nature seemed to be: hair crisped, moustache
+      springing thick and dark, head firmly planted, lips finished, as is
+      commonly sees them in gentlemen's families, a pupil well contracted, and a
+      mouth that opened frankly with a white flash of teeth that looked as if
+      they could serve him as they say Ethan Allen's used to serve their owner,&mdash;to
+      draw nails with. This is the kind of fellow to walk a frigate's deck and
+      bowl his broadsides into the &ldquo;Gadlant Thudnder-bomb,&rdquo; or any
+      forty-port-holed adventurer who would like to exchange a few tons of iron
+      compliments.&mdash;I don't know what put this into my head, for it was not
+      till some time afterward I learned the young fellow had been in the naval
+      school at Annapolis. Something had happened to change his plan of life,
+      and he was now studying engineering and architecture in Boston.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the youth made the short remark which drew my attention to him, the
+      little deformed gentleman turned round and took a long look at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Good for the Boston boy!&mdash;he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am not a Boston boy,&mdash;said the youth, smiling,&mdash;I am a
+      Marylander.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't care where you come from,&mdash;we'll make a Boston man of you,&mdash;said
+      the little gentleman. Pray, what part of Maryland did you come from, and
+      how shall I call you?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poor youth had to speak pretty loud, as he was at the right upper
+      corner of the table, and the little gentleman next the lower left-hand
+      corner. His face flushed a little, but he answered pleasantly, telling who
+      he was, as if the little man's infirmity gave him a right to ask any
+      questions he wanted to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here is the place for you to sit,&mdash;said the little gentleman,
+      pointing to the vacant chair next his own, at the corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You're go'n' to have a young lady next you, if you wait till to-morrow,&mdash;said
+      the landlady to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not reply, but I had a fancy that he changed color. It can't be
+      that he has susceptibilities with reference to a contingent young lady! It
+      can't be that he has had experiences which make him sensitive! Nature
+      could not be quite so cruel as to set a heart throbbing in that poor
+      little cage of ribs! There is no use in wasting notes of admiration. I
+      must ask the landlady about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are some of the facts she furnished.&mdash;Has not been long with
+      her. Brought a sight of furniture,&mdash;could n't hardly get some of it
+      upstairs. Has n't seemed particularly attentive to the ladies. The
+      Bombazine (whom she calls Cousin something or other) has tried to enter
+      into conversation with him, but retired with the impression that he was
+      indifferent to ladies' society. Paid his bill the other day without saying
+      a word about it. Paid it in gold,&mdash;had a great heap of twenty-dollar
+      pieces. Hires her best room. Thinks he is a very nice little man, but
+      lives dreadful lonely up in his chamber. Wants the care of some capable
+      nuss. Never pitied anybody more in her life&mdash;never see a more
+      interestin' person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;My intention was, when I began making these notes, to let them
+      consist principally of conversations between myself and the other
+      boarders. So they will, very probably; but my curiosity is excited about
+      this little boarder of ours, and my reader must not be disappointed, if I
+      sometimes interrupt a discussion to give an account of whatever fact or
+      traits I may discover about him. It so happens that his room is next to
+      mine, and I have the opportunity of observing many of his ways without any
+      active movements of curiosity. That his room contains heavy furniture,
+      that he is a restless little body and is apt to be up late, that he talks
+      to himself, and keeps mainly to himself, is nearly all I have yet found
+      out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One curious circumstance happened lately which I mention without drawing
+      an absolute inference. Being at the studio of a sculptor with whom I am
+      acquainted, the other day, I saw a remarkable cast of a left arm. On my
+      asking where the model came from, he said it was taken direct from the arm
+      of a deformed person, who had employed one of the Italian moulders to make
+      the cast. It was a curious case, it should seem, of one beautiful limb
+      upon a frame otherwise singularly imperfect&mdash;I have repeatedly
+      noticed this little gentleman's use of his left arm. Can he have furnished
+      the model I saw at the sculptor's?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;So we are to have a new boarder to-morrow. I hope there will be
+      something pretty and pleasing about her. A woman with a creamy voice, and
+      finished in alto rilievo, would be a variety in the boarding-house,&mdash;a
+      little more marrow and a little less sinew than our landlady and her
+      daughter and the bombazine-clad female, all of whom are of the
+      turkey-drumstick style of organization. I don't mean that these are our
+      only female companions; but the rest being conversational non-combatants,
+      mostly still, sad feeders, who take in their food as locomotives take in
+      wood and water, and then wither away from the table like blossoms that
+      never came to fruit, I have not yet referred to them as individuals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wonder what kind of young person we shall see in that empty chair
+      to-morrow!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I read this song to the boarders after breakfast the other morning.
+      It was written for our fellows;&mdash;you know who they are, of course.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                         THE BOYS.
+
+     Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
+     If there has, take him out, without making a noise!
+     Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
+     Old Time is a liar!  We're twenty to-night!
+
+     We're twenty!  We're twenty!  Who says we are more?
+     He's tipsy,&mdash;young jackanapes!&mdash;show him the door!
+     &mdash;&ldquo;Gray temples at twenty?&rdquo;&mdash;Yes! white, if we please;
+     Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there's nothing can freeze!
+
+     Was it snowing I spoke of?  Excuse the mistake!
+     Look close,&mdash;you will see not a sign of a flake;
+     We want some new garlands for those we have shed,
+     And these are white roses in place of the red!
+
+     We've a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told.
+     Of talking (in public) as if we were old;
+     That boy we call Doctor, (1) and this we call Judge (2)
+     &mdash;It's a neat little fiction,&mdash;of course it's all fudge.
+
+     That fellow's the Speaker, (3)&mdash;the one on the right;
+     Mr. Mayor, (4) my young one, how are you to-night?
+     That's our &ldquo;Member of Congress,&ldquo; (5) we say when we chaff;
+     There's the &ldquo;Reverend&rdquo; (6) What's his name?&mdash;don't make me laugh!
+
+     That boy with the grave mathematical look(7)
+     Made believe he had written a wonderful book,
+     And the ROYAL SOCIETY thought it was true!
+     So they chose him right in; a good joke it was, too.
+
+     There's a boy,&mdash;we pretend,&mdash;with a three-decker-brain
+     That could harness a team with a logical chain:
+     When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire,
+     We called him &ldquo;The Justice,&rdquo;&mdash;but now he's &ldquo;The Squire.&ldquo; (1)
+
+     And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith,(2)
+     Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith,
+     But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,
+     &mdash;Just read on his medal,&mdash;&ldquo;My country,&mdash;of thee!&rdquo;
+
+     You hear that boy laughing?&mdash;you think he's all fun,
+     But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
+     The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
+     And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all!(3)
+
+     Yes, we're boys,&mdash;always playing with tongue or with pen,
+     &mdash;And I sometimes have asked,&mdash;Shall we ever be men?
+     Shall we always be youthful and laughing and gay,
+     Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?
+
+     Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its gray!
+     The stars of its Winter, the dews of its May!
+     And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
+     Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys!
+
+     1 Francis Thomas.
+     2 George Tyler Bigelow.
+     3 Francis Boardman Crowninshield.
+     4 G. W. Richardson.
+     5 George Thomas Davis.
+     6 James Freeman Clarke.
+     7 Benjamin Peirce.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      [The Professor talks with the Reader. He tells a Young Girl's Story.]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of
+      mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the
+      balance of creation was disturbed. The materials that go to the making of
+      one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate nature of one
+      man's-worth of masculine constituents. These combined to make our first
+      mother, by a logical necessity involved in the previous creation of our
+      common father. All this, mythically, illustratively, and by no means
+      doctrinally or polemically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man implies the woman, you will understand. The excellent gentleman
+      whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling matter a few weeks
+      ago believes in the frequent occurrence of miracles at the present day. So
+      do I. I believe, if you could find an uninhabited coral-reef island, in
+      the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with plenty of cocoa-palms and
+      bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome young fellow, like our Marylander,
+      ashore upon it, if you touched there a year afterwards, you would find him
+      walking under the palm-trees arm in arm with a pretty woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Where would she come from?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, that 's the miracle!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at
+      the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear some
+      fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a clairvoyant,
+      seeing it all beforehand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to
+      the sun to ripen well.&mdash;How some of us fellows remember Joe and
+      Harry, Baltimoreans, both! Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples, and his
+      eyes like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the whiteness of the
+      flesh of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the chandelier-drops rattling
+      overhead, as we sat at our sparkling banquets in those gay times! Harry,
+      champion, by acclamation, of the college heavy-weights, broad-shouldered,
+      bull-necked, square-jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots
+      of pluck, good-natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed bison
+      in the crack of hand-to-hand battle! Who forgets the great muster-day, and
+      the collision of the classic with the democratic forces? The huge butcher,
+      fifteen stone,&mdash;two hundred and ten pounds,&mdash;good weight,&mdash;steps
+      out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant. No words from Harry, the Baltimorean,&mdash;one
+      of the quiet sort, who strike first; and do the talking, if there is any,
+      afterwards. No words, but, in the place thereof, a clean, straight, hard
+      hit, which took effect with a spank like the explosion of a
+      percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of beeves down a sand-bank,&mdash;followed,
+      alas! by the too impetuous youth, so that both rolled down together, and
+      the conflict terminated in one of those inglorious and inevitable Yankee
+      clinches, followed by a general melee, which make our native fistic
+      encounters so different from such admirably-ordered contests as that which
+      I once saw at an English fair, where everything was done decently and in
+      order; and the fight began and ended with such grave propriety, that a
+      sporting parson need hardly have hesitated to open it with a devout
+      petition, and, after it was over, dismiss the ring with a benediction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day, though it
+      is the most wanton and irrelevant digression. But all of us have a little
+      speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to men, just a speck,
+      for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,&mdash;so that we should
+      not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first heavy-heeled aggressor
+      that came along. You can tell a portrait from an ideal head, I suppose,
+      and a true story from one spun out of the writer's invention. See whether
+      this sounds true or not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and
+      Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am talking
+      of. With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little fellow, in velvet
+      breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise, traditionary in English
+      stables, when he rubbed down the silken-skinned racers, in great
+      perfection. After the soldiers had come from the muster-field, and some of
+      the companies were on the village-common, there was still some skirmishing
+      between a few individuals who had not had the fight taken out of them. The
+      little Yorkshire groom thought he must serve out somebody. So he threw
+      himself into an approved scientific attitude, and, in brief, emphatic
+      language, expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate any classical young
+      gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate for his attentions. I
+      don't suppose there were many of the college boys that would have been a
+      match for him in the art which Englishmen know so much more of than
+      Americans, for the most part. However, one of the Sophomores, a very
+      quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the crowd, and, running
+      straight at the groom, as he stood there, sparring away, struck him with
+      the sole of his foot, a straight blow, as if it had been with his fist,
+      and knocked him heels over head and senseless, so that he had to be
+      carried off from the field. This ugly way of hitting is the great trick of
+      the French gavate, which is not commonly thought able to stand its ground
+      against English pugilistic science. These are old recollections, with not
+      much to recommend them, except, perhaps, a dash of life, which may be
+      worth a little something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember. He recalled to
+      my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you of. Both have
+      been long dead. How often we see these great red-flaring flambeaux of life
+      blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,&mdash;and the little,
+      single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some white-faced and attenuated
+      invalid shades with trembling fingers, flickering on while they go out one
+      after another, until its glimmer is all that is left to us of the
+      generation to which it belonged!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some
+      pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and match
+      the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as accident
+      could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she ought, of
+      course, to be sitting. One of the &ldquo;positive&rdquo; blondes, as my friend, you
+      may remember, used to call them. Tawny-haired, amber-eyed, full-throated,
+      skin as white as a blanched almond. Looks dreamy to me, not
+      self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her neck sets it off as a
+      Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not do. So in her dress, there
+      is a harmony of tints that looks as if an artist had run his eye over her
+      and given a hint or two like the finishing touch to a picture. I can't
+      help being struck with her, for she is at once rounded and fine in
+      feature, looks calm, as blondes are apt to, and as if she might run wild,
+      if she were trifled with. It is just as I knew it would be,&mdash;and
+      anybody can see that our young Marylander will be dead in love with her in
+      a week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have the
+      good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as nice as a
+      three-volume novel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement of
+      having such a charming neighbor next him. I judge so mainly by his silence
+      and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if he were thinking
+      of something that had happened, or that might happen, or that ought to
+      happen,&mdash;or how beautiful her young life looked, or how hardly Nature
+      had dealt with him, or something which struck him silent, at any rate. I
+      made several conversational openings for him, but he did not fire up as he
+      often does. I even went so far as to indulge in, a fling at the State
+      House, which, as we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure,
+      covering less ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect. The
+      little man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt. He said to the young
+      lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our Acropolis,
+      which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he reddened a little,&mdash;so
+      I thought. I don't think it right to watch persons who are the subjects of
+      special infirmity,&mdash;but we all do it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of the table,
+      to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort. A well-mounted,
+      middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap, &mdash;pretty
+      wide in the parting, though,&mdash;contours vaguely hinted, &mdash;features
+      very quiet,&mdash;says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye on the
+      young lady, as if having some responsibility for her My record is a blank
+      for some days after this. In the mean time I have contrived to make out
+      the person and the story of our young lady, who, according to appearances,
+      ought to furnish us a heroine for a boarding-house romance before a year
+      is out. It is very curious that she should prove connected with a person
+      many of us have heard of. Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred
+      times struck with the circumstance that the most remote facts are
+      constantly striking each other; just as vessels starting from ports
+      thousands of miles apart pass close to each other in the naked breadth of
+      the ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a crack of
+      timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,&mdash;a cry
+      mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester
+      fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name of
+      her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely pillow,&mdash;a
+      widow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
+      spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack sail
+      straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for them in
+      the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and events, but
+      our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that, if there were a
+      reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar occurrence of what
+      I am now going to mention, I should think it a case for the missionaries
+      of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence among the Comfortable
+      Classes. There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of
+      children. For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or come
+      across some idea. Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact or idea
+      strikes you from another quarter. It seems as if it had passed into space
+      and bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank wall that shuts in the
+      world of thought. Yet no possible connection exists between the two
+      channels by which the thought or the fact arrived. Let me give an
+      infinitesimal illustration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
+      pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table boarders,
+      which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young
+      fellows being always hungry&mdash;Allow me to stop dead-short, in order to
+      utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank
+      interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a
+      geode.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               Aphorism by the Professor.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of
+      different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any
+      hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods, and you
+      might as well attempt to regulate the time of highwater to suit a
+      fishing-party as to change these periods. The crucial experiment is this.
+      Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the suspected individual just ten minutes
+      before dinner. If this is eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth
+      is established. If the subject of the question starts back and expresses
+      surprise and incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the
+      fact of maturity is no less clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Excuse me,&mdash;I return to my story of the Commons-table.&mdash;Young
+      fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare
+      of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to impale a slice
+      of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork holding it beneath
+      the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons that guarded
+      this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and kept a sharp
+      look-out for missing forks;&mdash;they knew where to find one, if it was
+      not in its place.&mdash;Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting so many
+      years to hear of this college trick, I should hear it mentioned a second
+      time within the same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the present
+      generation. Strange, but true. And so it has happened to me and to every
+      person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned
+      facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as
+      an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of
+      subsoil in it.&mdash;The explanation is, of course, that in a great many
+      thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our
+      attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the enormous
+      number of impressions which pass through our consciousness, until in some
+      future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts and the
+      stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more pieces to make up a
+      conscious life or a living body than you think for. Why, some of you were
+      surprised when a friend of mine told you there were fifty-eight separate
+      pieces in a fiddle. How many &ldquo;swimming glands&rdquo;&mdash;solid, organized,
+      regularly formed, rounded disks taking an active part in all your vital
+      processes, part and parcel, each one of them, of your corporeal being&mdash;do
+      you suppose are whirled along, like pebbles in a stream, with the blood
+      which warms your frame and colors your cheeks?&mdash;A noted German
+      physiologist spread out a minute drop of blood, under the microscope, in
+      narrow streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a calculation. The
+      counting by the micrometer took him a week.&mdash;You have, my full-grown
+      friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on
+      your vital errands day and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions,
+      five hundred and seventy thousand millions. Errors excepted.&mdash;Did I
+      hear some gentleman say, &ldquo;Doubted? &ldquo;&mdash;I am the Professor. I sit in my
+      chair with a petard under it that will blow me through the skylight of my
+      lecture-room, if I do not know what I am talking about and whom I am
+      quoting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and
+      saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been
+      waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible
+      that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I have
+      been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? Listen, then. The
+      number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the incalculable
+      multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts accounts for those
+      frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in the world of
+      thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in the world of
+      outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now at our table,
+      and proving to be the daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may
+      remember, is the special example which led me through this labyrinth of
+      reflections, and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl's
+      story, which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to
+      learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the
+      unconscious subject of my brief delineation. IRIS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd poem
+      written by an old Latin tutor? He brought up at the verb amo, I love, as
+      all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living dictionary for
+      him at the word filia, a daughter. The poor man was greatly perplexed in
+      choosing a name for her. Lucretia and Virginia were the first that he
+      thought of; but then came up those pictured stories of Titus Livius, which
+      he could never read without crying, though he had read them a hundred
+      times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one
+      friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber. To them her wrongs
+      briefly. Let them see to the wretch,&mdash;she will take care of herself.
+      Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart. She slides
+      from her seat, and falls dying. &ldquo;Her husband and her father cry aloud.&rdquo;&mdash;No,
+      not Lucretia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      -Virginius,&mdash;a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl. She engaged
+      to a very promising young man. Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy to
+      her,&mdash;must have her at any rate. Hires a lawyer to present the
+      arguments in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter. There
+      used to be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.&mdash;All right.
+      There are two sides to everything. Audi alteram partem. The legal
+      gentleman has no opinion,&mdash;he only states the evidence.&mdash;A
+      doubtful case. Let the young lady be under the protection of the Honorable
+      Decemvir until it can be looked up thoroughly.&mdash;Father thinks it
+      best, on the whole, to give in. Will explain the matter, if the young lady
+      and her maid will step this way. That is the explanation,&mdash;a stab
+      with a butcher's knife, snatched from a stall, meant for other lambs than
+      this poor bleeding Virginia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man thought over the story. Then he must have one look at the
+      original. So he took down the first volume and read it over. When he came
+      to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she was engaged to and
+      a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless shape and carried it
+      through the street, and how all the women followed, wailing, and asking if
+      that was what their daughters were coming to,&mdash;if that was what they
+      were to get for being good girls,&mdash;he melted down into his accustomed
+      tears of pity and grief, and, through them all, of delight at the charming
+      Latin of the narrative. But it was impossible to call his child Virginia.
+      He could never look at her without thinking she had a knife sticking in
+      her bosom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one. She was a queen, and the
+      founder of a great city. Her story had been immortalized by the greatest
+      of poets,&mdash;for the old Latin tutor clove to &ldquo;Virgilius Maro,&rdquo; as he
+      called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his memorable journey. So he
+      took down his Virgil, it was the smooth-leafed, open-lettered quarto of
+      Baskerville,&mdash;and began reading the loves and mishaps of Dido. It
+      would n't do. A lady who had not learned discretion by experience, and
+      came to an evil end. He shook his head, as he sadly repeated,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;&mdash;misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      but when he came to the lines,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis
+     Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording
+      angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone hard
+      with the Latin tutor some time or other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Iris shall be her name!&rdquo;&mdash;he said. So her name was Iris.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation. It is only a
+      question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries. These all
+      burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in brick or stone
+      and iron. I don't mean that you will see in the registry of deaths that
+      this or that particular tutor died of well-marked, uncomplicated
+      starvation. They may, even, in extreme cases, be carried off by a thin,
+      watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very well in the returns, but means
+      little to those who know that it is only debility settling on the head.
+      Generally, however, they fade and waste away under various pretexts,&mdash;calling
+      it dyspepsia, consumption, and so on, to put a decent appearance upon the
+      case and keep up the credit of the family and the institution where they
+      have passed through the successive stages of inanition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the process
+      in question. You see they do get food and clothes and fuel, in appreciable
+      quantities, such as they are. You will even notice rows of books in their
+      rooms, and a picture or two,&mdash;things that look as if they had surplus
+      money; but these superfluities are the water of crystallization to
+      scholars, and you can never get them away till the poor fellows effloresce
+      into dust. Do not be deceived. The tutor breakfasts on coffee made of
+      beans, edulcorated with milk watered to the verge of transparency; his
+      mutton is tough and elastic, up to the moment when it becomes tired out
+      and tasteless; his coal is a sullen, sulphurous anthracite, which rusts
+      into ashes, rather than burns, in the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth
+      is too thin for winter and too thick for summer. The greedy lungs of fifty
+      hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from the air he breathes in his
+      recitation-room. In short, he undergoes a process of gentle and gradual
+      starvation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the
+      old story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus. Her blood-name, which she
+      gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain old English one,
+      and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as recalling the mother of
+      Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well from the initial letter
+      forwards and from the terminal letter backwards. The poor lady, seated
+      with her companion at the chessboard of matrimony, had but just pushed
+      forward her one little white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black
+      Knight, that cares nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down
+      upon her and swept her from the larger board of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late
+      companion, with her name and age and Eheu! upon it,&mdash;a smaller one at
+      her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and snowed
+      on,&mdash;which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have cherished
+      tenderly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of
+      water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved into a
+      slight cough. Then he began to draw the buckle of his black trousers a
+      little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-ample waistcoat. His
+      temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts of color in his cheeks more
+      vivid than of old. After a while his walks fatigued him, and he was tired,
+      and breathed hard after going up a flight or two of stairs. Then came on
+      other marks of inward trouble and general waste, which he spoke of to his
+      physician as peculiar, and doubtless owing to accidental causes; to all
+      which the doctor listened with deference, as if it had not been the old
+      story that one in five or six of mankind in temperate climates tells, or
+      has told for him, as if it were something new. As the doctor went out, he
+      said to himself,&mdash;&ldquo;On the rail at last. Accommodation train. A good
+      many stops, but will get to the station by and by.&rdquo; So the doctor wrote a
+      recipe with the astrological sign of Jupiter before it, (just as your own
+      physician does, inestimable reader, as you will see, if you look at his
+      next prescription,) and departed, saying he would look in occasionally.
+      After this, the Latin tutor began the usual course of &ldquo;getting better,&rdquo;
+       until he got so much better that his face was very sharp, and when he
+      smiled, three crescent lines showed at each side of his lips, and when he
+      spoke; it was in a muffled whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as
+      pearly as the purest porcelain, &mdash;so much better, that he hoped&mdash;by
+      spring&mdash;he&mdash;might be able&mdash;to&mdash;attend&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;to
+      his class again.&mdash;But he was recommended not to expose himself, and
+      so kept his chamber, and occasionally, not having anything to do, his bed.
+      The unmarried sister with whom he lived took care of him; and the child,
+      now old enough to be manageable and even useful in trifling offices, sat
+      in the chamber, or played, about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things could not go on so forever, of course. One morning his face was
+      sunken and his hands were very, very cold. He was &ldquo;better,&rdquo; he whispered,
+      but sadly and faintly. After a while he grew restless and seemed a little
+      wandering. His mind ran on his classics, and fell back on the Latin
+      grammar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Iris!&rdquo; he said,&mdash;&ldquo;filiola mea!&rdquo;&mdash;The child knew this meant my
+      dear little daughter as well as if it had been English.&mdash;&ldquo;Rainbow!&rdquo;
+       for he would translate her name at times,&mdash;&ldquo;come to me,&mdash;veni&rdquo;&mdash;and
+      his lips went on automatically, and murmured, &ldquo;vel venito!&rdquo;&mdash;The
+      child came and sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could not
+      warm, but which shot its rays of cold all through her slender frame. But
+      there she sat, looking steadily at him. Presently he opened his lips
+      feebly, and whispered, &ldquo;Moribundus.&rdquo; She did not know what that meant, but
+      she saw that there was something new and sad. So she began to cry; but
+      presently remembering an old book that seemed to comfort him at times, got
+      up and brought a Bible in the Latin version, called the Vulgate. &ldquo;Open
+      it,&rdquo; he said,&mdash;&ldquo;I will read, segnius irritant,&mdash;don't put the
+      light out,&mdash;ah! hoeret lateri,&mdash;I am going,&mdash;vale, vale,
+      vale, goodbye, good-bye,&mdash;the Lord take care of my child! Domine,
+      audi&mdash;vel audito!&rdquo; His face whitened suddenly, and he lay still, with
+      open eyes and mouth. He had taken his last degree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very
+      brilliant rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view. A limited wardrobe
+      of man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,&mdash;a few good books,
+      principally classics,&mdash;a print or two, and a plaster model of the
+      Pantheon, with some pieces of furniture which had seen service,&mdash;these,
+      and a child's heart full of tearful recollections and strange doubts and
+      questions, alternating with the cheap pleasures which are the anodynes of
+      childish grief; such were the treasures she inherited.&mdash;No,&mdash;I
+      forgot. With that kindly sentiment which all of us feel for old men's
+      first children,&mdash;frost-flowers of the early winter season, the old
+      tutor's students had remembered him at a time when he was laughing and
+      crying with his new parental emotions, and running to the side of the
+      plain crib in which his alter egg, as he used to say, was swinging, to
+      hang over the little heap of stirring clothes, from which looked the
+      minute, red, downy, still, round face, with unfixed eyes and working lips,&mdash;in
+      that unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a smile, and
+      which gives to the earliest moon-year or two of an infant's life the
+      character of a first old age, to counterpoise that second childhood which
+      there is one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by. The boys had
+      remembered the old man and young father at that tender period of his hard,
+      dry life. There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with classical
+      figures, and bearing on a shield the graver words, Ex dono pupillorum. The
+      handle on its side showed what use the boys had meant it for; and a kind
+      letter in it, written with the best of feeling, in the worst of Latin,
+      pointed delicately to its destination. Out of this silver vessel, after a
+      long, desperate, strangling cry, which marked her first great lesson in
+      the realities of life, the child took the blue milk, such as poor tutors
+      and their children get, tempered with water, and sweetened a little, so as
+      to bring it nearer the standard established by the touching indulgence and
+      partiality of Nature,&mdash;who had mingled an extra allowance of sugar in
+      the blameless food of the child at its mother's breast, as compared with
+      that of its infant brothers and sisters of the bovine race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rainwater. An air-plant will
+      grow by feeding on the winds. Nay, those huge forests that overspread
+      great continents have built themselves up mainly from the air-currents
+      with which they are always battling. The oak is but a foliated atmospheric
+      crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that holds the future vegetable
+      world in solution. The storm that tears its leaves has paid tribute to its
+      strength, and it breasts the tornado clad in the spoils of a hundred
+      hurricanes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor little Iris! What had she in common with the great oak in the shadow
+      of which we are losing sight of her?&mdash;She lived and grew like that,&mdash;this
+      was all. The blue milk ran into her veins and filled them with thin, pure
+      blood. Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge, such as the white rosebud
+      shows before it opens. The doctor who had attended her father was afraid
+      her aunt would hardly be able to &ldquo;raise&rdquo; her,&mdash;&ldquo;delicate child,&rdquo;&mdash;hoped
+      she was not consumptive,&mdash;thought there was a fair chance she would
+      take after her father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white neckcloth,
+      sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two years and eleven
+      months, after having fully indorsed all the doctrines of the particular
+      persuasion to which he not only belonged himself, but thought it very
+      shameful that everybody else did not belong. What with foreboding looks
+      and dreary death-bed stories, it was a wonder the child made out to live
+      through it. It saddened her early years, of course,&mdash;it distressed
+      her tender soul with thoughts which, as they cannot be fully taken in,
+      should be sparingly used as instruments of torture to break down the
+      natural cheerfulness of a healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse, to
+      cheat a dying one out of the kind illusions with which the Father of All
+      has strewed its downward path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might have
+      added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have been as
+      cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with the best
+      intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the curious students
+      of science.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late Latin
+      tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the future mother
+      of his child. The deceased tutoress was a tranquil, smooth woman, easily
+      nourished, as such people are,&mdash;a quality which is inestimable in a
+      tutor's wife,&mdash;and so it happened that the daughter inherited enough
+      vitality from the mother to live through childhood and infancy and fight
+      her way towards womanhood, in spite of the tendencies she derived from her
+      other parent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary
+      descent of qualities. Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five. It
+      seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at another
+      blended,&mdash;that occasionally, the force of two natures is represented
+      in the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than either original
+      line of living movement,&mdash;that sometimes there is a loss of vitality
+      hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward impulse of variable
+      intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it was with this child. She had glanced off from her parental
+      probabilities at an unexpected angle. Instead of taking to classical
+      learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties like
+      her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the direction
+      of Art. As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to sketch outlines of
+      objects round her with a certain air and spirit. Very extraordinary
+      horses, but their legs looked as if they could move. Birds unknown to
+      Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush. Men with impossible legs,
+      which did yet seem to have a vital connection with their most improbable
+      bodies. By-and-by the doctor, on his beast,&mdash;an old man with a face
+      looking as if Time had kneaded it like dough with his knuckles, with a
+      rhubarb tint and flavor pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all
+      their appurtenances. A dreadful old man! Be sure she did not forget those
+      saddle-bags that held the detestable bottles out of which he used to shake
+      those loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that find heaven
+      in strawberries and peaches, are&mdash;Well, I suppose I had better stop.
+      Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him coming. On the
+      next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat and white cravat,
+      as he looked when he came and entertained her with stories concerning the
+      death of various little children about her age, to encourage her, as that
+      wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting Admiral Byng. Then she would take
+      her pencil, and with a few scratches there would be the outline of a
+      child, in which you might notice how one sudden sweep gave the chubby
+      cheek, and two dots darted at the paper looked like real eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on the
+      leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her
+      companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy, with
+      large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and children,
+      sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and heads thrown
+      back in ecstasy. This was at about twelve years old, as the dates of these
+      drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years before she came among
+      us. Soon after this time, the ideal figures began to take the place of
+      portraits and caricatures, and a new feature appeared in her drawing-books
+      in the form of fragments of verse and short poems.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an old
+      spinster and go to a village school. Her books bore testimony to this; for
+      there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a sense of
+      weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of blessedness or
+      other, which began to be painful. She might have gone through this
+      flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided into a sober,
+      human berry, but for the intervention of friendly assistance and counsel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition, somewhat
+      past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of cultivated
+      tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character, and of more than
+      common accomplishments. The gentleman in black broadcloth and white
+      neckerchief only echoed the common voice about her, when he called her,
+      after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof, an excellent cup of tea, with
+      certain elegancies and luxuries he was unaccustomed to, &ldquo;The Model of all
+      the Virtues.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She deserved this title as well as almost any woman. She did really
+      bristle with moral excellences. Mention any good thing she had not done; I
+      should like to see you try! There was no handle of weakness to take hold
+      of her by; she was as unseizable, except in her totality, as a
+      billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial table, where she had
+      been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue of Fortune, she glanced
+      from every human contact, and &ldquo;caromed&rdquo; from one relation to another, and
+      rebounded from the stuffed cushion of temptation, with such exact and
+      perfect angular movements, that the Enemy's corps of Reporters had long
+      given up taking notes of her conduct, as there was no chance for their
+      master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a slightly
+      self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius running like a
+      glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her virgin nature! One of
+      the lady-patroness's peculiar virtues was calmness. She was resolute and
+      strenuous, but still. You could depend on her for every duty; she was as
+      true as steel. She was kind-hearted and serviceable in all the relations
+      of life. She had more sense, more knowledge, more conversation, as well as
+      more goodness, than all the partners you have waltzed with this winter put
+      together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered himself to
+      her in marriage. It was a great wonder. I am very anxious to vindicate my
+      character as a philosopher and an observer of Nature by accounting for
+      this apparently extraordinary fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of presenting to
+      the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand. There are states of mind in
+      which a contact of this kind has a depressing effect on the vital powers
+      that makes us insensible to all the virtues and graces of the proprietor
+      of one of these life-absorbing organs. When they touch us, virtue passes
+      out of us, and we feel as if our electricity had been drained by a
+      powerful negative battery, carried about by an overgrown human torpedo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Model of all the Virtues&rdquo; had a pair of searching eyes as clear as
+      Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry. Her
+      features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-smile, but
+      never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the riotous tumult of
+      a laugh,&mdash;which, I take it, is the mob-law of the features;&mdash;and
+      propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act. She carried the brimming
+      cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious, steady hand, and an eye
+      always on them, to see that they did not spill. Then she was an admirable
+      judge of character. Her mind was a perfect laboratory of tests and
+      reagents; every syllable you put into breath went into her intellectual
+      eudiometer, and all your thoughts were recorded on litmus-paper. I think
+      there has rarely been a more admirable woman. Of course, Miss Iris was
+      immensely and passionately attached to her.&mdash;Well,&mdash;these are
+      two highly oxygenated adverbs, &mdash;grateful,&mdash;suppose we say,&mdash;yes,&mdash;grateful,
+      dutiful, obedient to her wishes for the most part,&mdash;perhaps not quite
+      up to the concert pitch of such a perfect orchestra of the virtues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it much.
+      People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than is good for
+      them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable subjects for
+      biographies. But we don't always care most for those flat-pattern flowers
+      that press best in the herbarium.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This immaculate woman,&mdash;why could n't she have a fault or two? Is n't
+      there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome aureole of saintly
+      perfection? Does n't she carry a lump of opium in her pocket? Is n't her
+      cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its legitimate use would require?
+      It would be such a comfort!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such words
+      escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind. Whether at the bottom
+      of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive presence, it is
+      hard to say, until we know more about her. Iris sits between the Little
+      Gentleman and the &ldquo;Model of all the Virtues,&rdquo; as the black-coated
+      personage called her.&mdash;I will watch them all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Here I stop for the present. What the Professor said has had to
+      make way this time for what he saw and heard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      -And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle souls who
+      love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with something like a
+      smile upon the reader's lips, at a meeting where these musical friends had
+      gathered. Whether they were written with smiles or not, you can guess
+      better after you have read them.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                    THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.
+
+     In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen
+     With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,
+     At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right,
+     Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night.
+
+     Ah me! how I remember the evening when it came!
+     What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame,
+     When the wondrous boa was opened that had come from over seas,
+     With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of ivory keys!
+
+     Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy,
+     For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy,
+     Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal way,
+     But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, &ldquo;Now, Mary, play.&rdquo;
+
+     For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm;
+     She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm,
+     In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills,
+     Or caroling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.
+
+     So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please,
+     Sat down to the new &ldquo;Clementi,&rdquo; and struck the glittering keys.
+     Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye grew dim,
+     As, floating from lip and finger, arose the &ldquo;Vesper Hymn.&rdquo;
+
+     &mdash;Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red,
+     (Wedded since, and a widow,&mdash;something like ten years dead,)
+     Hearing a gush of music such as none before,
+     Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door.
+
+     Just as the &ldquo;Jubilate&rdquo; in threaded whisper dies,
+     &mdash;&ldquo;Open it! open it, lady!&rdquo; the little maiden cries,
+     (For she thought 't was a singing creature caged in a box she heard,)
+     &ldquo;Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the bird!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I don't know whether our literary or professional people are more amiable
+      than they are in other places, but certainly quarrelling is out of fashion
+      among them. This could never be, if they were in the habit of secret
+      anonymous puffing of each other. That is the kind of underground machinery
+      which manufactures false reputations and genuine hatreds. On the other
+      hand, I should like to know if we are not at liberty to have a good time
+      together, and say the pleasantest things we can think of to each other,
+      when any of us reaches his thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth or eightieth
+      birthday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We don't have &ldquo;scenes,&rdquo; I warrant you, on these occasions. No &ldquo;surprise&rdquo;
+       parties! You understand these, of course. In the rural districts, where
+      scenic tragedy and melodrama cannot be had, as in the city, at the expense
+      of a quarter and a white pocket-handkerchief, emotional excitement has to
+      be sought in the dramas of real life. Christenings, weddings, and
+      funerals, especially the latter, are the main dependence; but babies,
+      brides, and deceased citizens cannot be had at a day's notice. Now, then,
+      for a surprise-party!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A bag of flour, a barrel of potatoes, some strings of onions, a basket of
+      apples, a big cake and many little cakes, a jug of lemonade, a purse
+      stuffed with bills of the more modest denominations, may, perhaps, do well
+      enough for the properties in one of these private theatrical exhibitions.
+      The minister of the parish, a tender-hearted, quiet, hard-working man,
+      living on a small salary, with many children, sometimes pinched to feed
+      and clothe them, praying fervently every day to be blest in his &ldquo;basket
+      and store,&rdquo; but sometimes fearing he asks amiss, to judge by the small
+      returns, has the first role,&mdash;not, however, by his own choice, but
+      forced upon him. The minister's wife, a sharp-eyed, unsentimental body, is
+      first lady; the remaining parts by the rest of the family. If they only
+      had a playbill, it would run thus:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                     ON TUESDAY NEXT
+                    WILL BE PRESENTED
+                   THE AFFECTING SCENE
+                         CALLED
+
+                   THE SURPRISE-PARTY
+
+                           OR
+
+                  THE OVERCOME FAMILY;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      WITH THE FOLLOWING STRONG CAST OF CHARACTERS.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The Rev.  Mr. Overcome, by the Clergyman of this Parish.
+     Mrs.  Overcome, by his estimable lady.
+     Masters Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Overcome,
+     Misses Dorcas, Tabitha, Rachel, and Hannah, Overcome, by their
+     interesting children.
+     Peggy, by the female help.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The poor man is really grateful;&mdash;it is a most welcome and unexpected
+      relief. He tries to express his thanks,&mdash;his voice falters,&mdash;he
+      chokes,&mdash;and bursts into tears. That is the great effect of the
+      evening. The sharp-sighted lady cries a little with one eye, and counts
+      the strings of onions, and the rest of the things, with the other. The
+      children stand ready for a spring at the apples. The female help weeps
+      after the noisy fashion of untutored handmaids.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now this is all very well as charity, but do let the kind visitors
+      remember they get their money's worth. If you pay a quarter for dry
+      crying, done by a second-rate actor, how much ought you to pay for real
+      hot, wet tears, out of the honest eyes of a gentleman who is not acting,
+      but sobbing in earnest?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All I meant to say, when I began, was, that this was not a surprise-party
+      where I read these few lines that follow:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     We will not speak of years to-night;
+     For what have years to bring,
+     But larger floods of love and light
+     And sweeter songs to sing?
+
+     We will not drown in wordy praise
+     The kindly thoughts that rise;
+     If friendship owns one tender phrase,
+     He reads it in our eyes.
+
+     We need not waste our schoolboy art
+     To gild this notch of time;
+     Forgive me, if my wayward heart
+     Has throbbed in artless rhyme.
+
+     Enough for him the silent grasp
+     That knits us hand in hand,
+     And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
+     That locks our circling band.
+
+     Strength to his hours of manly toil!
+     Peace to his starlit dreams!
+     Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
+     The music-haunted streams!
+
+     Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
+     The sunshine on his lips,
+     And faith, that sees the ring of light
+     Round Nature's last eclipse!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;One of our boarders has been talking in such strong language that I
+      am almost afraid to report it. However, as he seems to be really honest
+      and is so very sincere in his local prejudices, I don't believe anybody
+      will be very angry with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is here, Sir! right here!&mdash;said the little deformed gentleman,&mdash;in
+      this old new city of Boston,&mdash;this remote provincial corner of a
+      provincial nation, that the Battle of the Standard is fighting, and was
+      fighting before we were born, and will be fighting when we are dead and
+      gone,&mdash;please God! The battle goes on everywhere throughout
+      civilization; but here, here, here is the broad white flag flying which
+      proclaims, first of all, peace and good-will to men, and, next to that,
+      the absolute, unconditional spiritual liberty of each individual immortal
+      soul! The three-hilled city against the seven-hilled city! That is it,
+      Sir,&mdash;nothing less than that; and if you know what that means, I
+      don't think you'll ask for anything more. I swear to you, Sir, I believe
+      that these two centres of civilization are just exactly the two points
+      that close the circuit in the battery of our planetary intelligence! And I
+      believe there are spiritual eyes looking out from Uranus and unseen
+      Neptune,&mdash;ay, Sir, from the systems of Sirius and Arcturus and
+      Aldebaran, and as far as that faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent in
+      the distance that we call the nebula of Orion,&mdash;looking on, Sir, with
+      what organs I know not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery
+      fusion, the accidents and hindrances of humanity or man himself, Sir,&mdash;the
+      stupendous abortion, the illustrious failure that he is, if the
+      three-hilled city does not ride down and trample out the seven-hilled
+      city!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Steam 's up!&mdash;said the young man John, so called, in a low
+      tone. &mdash;Three hundred and sixty-five tons to the square inch. Let him
+      blow her off, or he'll bu'st his b'iler.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The divinity-student took it calmly, only whispering that he thought there
+      was a little confusion of images between a galvanic battery and a charge
+      of cavalry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Koh-i-noor&mdash;the gentleman, you remember, with a very large
+      diamond in his shirt-front laughed his scornful laugh, and made as if to
+      speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sail in, Metropolis!&mdash;said that same young man John, by name. And
+      then, in a lower lane, not meaning to be heard,&mdash;Now, then, Ma'am
+      Allen!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he was heard,&mdash;and the Koh-i-noor's face turned so white with
+      rage, that his blue-black moustache and beard looked fearful, seen against
+      it. He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he would have
+      thrown it or its contents at the speaker. The young Marylander fixed his
+      clear, steady eye upon him, and laid his hand on his arm, carelessly
+      almost, but the Jewel found it was held so that he could not move it. It
+      was of no use. The youth was his master in muscle, and in that deadly
+      Indian hug in which men wrestle with their eyes;&mdash;over in five
+      seconds, but breaks one of their two backs, and is good for threescore
+      years and ten;&mdash;one trial enough,&mdash;settles the whole matter,&mdash;just
+      as when two feathered songsters of the barnyard, game and dunghill, come
+      together,-after a jump or two at each other, and a few sharp kicks, there
+      is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous, Monsieur, with the beaten party
+      in all the social relations for all the rest of his days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot philosophically account for the Koh-i-noor's wrath. For though a
+      cosmetic is sold, bearing the name of the lady to whom reference was made
+      by the young person John, yet, as it is publicly asserted in respectable
+      prints that this cosmetic is not a dye, I see no reason why he should have
+      felt offended by any suggestion that he was indebted to it or its
+      authoress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to which
+      the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural. Nature is fertile in
+      variety. I saw an albiness in London once, for sixpence, (including the
+      inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked as if she had been
+      boiled in milk. A young Hottentot of my acquaintance had his hair all in
+      little pellets of the size of marrow-fat peas. One of my own classmates
+      has undergone a singular change of late years,&mdash;his hair losing its
+      original tint, and getting a remarkable discolored look; and another has
+      ceased to cultivate any hair at all over the vertex or crown of the head.
+      So I am perfectly willing to believe that the purple-black of the
+      Koh-i-noor's moustache and whiskers is constitutional and not pigmentary.
+      But I can't think why he got so angry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
+      threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it was all
+      over by the time the other end of the table found out there was a
+      disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be seen
+      resting on his axe at the instant you hear the last blow he struck. So you
+      will please to observe that the Little Gentleman was not, interrupted
+      during the time implied by these ex-post-facto remarks of mine, but for
+      some ten or fifteen seconds only.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started again. The
+      &ldquo;Sir&rdquo; of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself more than anybody
+      else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he were talking with some
+      imaginary opponent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;America, Sir,&mdash;he exclaimed,&mdash;is the only place where man
+      is full-grown!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round of his
+      high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his little
+      figure to the view of the boarders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was next to impossible to keep from laughing. The commentary was so
+      strange an illustration of the text! I thought it was time to put in a
+      word; for I have lived in foreign parts, and am more or less cosmopolitan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have in
+      England,&mdash;I said.&mdash;An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion
+      and politics. Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr. Channing did,
+      and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir,&mdash;said he,&mdash;it is n't what a man thinks or says; but when
+      and where and to whom he thinks and says it. A man with a flint and steel
+      striking sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking them over a
+      tinder-box is another. The free Englishman is born under protest; he lives
+      and dies under protest,&mdash;a tolerated, but not a welcome fact. Is not
+      freethinker a term of reproach in England? The same idea in the soul of an
+      Englishman who struggled up to it and still holds it antagonistically, and
+      in the soul of an American to whom it is congenital and spontaneous, and
+      often unrecognized, except as an element blended with all his thoughts, a
+      natural movement, like the drawing of his breath or the beating of his
+      heart, is a very different thing. You may teach a quadruped to walk on his
+      hind legs, but he is always wanting to be on all fours. Nothing that can
+      be taught a growing youth is like the atmospheric knowledge he breathes
+      from his infancy upwards. The American baby sucks in freedom with the milk
+      of the breast at which he hangs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;That's a good joke,&mdash;said the young fellow John,&mdash;considerin'
+      it commonly belongs to a female Paddy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought&mdash;I will not be certain&mdash;that the Little Gentleman
+      winked, as if he had been hit somewhere&mdash;as I have no doubt Dr.
+      Darwin did when the wooden-spoon suggestion upset his theory about why,
+      etc. If he winked, however, he did not dodge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A lively comment!&mdash;he said.&mdash;But Rome, in her great founder,
+      sucked the blood of empire out of the dugs of a brute, Sir! The Milesian
+      wet-nurse is only a convenient vessel through which the American infant
+      gets the life-blood of this virgin soil, Sir, that is making man over
+      again, on the sunset pattern! You don't think what we are doing and going
+      to do here. Why, Sir, while commentators are bothering themselves with
+      interpretation of prophecies, we have got the new heavens and the new
+      earth over us and under us! Was there ever anything in Italy, I should
+      like to know, like a Boston sunset?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;This time there was a laugh, and the little man himself almost
+      smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes,&mdash;Boston sunsets;&mdash;perhaps they're as good in some other
+      places, but I know 'em best here. Anyhow, the American skies are different
+      from anything they see in the Old World. Yes, and the rocks are different,
+      and the soil is different, and everything that comes out of the soil, from
+      grass up to Indians, is different. And now that the provisional races are
+      dying out&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;What do you mean by the provisional races, Sir?&mdash;said the
+      divinity-student, interrupting him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why, the aboriginal bipeds, to be sure,&mdash;he answered,&mdash;the
+      red-crayon sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colors for the
+      real manhood were ready.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hope they will come to something yet,&mdash;said the divinity-student.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irreclaimable, Sir,&mdash;irreclaimable!&mdash;said the Little Gentleman.&mdash;Cheaper
+      to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones. When you can get
+      the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can make an enlightened
+      commonwealth of Indians. A provisional race, Sir,&mdash;nothing more.
+      Exhaled carbonic acid for the use of vegetation, kept down the bears and
+      catamounts, enjoyed themselves in scalping and being scalped, and then
+      passed away or are passing away, according to the programme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, Sir, these races dying out, the white man has to acclimate himself.
+      It takes him a good while; but he will come all right by-and-by, Sir,&mdash;as
+      sound as a woodchuck,&mdash;as sound as a musquash!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of 'em
+      for wash-basins! A new race, and a whole new world for the new-born human
+      soul to work in! And Boston is the brain of it, and has been any time
+      these hundred years! That's all I claim for Boston,&mdash;that it is the
+      thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the planet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;And the grand emporium of modesty,&mdash;said the divinity-student,
+      a little mischievously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, don't talk to me of modesty!&mdash;answered the Little Gentleman,&mdash;I
+      'm past that! There is n't a thing that was ever said or done in Boston,
+      from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical lie it tore
+      into tatters and flung into the dock, that was n't thought very indelicate
+      by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the entrails of commercial and
+      spiritual conservatism are twisted into colics as often as this
+      revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of thinking come over it.&mdash;No,
+      Sir,&mdash;show me any other place that is, or was since the megalosaurus
+      has died out, where wealth and social influence are so fairly divided
+      between the stationary and the progressive classes! Show me any other
+      place where every other drawing-room is not a chamber of the Inquisition,
+      with papas and mammas for inquisitors,&mdash;and the cold shoulder,
+      instead of the &ldquo;dry pan and the gradual fire,&rdquo; the punishment of &ldquo;heresy&rdquo;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;We think Baltimore is a pretty civilized kind of a village,&mdash;said
+      the young Marylander, good-naturedly.&mdash;But I suppose you can't
+      forgive it for always keeping a little ahead of Boston in point of
+      numbers,&mdash;tell the truth now. Are we not the centre of something?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, indeed, to be sure you are. You are the gastronomic metropolis of the
+      Union. Why don't you put a canvas-back-duck on the top of the Washington
+      column? Why don't you get that lady off from Battle Monument and plant a
+      terrapin in her place? Why will you ask for other glories when you have
+      soft crabs? No, Sir,&mdash;you live too well to think as hard as we do in
+      Boston. Logic comes to us with the salt-fish of Cape Ann; rhetoric is born
+      of the beans of Beverly; but you&mdash;if you open your mouths to speak,
+      Nature stops them with a fat oyster, or offers a slice of the breast of
+      your divine bird, and silences all your aspirations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And what of Philadelphia?&mdash;said the Marylander.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, Philadelphia?&mdash;Waterworks,&mdash;killed by the Croton and
+      Cochituate; &mdash;Ben Franklin,&mdash;borrowed from Boston;&mdash;David
+      Rittenhouse,&mdash;made an orrery;&mdash;Benjamin Rush,&mdash;made a
+      medical system;&mdash;both interesting to antiquarians;&mdash;great
+      Red-river raft of medical students,&mdash;spontaneous generation of
+      professors to match;&mdash;more widely known through the Moyamensing
+      hose-company, and the Wistar parties;-for geological section of social
+      strata, go to The Club.&mdash;Good place to live in,&mdash;first-rate
+      market,&mdash;tip-top peaches.&mdash;What do we know about Philadelphia,
+      except that the engine-companies are always shooting each other?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And what do you say to New York?&mdash;asked the Koh-i-noor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great city, Sir,&mdash;replied the Little Gentleman,&mdash;a very
+      opulent, splendid city. A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and
+      of permanence for much that is respectable. A great money-centre. San
+      Francisco with the mines above-ground,&mdash;and some of 'em under the
+      sidewalks. I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York, in all
+      our cities. It makes 'em all look paltry and petty. Has many elements of
+      civilization. May stop where Venice did, though, for aught we know.&mdash;The
+      order of its development is just this:&mdash;Wealth; architecture;
+      upholstery; painting; sculpture. Printing, as a mechanical art,&mdash;just
+      as Nicholas Jepson and the Aldi, who were scholars too, made Venice
+      renowned for it. Journalism, which is the accident of business and crowded
+      populations, in great perfection. Venice got as far as Titian and Paul
+      Veronese and Tintoretto,&mdash;great colorists, mark you, magnificent on
+      the flesh-and-blood side of Art,&mdash;but look over to Florence and see
+      who lie in Santa Crocea, and ask out of whose loins Dante sprung!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, yes, to be sure, Venice built her Ducal Palace, and her Church of St.
+      Mark, and her Casa d' Or, and the rest of her golden houses; and Venice
+      had great pictures and good music; and Venice had a Golden Book, in which
+      all the large tax-payers had their names written;&mdash;but all that did
+      not make Venice the brain of Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I tell you what, Sir,&mdash;with all these magnificent appliances of
+      civilization, it is time we began to hear something from the djinnis donee
+      whose names are on the Golden Book of our sumptuous, splendid,
+      marble-placed Venice,&mdash;something in the higher walks of literature,
+      &mdash;something in the councils of the nation. Plenty of Art, I grant
+      you, Sir; now, then, for vast libraries, and for mighty scholars and
+      thinkers and statesmen,&mdash;five for every Boston one, as the population
+      is to ours,&mdash;ten to one more properly, in virtue of centralizing
+      attraction as the alleged metropolis, and not call our people provincials,
+      and have to come begging to us to write the lives of Hendrik Hudson and
+      Gouverneur Morris!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The Little Gentleman was on his hobby, exalting his own city at the
+      expense of every other place. I have my doubts if he had been in either of
+      the cities he had been talking about. I was just going to say something to
+      sober him down, if I could, when the young Marylander spoke up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Come, now,&mdash;he said,&mdash;what's the use of these comparisons? Did
+      n't I hear this gentleman saying, the other day, that every American owns
+      all America? If you have really got more brains in Boston than other
+      folks, as you seem to think, who hates you for it, except a pack of
+      scribbling fools? If I like Broadway better than Washington Street, what
+      then? I own them both, as much as anybody owns either. I am an American,&mdash;and
+      wherever I look up and see the stars and stripes overhead, that is home to
+      me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke, and looked up as if he heard the emblazoned folds crackling over
+      him in the breeze. We all looked up involuntarily, as if we should see the
+      national flag by so doing. The sight of the dingy ceiling and the
+      gas-fixture depending therefrom dispelled the illusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bravo! bravo!&mdash;said the venerable gentleman on the other side of the
+      table.&mdash;Those are the sentiments of Washington's Farewell Address.
+      Nothing better than that since the last chapter in Revelations.
+      Five-and-forty years ago there used to be Washington societies, and little
+      boys used to walk in processions, each little boy having a copy of the
+      Address, bound in red, hung round his neck by a ribbon. Why don't they
+      now? Why don't they now? I saw enough of hating each other in the old
+      Federal times; now let's love each other, I say,&mdash;let's love each
+      other, and not try to make it out that there is n't any place fit to live
+      in except the one we happen to be born in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It dwarfs the mind, I think,&mdash;said I,&mdash;to feed it on any
+      localism. The full stature of manhood is shrivelled&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The color burst up into my cheeks. What was I saying,&mdash;I, who would
+      not for the world have pained our unfortunate little boarder by an
+      allusion?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I will go,&mdash;he said,&mdash;and made a movement with his left arm to
+      let himself down from his high chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No,&mdash;no,&mdash;he does n't mean it,&mdash;you must not go,&mdash;said
+      a kind voice next him; and a soft, white hand was laid upon his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Iris, my dear!&mdash;exclaimed another voice, as of a female, in accents
+      that might be considered a strong atmospheric solution of duty with very
+      little flavor of grace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not move for this address, and there was a tableau that lasted
+      some seconds. For the young girl, in the glory of half-blown womanhood,
+      and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature covered with
+      Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his life.
+      Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that reached into her
+      soul as these did. It was not that they were in themselves supernaturally
+      bright,&mdash;but there was the sad fire in them that flames up from the
+      soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman without hope, but, alas! not
+      without emotion. To him it seemed as if those amber gates had been
+      translucent as the brown water of a mountain brook, and through them he
+      had seen dimly into a virgin wilderness, only waiting for the sunrise of a
+      great passion for all its buds to blow and all its bowers to ring with
+      melody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That is my image, of course,&mdash;not his. It was not a simile that was
+      in his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,&mdash;it was a pang of
+      wordless passion, and then a silent, inward moan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A lady's wish,&mdash;he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,&mdash;makes
+      slaves of us all.&mdash;And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and
+      never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures without
+      one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged pocket,&mdash;Nature
+      suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well; and he fell into a
+      reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always hovering dust outside
+      the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze
+      in, knowing perfectly well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as
+      soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,&mdash;misty,
+      fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up
+      against his inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:&mdash;John
+      Wilkes's&mdash;the ugliest man's in England&mdash;saying, that with
+      half-an-hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land
+      in any woman's good graces; Cadenus&mdash;old and savage&mdash;leading
+      captive Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, &ldquo;And a
+      winning tongue had he,&rdquo;&mdash;as much as to say, it is n't looks, after
+      all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over,&mdash;just as of old when
+      it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to
+      listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, dear me! We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club, subjugating
+      man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of it, and the second
+      by our handling of it,&mdash;we rehearse it, I say, by our own
+      hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the exercise is easy.
+      But when we come to real life, the poker is in the fore, and, ten to one,
+      if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to hold;&mdash;lucky for us, if
+      it is not white-hot, and we do not have to leave the skin of our hands
+      sticking to it when we fling it down or drop it with a loud or silent cry!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human
+      character and feeling I am winding. I meant to tell my thoughts, and to
+      throw in a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured themselves
+      for me from day to day. Chance has thrown together at the table with me a
+      number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean not only to look on
+      them, but, if I can, through them. You can get any man's or woman's
+      secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your own, if you will only look
+      patiently on them long enough. Nature is always applying her reagents to
+      character, if you will take the pains to watch her. Our studies of
+      character, to change the image, are very much like the surveyor's
+      triangulation of a geographical province. We get a base-line in
+      organization, always; then we get an angle by sighting some distant object
+      to which the passions or aspirations of the subject of our observation are
+      tending; then another;&mdash;and so we construct our first triangle. Once
+      fix a man's ideals, and for the most part the rest is easy. A wants to die
+      worth half a million. Good. B (female) wants to catch him,&mdash;and
+      outlive him. All right. Minor details at our leisure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all your
+      misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of acts of
+      consciousness which make up your past life? What should you most dislike
+      to tell your nearest friend?&mdash;Be so good as to pause for a brief
+      space, and shut the volume you hold with your finger between the pages.&mdash;Oh,
+      that is it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my soul
+      open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants came back
+      to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy bills!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of those
+      stately upright cabinet desks and cases of drawers which were not rare in
+      prosperous families during the last century. It had held the clothes and
+      the books and the papers of generation after generation. The hands that
+      opened its drawers had grown withered, shrivelled, and at last been folded
+      in death. The children that played with the lower handles had got tall
+      enough to open the desk, to reach the upper shelves behind the
+      folding-doors,&mdash;grown bent after a while,&mdash;and then followed
+      those who had gone before, and left the old cabinet to be ransacked by a
+      new generation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being a
+      quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for by the
+      smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk. Prying about with
+      busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a spring, on pressing which,
+      a secret drawer flew from its hiding-place. It had never been opened but
+      by the maker. The mahogany shavings and dust were lying in it as when the
+      artisan closed it,&mdash;and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if that day
+      finished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which no
+      hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you seem to
+      have suspected? What does it hold?&mdash;A sin?&mdash;I hope not. What a
+      strange thing an old dead sin laid away in a secret drawer of the soul is!
+      Must it some time or other be moistened with tears, until it comes to life
+      again and begins to stir in our consciousness,&mdash;as the dry
+      wheel-animalcule, looking like a grain of dust, becomes alive, if it is
+      wet with a drop of water?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or is it a passion? There are plenty of withered men and women walking
+      about the streets who have the secret drawer in their hearts, which, if it
+      were opened, would show as fresh as it was when they were in the flush of
+      youth and its first trembling emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What it held will, perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and gone,
+      and same curious eye lights on an old yellow letter with the fossil
+      footprints of the extinct passion trodden thick all over it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is not a boarder at our table, I firmly believe, excepting the young
+      girl, who has not a story of the heart to tell, if one could only get the
+      secret drawer open. Even this arid female, whose armor of black bombazine
+      looks stronger against the shafts of love than any cuirass of triple
+      brass, has had her sentimental history, if I am not mistaken. I will tell
+      you my reason for suspecting it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Like many other old women, she shows a great nervousness and restlessness
+      whenever I venture to express any opinion upon a class of subjects which
+      can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of men as their strictly
+      private property,&mdash;not even to the clergy, or the newspapers commonly
+      called &ldquo;religious.&rdquo; Now, although it would be a great luxury to me to
+      obtain my opinions by contract, ready-made, from a professional man, and
+      although I have a constitutional kindly feeling to all sorts of good
+      people which would make me happy to agree with all their beliefs, if that
+      were possible, still I must have an idea, now and then, as to the meaning
+      of life; and though the only condition of peace in this world is to have
+      no ideas, or, at least, not to express them, with reference to such
+      subjects, I can't afford to pay quite so much as that even for peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on the
+      shores of Sir Isaac Newton's Ocean of Truth, that salt, fish, which have
+      been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and dried, are the
+      only proper and allowable food for reasonable people. I maintain, on the
+      other hand, that there are a number of live fish still swimming in it, and
+      that every one of us has a right to see if he cannot catch some of them.
+      Sometimes I please myself with the idea that I have landed an actual
+      living fish, small, perhaps, but with rosy gills and silvery scales. Then
+      I find the consumers of nothing but the salted and dried article insist
+      that it is poisonous, simply because it is alive, and cry out to people
+      not to touch it. I have not found, however, that people mind them much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer. I try every questionable
+      proposition on her. If she winces, I must be prepared for an outcry from
+      the other old women. I frightened her, the other day, by saying that
+      faith, as an intellectual state, was self-reliance, which, if you have a
+      metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a paradox as it sounds
+      at first. So she sent me a book to read which was to cure me of that
+      error. It was an old book, and looked as if it had not been opened for a
+      long time. What should drop out of it, one day, but a small heart-shaped
+      paper, containing a lock of that straight, coarse, brown hair which sets
+      off the sharp faces of so many thin-flanked, large-handed bumpkins! I read
+      upon the paper the name &ldquo;Hiram.&rdquo;&mdash;Love! love! love!&mdash;everywhere!
+      everywhere!&mdash;under diamonds and housemaids' &ldquo;jewelry,&rdquo;&mdash;lifting
+      the marrowy camel's-hair, and rustling even the black bombazine!&mdash;No,
+      no,&mdash;I think she never was pretty, but she was young once, and wore
+      bright ginghams, and, perhaps, gay merinos. We shall find that the poor
+      little crooked man has been in love, or is in love, or will be in love
+      before we have done with him, for aught that I know!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Romance! Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the seemingly
+      prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background, where you could
+      see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some upheaving sentiment, or
+      the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-out passions? You look on the
+      black bombazine and high-necked decorum of your neighbor, and no more
+      think of the real life that underlies this despoiled and dismantled
+      womanhood than you think of a stone trilobite as having once been full of
+      the juices and the nervous thrills of throbbing and self-conscious being.
+      There is a wild creature under that long yellow pin which serves as brooch
+      for the bombazine cuirass,&mdash;a wild creature, which I venture to say
+      would leap in his cage, if I should stir him, quiet as you think him. A
+      heart which has been domesticated by matrimony and maternity is as
+      tranquil as a tame bullfinch; but a wild heart which has never been fairly
+      broken in flutters fiercely long after you think time has tamed it down,&mdash;like
+      that purple finch I had the other day, which could not be approached
+      without such palpitations and frantic flings against the bars of his cage,
+      that I had to send him back and get a little orthodox canary which had
+      learned to be quiet and never mind the wires or his keeper's handling. I
+      will tell you my wicked, but half involuntary experiment on the wild heart
+      under the faded bombazine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special
+      weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not touch
+      the infirm spot? I confess the most frightful tendency to do just this
+      thing. If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself imitating it. If
+      another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that, go before him,
+      limping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could never meet an Irish gentleman&mdash;if it had been the Duke of
+      Wellington himself&mdash;without stumbling upon the word &ldquo;Paddy,&rdquo;&mdash;which
+      I use rarely in my common talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate
+      depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing instinct,
+      which, under different circumstances, might have made a Fijian
+      anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I was not
+      answerable. It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact like
+      endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted. A thin film of
+      politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of thought from
+      the stream of conversation. After a time one begins to soak through and
+      mingle with the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were talking about names, one day.&mdash;Was there ever anything,&mdash;I
+      said,&mdash;like the Yankee for inventing the most uncouth, pretentious,
+      detestable appellations,&mdash;inventing or finding them,&mdash;since the
+      time of Praise-God Barebones? I heard a country-boy once talking of
+      another whom he called Elpit, as I understood him. Elbridge is common
+      enough, but this sounded oddly. It seems the boy was christened Lord Pitt,&mdash;and
+      called for convenience, as above. I have heard a charming little girl,
+      belonging to an intelligent family in the country, called Anges
+      invariably; doubtless intended for Agnes. Names are cheap. How can a man
+      name an innocent new-born child, that never did him any harm, Hiram?&mdash;The
+      poor relation, or whatever she is, in bombazine, turned toward me, but I
+      was stupid, and went on.&mdash;To think of a man going through life
+      saddled with such an abominable name as that!&mdash;The poor relation grew
+      very uneasy.&mdash;I continued; for I never thought of all this till
+      afterwards.&mdash;I knew one young fellow, a good many years ago, by the
+      name of Hiram&mdash;What's got into you, Cousin,&mdash;said our landlady,&mdash;to
+      look so?&mdash;There! you 've upset your teacup!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It suddenly occurred to me what I had been doing, and I saw the poor woman
+      had her hand at her throat; she was half-choking with the &ldquo;hysteric ball,&rdquo;&mdash;a
+      very odd symptom, as you know, which nervous women often complain of. What
+      business had I to be trying experiments on this forlorn old soul? I had a
+      great deal better be watching that young girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, the young girl! I am sure that she can hide nothing from me. Her skin
+      is so transparent that one can almost count her heart-beats by the flushes
+      they send into her cheeks. She does not seem to be shy, either. I think
+      she does not know enough of danger to be timid. She seems to me like one
+      of those birds that travellers tell of, found in remote, uninhabited
+      islands, who, having never received any wrong at the hand of man, show no
+      alarm at and hardly any particular consciousness of his presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first thing will be to see how she and our little deformed gentleman
+      get along together; for, as I have told you, they sit side by side. The
+      next thing will be to keep an eye on the duenna,&mdash;the &ldquo;Model&rdquo; and so
+      forth, as the white-neck-cloth called her. The intention of that estimable
+      lady is, I understand, to launch her and leave her. I suppose there is no
+      help for it, and I don't doubt this young lady knows how to take care of
+      herself, but I do not like to see young girls turned loose in
+      boarding-houses. Look here now! There is that jewel of his race, whom I
+      have called for convenience the Koh-i-noor, (you understand it is quite
+      out of the question for me to use the family names of our boarders, unless
+      I want to get into trouble,)&mdash;I say, the gentleman with the diamond
+      is looking very often and very intently, it seems to me, down toward the
+      farther corner of the table, where sits our amber-eyed blonde. The
+      landlady's daughter does not look pleased, it seems to me, at this, nor at
+      those other attentions which the gentleman referred to has, as I have
+      learned, pressed upon the newly-arrived young person. The landlady made a
+      communication to me, within a few days after the arrival of Miss Iris,
+      which I will repeat to the best of my remembrance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He, (the person I have been speaking of,)&mdash;she said,&mdash;seemed to
+      be kinder hankerin' round after that young woman. It had hurt her
+      daughter's feelin's a good deal, that the gentleman she was a-keepin'
+      company with should be offerin' tickets and tryin' to send presents to
+      them that he'd never know'd till jest a little spell ago,&mdash;and he as
+      good as merried, so fur as solemn promises went, to as respectable a young
+      lady, if she did say so, as any there was round, whosomever they might be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tickets! presents!&mdash;said I.&mdash;What tickets, what presents has he
+      had the impertinence to be offering to that young lady?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tickets to the Museum,&mdash;said the landlady. There is them that's glad
+      enough to go to the Museum, when tickets is given 'em; but some of 'em
+      ha'n't had a ticket sence Cenderilla was played,&mdash;and now he must be
+      offerin' 'em to this ridiculous young paintress, or whatever she is,
+      that's come to make more mischief than her board's worth. But it a'n't her
+      fault,&mdash;said the landlady, relenting;&mdash;and that aunt of hers, or
+      whatever she is, served him right enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why, what did she do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do? Why, she took it up in the tongs and dropped it out o' winder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dropped? dropped what?&mdash;I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why, the soap,&mdash;said the landlady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It appeared that the Koh-i-noor, to ingratiate himself, had sent an
+      elegant package of perfumed soap, directed to Miss Iris, as a delicate
+      expression of a lively sentiment of admiration, and that, after having met
+      with the unfortunate treatment referred to, it was picked up by Master
+      Benjamin Franklin, who appropriated it, rejoicing, and indulged in most
+      unheard-of and inordinate ablutions in consequence, so that his hands were
+      a frequent subject of maternal congratulation, and he smelt like a
+      civet-cat for weeks after his great acquisition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After watching daily for a time, I think I can see clearly into the
+      relation which is growing up between the little gentleman and the young
+      lady. She shows a tenderness to him that I can't help being interested in.
+      If he was her crippled child, instead of being more than old enough to be
+      her father, she could not treat him more kindly. The landlady's daughter
+      said, the other day, she believed that girl was settin' her cap for the
+      Little Gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of them young folks is very artful,&mdash;said her mother,&mdash;and
+      there is them that would merry Lazarus, if he'd only picked up crumbs
+      enough. I don't think, though, this is one of that sort; she's kinder
+      childlike,&mdash;said the landlady,&mdash;and maybe never had any dolls to
+      play with; for they say her folks was poor before Ma'am undertook to see
+      to her teachin' and board her and clothe her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not help overhearing this conversation. &ldquo;Board her and clothe
+      her!&rdquo;&mdash;speaking of such a young creature! Oh, dear!&mdash;Yes,&mdash;she
+      must be fed,&mdash;just like Bridget, maid-of-all-work at this
+      establishment. Somebody must pay for it. Somebody has a right to watch her
+      and see how much it takes to &ldquo;keep&rdquo; her, and growl at her, if she has too
+      good an appetite. Somebody has a right to keep an eye on her and take care
+      that she does not dress too prettily. No mother to see her own youth over
+      again in these fresh features and rising reliefs of half-sculptured
+      womanhood, and, seeing its loveliness, forget her lessons of
+      neutral-tinted propriety, and open the cases that hold her own ornaments
+      to find for her a necklace or a bracelet or a pair of ear-rings,&mdash;those
+      golden lamps that light up the deep, shadowy dimples on the cheeks of
+      young beauties,&mdash;swinging in a semi-barbaric splendor that carries
+      the wild fancy to Abyssinian queens and musky Odalisques! I don't believe
+      any woman has utterly given up the great firm of Mundus &amp; Co., so long
+      as she wears ear-rings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think Iris loves to hear the Little Gentleman talk. She smiles sometimes
+      at his vehement statements, but never laughs at him. When he speaks to
+      her, she keeps her eye always steadily upon him. This may be only natural
+      good-breeding, so to speak, but it is worth noticing. I have often
+      observed that vulgar persons, and public audiences of inferior collective
+      intelligence, have this in common: the least thing draws off their minds,
+      when you are speaking to them. I love this young creature's rapt attention
+      to her diminutive neighbor while he is speaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is evidently pleased with it. For a day or two after she came, he was
+      silent and seemed nervous and excited. Now he is fond of getting the talk
+      into his own hands, and is obviously conscious that he has at least one
+      interested listener. Once or twice I have seen marks of special attention
+      to personal adornment, a ruffled shirt-bosom, one day, and a diamond pin
+      in it,&mdash;not so very large as the Koh-i-noor's, but more lustrous. I
+      mentioned the death's-head ring he wears on his right hand. I was
+      attracted by a very handsome red stone, a ruby or carbuncle or something
+      of the sort, to notice his left hand, the other day. It is a handsome
+      hand, and confirms my suspicion that the cast mentioned was taken from his
+      arm. After all, this is just what I should expect. It is not very uncommon
+      to see the upper limbs, or one of them, running away with the whole
+      strength, and, therefore, with the whole beauty, which we should never
+      have noticed, if it had been divided equally between all four extremities.
+      If it is so, of course he is proud of his one strong and beautiful arm;
+      that is human nature. I am afraid he can hardly help betraying his
+      favoritism, as people who have any one showy point are apt to do,&mdash;especially
+      dentists with handsome teeth, who always smile back to their last molars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sitting, as he does, next to the young girl, and next but one to the calm
+      lady who has her in charge, he cannot help seeing their relations to each
+      other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That is an admirable woman, Sir,&mdash;he said to me one day, as we sat
+      alone at the table after breakfast,&mdash;an admirable woman, Sir,&mdash;and
+      I hate her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, I begged an explanation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An admirable woman, Sir, because she does good things, and even kind
+      things,&mdash;takes care of this&mdash;this&mdash;young lady&mdash;we have
+      here, talks like a sensible person, and always looks as if she was doing
+      her duty with all her might. I hate her because her voice sounds as if it
+      never trembled and her eyes look as if she never knew what it was to cry.
+      Besides, she looks at me, Sir, stares at me, as if she wanted to get an
+      image of me for some gallery in her brain,&mdash;and we don't love to be
+      looked at in this way, we that have&mdash;I hate her,&mdash;I hate her,&mdash;her
+      eyes kill me,&mdash;it is like being stabbed with icicles to be looked at
+      so,&mdash;the sooner she goes home, the better. I don't want a woman to
+      weigh me in a balance; there are men enough for that sort of work. The
+      judicial character is n't captivating in females, Sir. A woman fascinates
+      a man quite as often by what she overlooks as by what she sees. Love
+      prefers twilight to daylight; and a man doesn't think much of, nor care
+      much for, a woman outside of his household, unless he can couple the idea
+      of love, past, present, or future, with her. I don't believe the Devil
+      would give half as much for the services of a sinner as he would for those
+      of one of these folks that are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make
+      them unpleasing.&mdash;That young girl wants a tender nature to cherish
+      her and give her a chance to put out her leaves,&mdash;sunshine, and not
+      east winds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was silent,&mdash;and sat looking at his handsome left hand with the
+      red stone ring upon it.&mdash;Is he going to fall in love with Iris?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here are some lines I read to the boarders the other day:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+           THE CROOKED FOOTPATH
+
+     Ah, here it is! the sliding rail
+     That marks the old remembered spot,
+     &mdash;The gap that struck our schoolboy trail,
+     &mdash;The crooked path across the lot.
+
+     It left the road by school and church,
+     A pencilled shadow, nothing more,
+     That parted from the silver birch
+     And ended at the farmhouse door.
+
+     No line or compass traced its plan;
+     With frequent bends to left or right,
+     In aimless, wayward curves it ran,
+     But always kept the door in sight.
+
+     The gabled porch, with woodbine green,
+     &mdash;The broken millstone at the sill,
+     &mdash;Though many a rood might stretch between,
+     The truant child could see them still.
+
+     No rocks, across the pathway lie,
+     &mdash;No fallen trunk is o'er it thrown,
+     &mdash;And yet it winds, we know not why,
+     And turns as if for tree or stone.
+
+     Perhaps some lover trod the way
+     With shaking knees and leaping heart,
+     &mdash;And so it often runs astray
+     With sinuous sweep or sudden start.
+
+     Or one, perchance, with clouded brain
+     From some unholy banquet reeled,
+     &mdash;And since, our devious steps maintain
+     His track across the trodden field.
+
+     Nay, deem not thus,&mdash;no earthborn will
+     Could ever trace a faultless line;
+     Our truest steps are human still,
+     &mdash;To walk unswerving were divine!
+
+     Truants from love, we dream of wrath;
+     &mdash;Oh, rather let us trust the more!
+     Through all the wanderings of the path,
+     We still can see our Father's door!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      The Professor finds a Fly in his Teacup.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I have a long theological talk to relate, which must be dull reading to
+      some of my young and vivacious friends. I don't know, however, that any of
+      them have entered into a contract to read all that I write, or that I have
+      promised always to write to please them. What if I should sometimes write
+      to please myself?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now you must know that there are a great many things which interest me, to
+      some of which this or that particular class of readers may be totally
+      indifferent. I love Nature, and human nature, its thoughts, affections,
+      dreams, aspirations, delusions,&mdash;Art in all its forms,&mdash;virtu in
+      all its eccentricities,&mdash;old stories from black-letter volumes and
+      yellow manuscripts, and new projects out of hot brains not yet imbedded in
+      the snows of age. I love the generous impulses of the reformer; but not
+      less does my imagination feed itself upon the old litanies, so often
+      warmed by the human breath upon which they were wafted to Heaven that they
+      glow through our frames like our own heart's blood. I hope I love good men
+      and women; I know that they never speak a word to me, even if it be of
+      question or blame, that I do not take pleasantly, if it is expressed with
+      a reasonable amount of human kindness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have before me at this time a beautiful and affecting letter, which I
+      have hesitated to answer, though the postmark upon it gave its direction,
+      and the name is one which is known to all, in some of its representatives.
+      It contains no reproach, only a delicately-hinted fear. Speak gently, as
+      this dear lady has spoken, and there is no heart so insensible that it
+      does not answer to the appeal, no intellect so virile that it does not own
+      a certain deference to the claims of age, of childhood, of sensitive and
+      timid natures, when they plead with it not to look at those sacred things
+      by the broad daylight which they see in mystic shadow. How grateful would
+      it be to make perpetual peace with these pleading saints and their
+      confessors, by the simple act that silences all complainings! Sleep,
+      sleep, sleep! says the Arch-Enchantress of them all,&mdash;and pours her
+      dark and potent anodyne, distilled over the fires that consumed her foes,&mdash;its
+      large, round drops changing, as we look, into the beads of her convert's
+      rosary! Silence! the pride of reason! cries another, whose whole life is
+      spent in reasoning down reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hope I love good people, not for their sake, but for my own. And most
+      assuredly, if any deed of wrong or word of bitterness led me into an act
+      of disrespect towards that enlightened and excellent class of men who make
+      it their calling to teach goodness and their duty to practise it, I should
+      feel that I had done myself an injury rather than them. Go and talk with
+      any professional man holding any of the medieval creeds, choosing one who
+      wears upon his features the mark of inward and outward health, who looks
+      cheerful, intelligent, and kindly, and see how all your prejudices melt
+      away in his presence! It is impossible to come into intimate relations
+      with a large, sweet nature, such as you may often find in this class,
+      without longing to be at one with it in all its modes of being and
+      believing. But does it not occur to you that one may love truth as he sees
+      it, and his race as he views it, better than even the sympathy and
+      approbation of many good men whom he honors,&mdash;better than sleeping to
+      the sound of the Miserere or listening to the repetition of an effete
+      Confession of Faith?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The three learned professions have but recently emerged from a state of
+      quasi-barbarism. None of them like too well to be told of it, but it must
+      be sounded in their ears whenever they put on airs. When a man has taken
+      an overdose of laudanum, the doctors tell us to place him between two
+      persons who shall make him walk up and down incessantly; and if he still
+      cannot be kept from going to sleep, they say that a lash or two over his
+      back is of great assistance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So we must keep the doctors awake by telling them that they have not yet
+      shaken off astrology and the doctrine of signatures, as is shown by the
+      form of their prescriptions, and their use of nitrate of silver, which
+      turns epileptics into Ethiopians. If that is not enough, they must be
+      given over to the scourgers, who like their task and get good fees for it.
+      A few score years ago, sick people were made to swallow burnt toads and
+      powdered earthworms and the expressed juice of wood-lice. The physician of
+      Charles I. and II. prescribed abominations not to be named. Barbarism, as
+      bad as that of Congo or Ashantee. Traces of this barbarism linger even in
+      the greatly improved medical science of our century. So while the solemn
+      farce of over-drugging is going on, the world over, the harlequin
+      pseudo-science jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with half-a-dozen
+      somersets, and begins laying about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1817, perhaps you remember, the law of wager by battle was unrepealed,
+      and the rascally murderous, and worse than murderous, clown, Abraham
+      Thornton, put on his gauntlet in open court and defied the appellant to
+      lift the other which he threw down. It was not until the reign of George
+      II. that the statutes against witchcraft were repealed. As for the English
+      Court of Chancery, we know that its antiquated abuses form one of the
+      staples of common proverbs and popular literature. So the laws and the
+      lawyers have to be watched perpetually by public opinion as much as the
+      doctors do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't think the other profession is an exception. When the Reverend Mr.
+      Cauvin and his associates burned my distinguished scientific brother,&mdash;he
+      was burned with green fagots, which made it rather slow and painful,&mdash;it
+      appears to me they were in a state of religious barbarism. The dogmas of
+      such people about the Father of Mankind and his creatures are of no more
+      account in my opinion than those of a council of Aztecs. If a man picks
+      your pocket, do you not consider him thereby disqualified to pronounce any
+      authoritative opinion on matters of ethics? If a man hangs my ancient
+      female relatives for sorcery, as they did in this neighborhood a little
+      while ago, or burns my instructor for not believing as he does, I care no
+      more for his religious edicts than I should for those of any other
+      barbarian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, a barbarian may hold many true opinions; but when the ideas of
+      the healing art, of the administration of justice, of Christian love,
+      could not exclude systematic poisoning, judicial duelling, and murder for
+      opinion's sake, I do not see how we can trust the verdict of that time
+      relating to any subject which involves the primal instincts violated in
+      these abominations and absurdities.&mdash;What if we are even now in a
+      state of semi-barbarism?
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     [Note: This physician believes we &ldquo;are even now in a state
+     of semi-barbarism&rdquo;: invasive procedures for the prolongation
+     of death rather than prolongation of life; &ldquo;faith&rdquo; as slimly
+     based as medieval faith in minute differences between
+     control and treated groups; statistical manipulation to
+     prove a prejudice.  Medicine has a good deal to answer for!
+     D.W.]
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table about such things.&mdash;I
+      am not so sure of that. Religion and government appear to me the two
+      subjects which of all others should belong to the common talk of people
+      who enjoy the blessings of freedom. Think, one moment. The earth is a
+      great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its axis, receives
+      fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same number worked up
+      more or less completely. There must be somewhere a population of two
+      hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred times as many,
+      earth-born intelligences. Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge of
+      the boundless ocean of existence where it comes on soundings. In this
+      view, I do not see anything so fit to talk about, or half so interesting,
+      as that which relates to the innumerable majority of our fellow-creatures,
+      the dead-living, who are hundreds of thousands to one of the live-living,
+      and with whom we all potentially belong, though we have got tangled for
+      the present in some parcels of fibrine, albumen, and phosphates, that keep
+      us on the minority side of the house. In point of fact, it is one of the
+      many results of Spiritualism to make the permanent destiny of the race a
+      matter of common reflection and discourse, and a vehicle for the
+      prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age doctrines on the subject. I cannot
+      help thinking, when I remember how many conversations my friend and myself
+      have sported, that it would be very extraordinary, if there were no
+      mention of that class of subjects which involves all that we have and all
+      that we hope, not merely for ourselves, but for the dear people whom we
+      love best,&mdash;noble men, pure and lovely women, ingenuous children,
+      about the destiny of nine tenths of whom you know the opinions that would
+      have been taught by those old man-roasting, woman-strangling dogmatists.&mdash;However,
+      I fought this matter with one of our boarders the other day, and I am
+      going to report the conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The divinity-student came down, one morning, looking rather more serious
+      than usual. He said little at breakfast-time, but lingered after the
+      others, so that I, who am apt to be long at the table, found myself alone
+      with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the rest were all gone, he turned his chair round towards mine, and
+      began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am afraid,&mdash;he said,&mdash;you express yourself a little too freely
+      on a most important class of subjects. Is there not danger in introducing
+      discussions or allusions relating to matters of religion into common
+      discourse?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Danger to what?&mdash;I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Danger to truth,&mdash;he replied, after a slight pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I didn't know Truth was such an invalid,' I said.&mdash;How long is it
+      since she could only take the air in a close carriage, with a gentleman in
+      a black coat on the box? Let me tell you a story, adapted to young
+      persons, but which won't hurt older ones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;There was a very little boy who had one of those balloons you may
+      have seen, which are filled with light gas, and are held by a string to
+      keep them from running off in aeronautic voyages on their own account.
+      This little boy had a naughty brother, who said to him, one day,&mdash;Brother,
+      pull down your balloon, so that I can look at it and take hold of it. Then
+      the little boy pulled it down. Now the naughty brother had a sharp pin in
+      his hand, and he thrust it into the balloon, and all the gas oozed out, so
+      that there was nothing left but a shrivelled skin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening, the little boy's father called him to the window to see the
+      moon, which pleased him very much; but presently he said,&mdash;Father, do
+      not pull the string and bring down the moon, for my naughty brother will
+      prick it, and then it will all shrivel up and we shall not see it any
+      more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then his father laughed, and told him how the moon had been shining a good
+      while, and would shine a good while longer, and that all we could do was
+      to keep our windows clean, never letting the dust get too thick on them,
+      and especially to keep our eyes open, but that we could not pull the moon
+      down with a string, nor prick it with a pin.&mdash;Mind you this, too, the
+      moon is no man's private property, but is seen from a good many
+      parlor-windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay,
+      you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and
+      full at evening. Does not Mr. Bryant say, that Truth gets well if she is
+      run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her
+      finger? [Would that this was so:&mdash;error, superstition, mysticism,
+      authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a tenacity that survives
+      inexplicably. D.W.] I never heard that a mathematician was alarmed for the
+      safety of a demonstrated proposition. I think, generally, that fear of
+      open discussion implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great
+      sensitiveness to the expression of individual opinion is a mark of
+      weakness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I am not so much afraid for truth,&mdash;said the divinity-student,&mdash;as
+      for the conceptions of truth in the minds of persons not accustomed to
+      judge wisely the opinions uttered before them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Would you, then, banish all allusions to matters of this nature from the
+      society of people who come together habitually?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would be very careful in introducing them,&mdash;said the
+      divinity-student.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, but friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be
+      picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of doctrines
+      these people do not approve. Some of your friends stop little children in
+      the street, and give them books, which their parents, who have had them
+      baptized into the Christian fold and give them what they consider proper
+      religious instruction, do not think fit for them. One would say it was
+      fair enough to talk about matters thus forced upon people's attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The divinity-student could not deny that this was what might be called
+      opening the subject to the discussion of intelligent people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But,&mdash;he said,&mdash;the greatest objection is this, that persons who
+      have not made a professional study of theology are not competent to speak
+      on such subjects. Suppose a minister were to undertake to express opinions
+      on medical subjects, for instance, would you not think he was going beyond
+      his province?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I laughed,&mdash;for I remembered John Wesley's &ldquo;sulphur and
+      supplication,&rdquo; and so many other cases where ministers had meddled with
+      medicine,&mdash;sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general rule,
+      with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose way of
+      admitting evidence,&mdash;that I could not help being amused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I beg your pardon,&mdash;I said,&mdash;I do not wish to be impolite, but I
+      was thinking of their certificates to patent medicines. Let us look at
+      this matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If a minister had attended lectures on the theory and practice of
+      medicine, delivered by those who had studied it most deeply, for thirty or
+      forty years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a year,&mdash;if he
+      had been constantly reading and hearing read the most approved text-books
+      on the subject,&mdash;if he had seen medicine actually practised according
+      to different methods, daily, for the same length of time,&mdash;I should
+      think, that if a person of average understanding, he was entitled to
+      express an opinion on the subject of medicine, or else that his
+      instructors were a set of ignorant and incompetent charlatans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If, before a medical practitioner would allow me to enjoy the full
+      privileges of the healing art, he expected me to affirm my belief in a
+      considerable number of medical doctrines, drugs, and formulae, I should
+      think that he thereby implied my right to discuss the same, and my ability
+      to do so, if I knew how to express myself in English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suppose, for instance, the Medical Society should refuse to give us an
+      opiate, or to set a broken limb, until we had signed our belief in a
+      certain number of propositions,&mdash;of which we will say this is the
+      first:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I. All men's teeth are naturally in a state of total decay or caries, and,
+      therefore, no man can bite until every one of them is extracted and a new
+      set is inserted according to the principles of dentistry adopted by this
+      Society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I, for one, should want to discuss that before signing my name to it, and
+      I should say this:&mdash;Why, no, that is n't true. There are a good many
+      bad teeth, we all know, but a great many more good ones. You must n't
+      trust the dentists; they are all the time looking at the people who have
+      bad teeth, and such as are suffering from toothache. The idea that you
+      must pull out every one of every nice young man and young woman's natural
+      teeth! Poh, poh! Nobody believes that. This tooth must be straightened,
+      that must be filled with gold, and this other perhaps extracted, but it
+      must be a very rare case, if they are all so bad as to require extraction;
+      and if they are, don't blame the poor soul for it! Don't tell us, as some
+      old dentists used to, that everybody not only always has every tooth in
+      his head good for nothing, but that he ought to have his head cut off as a
+      punishment for that misfortune! No, I can't sign Number One. Give us
+      Number Two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      II. We hold that no man can be well who does not agree with our views of
+      the efficacy of calomel, and who does not take the doses of it prescribed
+      in our tables, as there directed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To which I demur, questioning why it should be so, and get for answer the
+      two following:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      III. Every man who does not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed by us
+      in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of disease from
+      head to foot; it being self-evident that he is simultaneously affected
+      with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia, and Atrophy; with
+      Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with Cachexia, Carcinoma, and
+      Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet, to Xerophthahnia and Zona,
+      with all possible and incompatible diseases which are necessary to make up
+      a totally morbid state; and he will certainly die, if he does not take
+      freely of our prepared calomel, to be obtained only of one of our
+      authorized agents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      IV. No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does not give
+      in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named and the
+      following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his mouth to
+      certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry, to examine
+      whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set inserted according
+      to our regulations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha'n't have any rhubarb, if
+      we don't sign their articles, and that, if, after signing them, we express
+      doubts (in public), about any of them, they will cut us off from our jalap
+      and squills,&mdash;but then to ask a fellow not to discuss the
+      propositions before he signs them is what I should call boiling it down a
+      little too strong!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we understand them, why can't we discuss them? If we can't understand
+      them, because we have n't taken a medical degree, what the Father of Lies
+      do they ask us to sign them for?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just so with the graver profession. Every now and then some of its members
+      seem to lose common sense and common humanity. The laymen have to keep
+      setting the divines right constantly. Science, for instance,&mdash;in
+      other words, knowledge,&mdash;is not the enemy of religion; for, if so,
+      then religion would mean ignorance: But it is often the antagonist of
+      school-divinity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines. Come
+      down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant prelate,
+      tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-third of
+      October, four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ. Deluge,
+      December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-eight years B. C. Yes,
+      and the earth stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise. One
+      statement is as near the truth as the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral surgery. I
+      have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more picture to his four
+      stages of Cruelty. Those wretched fools, reverend divines and others, who
+      were strangling men and women for imaginary crimes a little more than a
+      century ago among us, were set right by a layman, and very angry it made
+      them to have him meddle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their
+      clergyman,&mdash;a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain
+      mechanical processes as Babbage's calculating machine. The commentary of
+      the laymen on the preaching and practising of Jonathan Edwards was, that,
+      after twenty-three years of endurance, they turned him out by a vote of
+      twenty to one, and passed a resolve that he should never preach for them
+      again. A man's logical and analytical adjustments are of little
+      consequence, compared to his primary relations with Nature and truth: and
+      people have sense enough to find it out in the long ran; they know what
+      &ldquo;logic&rdquo; is worth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and
+      Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many men
+      can do this. But common sense and common humanity were unfortunately left
+      out from their premises, and a layman had to supply them. A hundred more
+      years and many of the barbarisms still lingering among us will, of course,
+      have disappeared like witch-hanging. But people are sensitive now, as they
+      were then. You will see by this extract that the Rev. Cotton Mather did
+      not like intermeddling with his business very well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions,&rdquo; he says,
+      &ldquo;and God will smite thro' the loins of those that rise up against them. I
+      will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds among us know to be true.
+      The Godly Minister of a certain Town in Connecticut, when he had occasion
+      to be absent on a Lord's Day from his Flock, employ'd an honest Neighbour
+      of some small Talents for a Mechanick, to read a Sermon out of some good
+      Book unto 'em. This Honest, whom they ever counted also a Pious Man, had
+      so much conceit of his Talents, that instead of Reading a Sermon
+      appointed, he to the Surprize of the People, fell to preaching one of his
+      own. For his Text he took these Words, 'Despise not Prophecyings'; and in
+      his Preachment he betook himself to bewail the Envy of the Clergy in the
+      Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord's People to be Prophets, and
+      call forth Private Brethren publickly to prophesie. While he was thus in
+      the midst of his Exercise, God smote him with horrible Madness; he was
+      taken ravingly distracted; the People were forc'd with violent Hands to
+      carry him home. I will not mention his Name: He was reputed a Pious Man.&rdquo;&mdash;This
+      is one of Cotton Mather's &ldquo;Remarkable Judgments of God, on Several Sorts
+      of Offenders,&rdquo;&mdash;and the next cases referred to are the Judgments on
+      the &ldquo;Abominable Sacrilege&rdquo; of not paying the Ministers' Salaries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This sort of thing does n't do here and now, you see, my young friend! We
+      talk about our free institutions;&mdash;they are nothing but a coarse
+      outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought. The
+      President of the United States is only the engine driver of our
+      broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a seat
+      in the first-class cars behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;There is something in what you say,&mdash;replied the
+      divinity-student; &mdash;and yet it seems to me there are places and times
+      where disputed doctrines of religion should not be introduced. You would
+      not attack a church dogma&mdash;say Total Depravity&mdash;in a
+      lyceum-lecture, for instance?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Certainly not; I should choose another place,&mdash;I answered.&mdash;But,
+      mind you, at this table I think it is very different. I shall express my
+      ideas on any subject I like. The laws of the lecture-room, to which my
+      friends and myself are always amenable, do not hold here. I shall not
+      often give arguments, but frequently opinions,&mdash;I trust with courtesy
+      and propriety, but, at any rate, with such natural forms of expression as
+      it has pleased the Almighty to bestow upon me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man's opinions, look you, are generally of much more value than his
+      arguments. These last are made by his brain, and perhaps he does not
+      believe the proposition they tend to prove,&mdash;as is often the case
+      with paid lawyers; but opinions are formed by our whole nature,&mdash;brain,
+      heart, instinct, brute life, everything all our experience has shaped for
+      us by contact with the whole circle of our being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;There is one thing more,&mdash;said the divinity-student,&mdash;that
+      I wished to speak of; I mean that idea of yours, expressed some time
+      since, of depolarizing the text of sacred books in order to judge them
+      fairly. May I ask why you do not try the experiment yourself?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Certainly,&mdash;I replied,&mdash;if it gives you any pleasure to ask
+      foolish questions. I think the ocean telegraph-wire ought to be laid and
+      will be laid, but I don't know that you have any right to ask me to go and
+      lay it. But, for that matter, I have heard a good deal of Scripture
+      depolarized in and out of the pulpit. I heard the Rev. Mr. F. once
+      depolarize the story of the Prodigal Son in Park-Street Church. Many years
+      afterwards, I heard him repeat the same or a similar depolarized version
+      in Rome, New York. I heard an admirable depolarization of the story of the
+      young man who &ldquo;had great possessions&rdquo; from the Rev. Mr. H. in another
+      pulpit, and felt that I had never half understood it before. All
+      paraphrases are more or less perfect depolarizations. But I tell you this:
+      the faith of our Christian community is not robust enough to bear the
+      turning of our most sacred language into its depolarized equivalents. You
+      have only to look back to Dr. Channing's famous Baltimore discourse and
+      remember the shrieks of blasphemy with which it was greeted, to satisfy
+      yourself on this point. Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our
+      Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing
+      signified. Man is an idolater or symbol-worshipper by nature, which, of
+      course, is no fault of his; but sooner or later all his local and
+      temporary symbols must be ground to powder, like the golden calf,&mdash;word-images
+      as well as metal and wooden ones. Rough work, iconoclasm,&mdash;but the
+      only way to get at truth. It is, indeed, as that quaint and rare old
+      discourse, &ldquo;A Summons for Sleepers,&rdquo; hath it, &ldquo;no doubt a thankless
+      office, and a verie unthriftie occupation; veritas odium parit, truth
+      never goeth without a scratcht face; he that will be busie with voe vobis,
+      let him looke shortly for coram nobas.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think
+      what we like and say what we think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Think what we like!&mdash;said the divinity-student;&mdash;think
+      what we like! What! against all human and divine authority?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Against all human versions of its own or any other authority. At our own
+      peril always, if we do not like the right,&mdash;but not at the risk of
+      being hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on green
+      fagots for ecclesiastical treason! Nay, we have got so far, that the very
+      word heresy has fallen into comparative disuse among us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now, my young friend, let-us shake hands and stop our discussion,
+      which we will not make a quarrel. I trust you know, or will learn, a great
+      many things in your profession which we common scholars do not know; but
+      mark this: when the common people of New England stop talking politics and
+      theology, it will be because they have got an Emperor to teach them the
+      one, and a Pope to teach them the other!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the end of my long conference with the divinity-student. The next
+      morning we got talking a little on the same subject, very good-naturedly,
+      as people return to a matter they have talked out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You must look to yourself,&mdash;said the divinity-student,&mdash;if your
+      democratic notions get into print. You will be fired into from all
+      quarters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If it were only a bullet, with the marksman's name on it!&mdash;I said.&mdash;I
+      can't stop to pick out the peep-shot of the anonymous scribblers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Right, Sir! right!&mdash;said the Little Gentleman. The scamps! I know the
+      fellows. They can't give fifty cents to one of the Antipodes, but they
+      must have it jingled along through everybody's palms all the way, till it
+      reaches him,&mdash;and forty cents of it gets spilt, like the water out of
+      the fire-buckets passed along a &ldquo;lane&rdquo; at a fire;&mdash;but when it comes
+      to anonymous defamation, putting lies into people's mouths, and then
+      advertising those people through the country as the authors of them,&mdash;oh,
+      then it is that they let not their left hand know what their right hand
+      doeth!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't like Ehud's style of doing business, Sir. He comes along with a
+      very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his &ldquo;secret errand unto thee,&rdquo; and his
+      &ldquo;message from God unto thee,&rdquo; and then pulls out his hidden knife with
+      that unsuspected hand of his,&mdash;(the Little Gentleman lifted his
+      clenched left hand with the blood-red jewel on the ring-finger,)&mdash;and
+      runs it, blade and haft, into a man's stomach! Don't meddle with these
+      fellows, Sir. They are read mostly by persons whom you would not reach, if
+      you were to write ever so much. Let 'em alone. A man whose opinions are
+      not attacked is beneath contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hope so,&mdash;I said.&mdash;I got three pamphlets and innumerable
+      squibs flung at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in
+      former years. When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the
+      professional public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance of
+      poison from one young mother's chamber to another's,&mdash;for doing which
+      humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though nothing
+      else good should ever come of my life,&mdash;I had to bear the sneers of
+      those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe, have at last
+      demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women stir among the
+      ruins.&mdash;What would you do, if the folks without names kept at you,
+      trying to get a San Benito on to your shoulders that would fit you?&mdash;Would
+      you stand still in fly-time, or would you give a kick now and then?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let 'em bite!&mdash;said the Little Gentleman,&mdash;let 'em bite! It
+      makes 'em hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as
+      ever and twice as savage. Do you know what meddling with the folks without
+      names, as you call 'em, is like?&mdash;It is like riding at the quintaan.
+      You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a pivot, with a bag of
+      sand on an arm that balances it. The board gives way as soon as you touch
+      it; and before you have got by, the bag of sand comes round whack on the
+      back of your neck. &ldquo;Ananias,&rdquo; for instance, pitches into your lecture, we
+      will say, in some paper taken by the people in your kitchen. Your servants
+      get saucy and negligent. If their newspaper calls you names, they need not
+      be so particular about shutting doors softly or boiling potatoes. So you
+      lose your temper, and come out in an article which you think is going to
+      finish &ldquo;Ananias,&rdquo; proving him a booby who doesn't know enough to
+      understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells lies. Now
+      you think you 've got him! Not so fast. &ldquo;Ananias&rdquo; keeps still and winks to
+      &ldquo;Shimei,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Shimei&rdquo; comes out in the paper which they take in your
+      neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow. If you meddle
+      with &ldquo;Shimei,&rdquo; he steps out, and next week appears &ldquo;Rab-shakeh,&rdquo; an
+      unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out what good sense there
+      was in Hezekiah's &ldquo;Answer him not.&rdquo;&mdash;No, no,&mdash;keep your temper.&mdash;So
+      saying, the Little Gentleman doubled his left fist and looked at it as if
+      he should like to hit something or somebody a most pernicious punch with
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Good!&mdash;said I.&mdash;Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived
+      at, after seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious
+      sects, about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to deal
+      and to live with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among
+      the men, in every denomination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     1.  The comfortably rich.
+     2.  The decently comfortable.
+     3.  The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.
+     4.  The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't
+      clinch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute
+      were two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Humility is the first of the virtues&mdash;for other people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a
+      greater. A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the belief
+      of a large one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth while all
+      this was going on. She broke out in speech at this point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hate to hear folks talk so. I don't see that you are any better than a
+      heathen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,&mdash;I said.&mdash;Dying
+      for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than scolding for
+      it; and the history of heathen races is full of instances where men have
+      laid down their lives for the love of their kind, of their country, of
+      truth, nay, even for simple manhood's sake, or to show their obedience or
+      fidelity. What would not such beings have done for the souls of men, for
+      the Christian commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had lived in
+      days of larger light? Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates drinking
+      his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's camp, or that old New
+      England divine sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling over his
+      conceit of certain poor women, who had been burned to death in his own
+      town, going &ldquo;roaring out of one fire into another&rdquo;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't believe he said any such thing,&mdash;replied the Poor Relation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is hard to believe,&mdash;said I,&mdash;but it is true for all that. In
+      another hundred years it will be as incredible that men talked as we
+      sometimes hear them now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pectus est quod facit theologum. The heart makes the theologian. Every
+      race, every civilization, either has a new revelation of its own or a new
+      interpretation of an old one. Democratic America, has a different humanity
+      from feudal Europe, and so must have a new divinity. See, for one moment,
+      how intelligence reacts on our faiths. The Bible was a divining-book to
+      our ancestors, and is so still in the hands of some of the vulgar. The
+      Puritans went to the Old Testament for their laws; the Mormons go to it
+      for their patriarchal institution. Every generation dissolves something
+      new and precipitates something once held in solution from that great
+      storehouse of temporary and permanent truths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may observe this: that the conversation of intelligent men of the
+      stricter sects is strangely in advance of the formula that belong to their
+      organizations. So true is this, that I have doubts whether a large
+      proportion of them would not have been rather pleased than offended, if
+      they could have overheard our talk. For, look you, I think there is hardly
+      a professional teacher who will not in private conversation allow a large
+      part of what we have said, though it may frighten him in print; and I know
+      well what an under-current of secret sympathy gives vitality to those poor
+      words of mine which sometimes get a hearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't mind the exclamation of any old stager who drinks Madeira worth
+      from two to six Bibles a bottle, and burns, according to his own premises,
+      a dozen souls a year in the cigars with which he muddles his brains. But
+      as for the good and true and intelligent men whom we see all around us,
+      laborious, self-denying, hopeful, helpful,&mdash;men who know that the
+      active mind of the century is tending more and more to the two poles, Rome
+      and Reason, the sovereign church or the free soul, authority or
+      personality, God in us or God in our masters, and that, though a man may
+      by accident stand half-way between these two points, he must look one way
+      or the other,&mdash;I don't believe they would take offence at anything I
+      have reported of our late conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But supposing any one do take offence at first sight, let him look over
+      these notes again, and see whether he is quite sure he does not agree with
+      most of these things that were said amongst us. If he agrees with most of
+      them, let him be patient with an opinion he does not accept, or an
+      expression or illustration a little too vivacious. I don't know that I
+      shall report any more conversations on these topics; but I do insist on
+      the right to express a civil opinion on this class of subjects without
+      giving offence, just when and where I please,&mdash;unless, as in the
+      lecture-room, there is an implied contract to keep clear of doubtful
+      matters. You did n't think a man could sit at a breakfast-table doing
+      nothing but making puns every morning for a year or two, and never give a
+      thought to the two thousand of his fellow-creatures who are passing into
+      another state during every hour that he sits talking and laughing. Of
+      course, the one matter that a real human being cares for is what is going
+      to become of them and of him. And the plain truth is, that a good many
+      people are saying one thing about it and believing another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;How do I know that? Why, I have known and loved to talk with good
+      people, all the way from Rome to Geneva in doctrine, as long as I can
+      remember. Besides, the real religion of the world comes from women much
+      more than from men,&mdash;from mothers most of all, who carry the key of
+      our souls in their bosoms. It is in their hearts that the &ldquo;sentimental&rdquo;
+       religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its source. The
+      sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the sentiment of the
+      paramount obligation of the parent to the child as having called it into
+      existence, enhanced just in proportion to the power and knowledge of the
+      one and the weakness and ignorance of the other,&mdash;these are the
+      &ldquo;sentiments&rdquo; that have kept our soulless systems from driving men off to
+      die in holes like those that riddle the sides of the hill opposite the
+      Monastery of St. Saba, where the miserable victims of a
+      falsely-interpreted religion starved and withered in their delusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have looked on the face of a saintly woman this very day, whose creed
+      many dread and hate, but whose life is lovely and noble beyond all praise.
+      When I remember the bitter words I have heard spoken against her faith, by
+      men who have an Inquisition which excommunicates those who ask to leave
+      their communion in peace, and an Index Expurgatorius on which this article
+      may possibly have the honor of figuring,&mdash;and, far worse than these,
+      the reluctant, pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps be possible
+      that one who so believed should be accepted of the Creator,&mdash;and then
+      recall the sweet peace and love that show through all her looks, the price
+      of untold sacrifices and labors, and again recollect how thousands of
+      women, filled with the same spirit, die, without a murmur, to earthly
+      life, die to their own names even, that they may know nothing but their
+      holy duties,&mdash;while men are torturing and denouncing their fellows,
+      and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the hammers that are
+      trying, like the brute forces in the &ldquo;Prometheus,&rdquo; to rivet their
+      adamantine wedges right through the breast of human nature,&mdash;I have
+      been ready to believe that we have even now a new revelation, and the name
+      of its Messiah is WOMAN!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I should be sorry,&mdash;I remarked, a day or two afterwards, to
+      the divinity-student,&mdash;if anything I said tended in any way to foster
+      any jealousy between the professions, or to throw disrespect upon that one
+      on whose counsel and sympathies almost all of us lean in our moments of
+      trial. But we are false to our new conditions of life, if we do not
+      resolutely maintain our religious as well as our political freedom, in the
+      face of any and all supposed monopolies. Certain men will, of course, say
+      two things, if we do not take their views: first, that we don't know
+      anything about these matters; and, secondly, that we are not so good as
+      they are. They have a polarized phraseology for saying these things, but
+      it comes to precisely that. To which it may be answered, in the first
+      place, that we have good authority for saying that even babes and
+      sucklings know something; and, in the second, that, if there is a mote or
+      so to be removed from our premises, the courts and councils of the last
+      few years have found beams enough in some other quarters to build a church
+      that would hold all the good people in Boston and have sticks enough left
+      to make a bonfire for all the heretics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to that terrible depolarizing process of mine, of which we were talking
+      the other day, I will give you a specimen of one way of managing it, if
+      you like. I don't believe it will hurt you or anybody. Besides, I had a
+      great deal rather finish our talk with pleasant images and gentle words
+      than with sharp sayings, which will only afford a text, if anybody repeats
+      them, for endless relays of attacks from Messrs. Ananias, Shimei, and
+      Rabshakeh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [I must leave such gentry, if any of them show themselves, in the hands of
+      my clerical friends, many of whom are ready to stand up for the rights of
+      the laity,&mdash;and to those blessed souls, the good women, to whom this
+      version of the story of a mother's hidden hopes and tender anxieties is
+      dedicated by their peaceful and loving servant.]
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               A MOTHER'S SECRET.
+
+     How sweet the sacred legend&mdash;if unblamed
+     In my slight verse such holy things are named
+     &mdash;Of Mary's secret hours of hidden joy,
+     Silent, but pondering on her wondrous boy!
+     Ave, Maria!  Pardon, if I wrong
+     Those heavenly words that shame my earthly song!
+
+     The choral host had closed the angel's strain
+     Sung to the midnight watch on Bethlehem's plain;
+     And now the shepherds, hastening on their way,
+     Sought the still hamlet where the Infant lay.
+     They passed the fields that gleaning Ruth toiled O'er,
+     They saw afar the ruined threshing-floor
+     Where Moab's daughter, homeless and forlorn,
+     Found Boaz slumbering by his heaps of corn;
+     And some remembered how the holy scribe,
+     Skilled in the lore of every jealous tribe,
+     Traced the warm blood of Jesse's royal son
+     To that fair alien, bravely wooed and won.
+     So fared they on to seek the promised sign
+     That marked the anointed heir of David's line.
+
+     At last, by forms of earthly semblance led,
+     They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed.
+     No pomp was there, no glory shone around
+     On the coarse straw that strewed the reeking ground;
+     One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed,
+     In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid!
+
+     The wondering shepherds told their breathless tale
+     Of the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale;
+     Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed;
+     Told how the shining multitude proclaimed
+     &ldquo;Joy, joy to earth!  Behold the hallowed morn!
+     In David's city Christ the Lord is born!
+     'Glory to God!' let angels shout on high,
+     'Good-will to men!' the listening Earth reply!&rdquo;
+
+     They spoke with hurried words and accents wild;
+     Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child.
+     No trembling word the mother's joy revealed,
+     One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed;
+     Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart,
+     But kept their words to ponder in her heart.
+
+     Twelve years had passed; the boy was fair and tall,
+     Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all.
+     The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fill
+     Their balanced urns beside the mountain-rill,
+     The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun,
+     Spoke in soft words of Joseph's quiet son.
+     No voice had reached the Galilean vale
+     Of star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds' tale;
+     In the meek, studious child they only saw
+     The future Rabbi, learned in Israel's law.
+
+     So grew the boy; and now the feast was near,
+     When at the holy place the tribes appear.
+     Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen
+     Beyond the hills that girt the village-green,
+     Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands,
+     Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering bands,
+     A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast,
+     Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering West.
+
+     Then Joseph spake: &ldquo;Thy boy hath largely grown;
+     Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown;
+     Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest
+     Goes he not with us to the holy feast?&rdquo;
+
+     And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white;
+     Till eve she spun; she spun till morning light.
+     The thread was twined; its parting meshes through
+     From hand to hand her restless shuttle flew,
+     Till the full web was wound upon the beam,
+     Love's curious toil,&mdash;a vest without a seam!
+
+     They reach the holy place, fulfil the days
+     To solemn feasting given, and grateful praise.
+     At last they turn, and far Moriah's height
+     Melts in the southern sky and fades from sight.
+     All day the dusky caravan has flowed
+     In devious trails along the winding road,
+     (For many a step their homeward path attends,
+     And all the sons of Abraham are as friends.)
+     Evening has come,&mdash;the hour of rest and joy;
+     Hush! hush!&mdash;that whisper,-&ldquo;Where is Mary's boy?&rdquo;
+
+     O weary hour!  O aching days that passed
+     Filled with strange fears, each wilder than the last:
+     The soldier's lance,&mdash;the fierce centurion's sword,
+     The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman lord,
+     The midnight crypt that suck's the captive's breath,
+     The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death!
+
+     Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light,
+     Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night,
+     Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth,
+     Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.
+
+     At last, in desperate mood, they sought once more
+     The Temple's porches, searched in vain before;
+     They found him seated with the ancient men,
+     The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen,
+     Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near;
+     Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear,
+     Lost in half-envious wonder and surprise
+     That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.
+
+     And Mary said,&mdash;as one who, tried too long,
+     Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong,
+     &ldquo;What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast done?
+     Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son!&rdquo;
+      Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone,
+     Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown;
+     Then turned with them and left the holy hill,
+     To all their mild commands obedient still.
+
+     The tale was told to Nazareth's sober men,
+     And Nazareth's matrons told it oft again;
+     The maids retold it at the fountain's side;
+     The youthful shepherds doubted or denied;
+     It passed around among the listening friends,
+     With all that fancy adds and fiction fends,
+     Till newer marvels dimmed the young renown
+     Of Joseph's son, who talked the Rabbis down.
+
+     But Mary, faithful to its lightest word,
+     Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard,
+     Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil,
+     And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.
+
+     Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall;
+     A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back.
+      Bloated some, I expect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which the
+      Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part to
+      continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and particularly
+      unpleasant world. This is so much a matter of course, that I was surprised
+      to see the divinity-student change color. He took a look at a small and
+      uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting forward over the chapped
+      sideboard. The image it returned to him had the color of a very young pea
+      somewhat overboiled. The scenery of a long tragic drama flashed through
+      his mind as the lightning-express-train whishes by a station: the gradual
+      dismantling process of disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but
+      secretly chuckling over their own stomachs of iron and lungs of
+      caoutchouc; nurses attentive, but calculating their crop, and thinking how
+      soon it will be ripe, so that they can go to your neighbor, who is good
+      for a year or so longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental
+      shake, as they go out of your door, which throws off your particular grief
+      as a duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but
+      happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks for
+      fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who puts your name on the slab
+      which has been waiting for you ever since the birds or beasts made their
+      tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and the dandelions and the
+      buttercups,&mdash;&mdash;Earth saying to the mortal body, with her sweet
+      symbolism, &ldquo;You have scarred my bosom, but you are forgiven&rdquo;; then a
+      glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness without very definite form
+      or place, but dimly conceived of as an upright column of vapor or mist
+      several times larger than life-size, so far as it could be said to have
+      any size at all, wandering about and living a thin and half-awake life for
+      want of good old-fashioned solid matter to come down upon with foot and
+      fist,&mdash;in fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for
+      taking the sitting posture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen
+      images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian were
+      only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the formless and
+      position to the placeless. Neither did his thoughts spread themselves out
+      and link themselves as I have displayed them. They came confusedly into
+      his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,&mdash;sometimes a part of the
+      picture complete in itself, sometimes connected fragments, and sometimes
+      only single severed stones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance. On the
+      contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I have said; and
+      when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass turned him green in
+      addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to him as if it were all
+      settled, and his book of life were to be shut not yet half-read, and go
+      back to the dust of the under-ground archives. He coughed a mild short
+      cough, as if to point the direction in which his downward path was
+      tending. It was an honest little cough enough, so far as appearances went.
+      But coughs are ungrateful things. You find one out in the cold, take it up
+      and nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give it all
+      sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in your bosom
+      as if it were a miniature lapdog. And by-and-by its little bark grows
+      sharp and savage, and&mdash;confound the thing!&mdash;you find it is a
+      wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in the breast
+      where he has been nestling so long.&mdash;The Poor Relation said that
+      somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a bad way.&mdash;The
+      landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by cherry-pictorial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whiskey's the fellah,&mdash;said the young man John.&mdash;Make it into
+      punch, cold at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time. I'll come up 'n' show you
+      how to mix it. Have n't any of you seen the wonderful fat man exhibitin'
+      down in Hanover Street?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy
+      exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place where
+      the fat man was exhibitin'. Tried to get in at half-price, but the man at
+      the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten year old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is n't two years,&mdash;said the young man John, since that fat fellah
+      was exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton. Whiskey&mdash;that's what did
+      it,&mdash;real Burbon's the stuff. Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little
+      shavin' of lemon-skin in it,&mdash;skin, mind you, none o' your juice;
+      take it off thin,&mdash;shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls
+      wear on the sides of their foreheads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I am a teetotaller,&mdash;said the divinity-student in a subdued tone;&mdash;not
+      noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young fellow had just
+      drawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took up his hat and went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,&mdash;I said.&mdash;I
+      don't believe he will jump off one of the bridges, for he has too much
+      principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for he looks as
+      if his mind were made up to something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I followed him at a reasonable distance. He walked doggedly along, looking
+      neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street, and made for
+      a well-known Life-Insurance Office. Luckily, the doctor was there and
+      overhauled him on the spot. There was nothing the matter with him, he
+      said, and he could have his life insured as a sound one. He came out in
+      good spirits, and told me this soon after.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of
+      well-bred and ill-bred people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I began,&mdash;The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not
+      like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable.
+      Good-breeding is surface-Christianity. Every look, movement, tone,
+      expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is
+      habitually excluded from conversational intercourse. This is the reason
+      why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I thought you were a great champion of equality,&mdash;said the
+      discreet and severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin
+      Tutor's daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I go politically for equality,&mdash;I said,&mdash;and socially for the
+      quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who are the &ldquo;quality,&rdquo;&mdash;said the Model, etc., in a community like
+      ours?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,&mdash;I said.
+      &mdash;Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which
+      exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define. The great
+      gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters and
+      mistresses; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a republic;
+      mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex-presidents are
+      nothing to them. How well we know this, and how seldom it finds a distinct
+      expression! Now I tell you truly, I believe in man as man, and I
+      disbelieve in all distinctions except such as follow the natural lines of
+      cleavage in a society which has crystallized according to its own true
+      laws. But the essence of equality is to be able to say the truth; and
+      there is nothing more curious than these truths relating to the
+      stratification of society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality, there
+      is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this of social
+      position,&mdash;as you see by the circumstances that the core of all the
+      great social orders the world has seen has been, and is still, for the
+      most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies arranged in a
+      regular scale of precedence among themselves, but superior as a body to
+      all else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting
+      farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can prevent this
+      subdivision of society into classes from taking place everywhere,&mdash;in
+      the great centres of our republic as much as in old European monarchies.
+      Only there position is more absolutely hereditary,&mdash;here it is more
+      completely elective.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and
+      who are the electors?&mdash;said the Model.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken; there never is a formal vote. The
+      women settle it mostly; and they know wonderfully well what is
+      presentable, and what can't stand the blaze of the chandeliers and the
+      critical eye and ear of people trained to know a staring shade in a
+      ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an ill-bred tone, an angular movement,
+      everything that betrays a coarse fibre and cheap training. As a general
+      thing, you do not get elegance short of two or three removes from the
+      soil, out of which our best blood doubtless comes,&mdash;quite as good, no
+      doubt, as if it came from those old prize-fighters with iron pots on their
+      heads, to whom some great people are so fond of tracing their descent
+      through a line of small artisans and petty shopkeepers whose veins have
+      held &ldquo;base&rdquo; fluid enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Does not money go everywhere?&mdash;said the Model.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost. And with good reason. For though there are numerous exceptions,
+      rich people are, as I said, commonly altogether the most agreeable
+      companions. The influence of a fine house, graceful furniture, good
+      libraries, well-ordered tables, trim servants, and, above all, a position
+      so secure that one becomes unconscious of it, gives a harmony and
+      refinement to the character and manners which we feel, if we cannot
+      explain their charm. Yet we can get at the reason of it by thinking a
+      little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these appliances are to shield the sensibility from disagreeable
+      contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial influences. In
+      this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow delicate, just as the
+      hands grow white and soft when saved from toil and incased in soft gloves.
+      The whole nature becomes subdued into suavity. I confess I like the
+      quality ladies better than the common kind even of literary ones. They
+      have n't read the last book, perhaps, but they attend better to you when
+      you are talking to them. If they are never learned, they make up for it in
+      tact and elegance. Besides, I think, on the whole, there is less
+      self-assertion in diamonds than in dogmas. I don't know where you will
+      find a sweeter portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor play-girl of
+      King Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when she went before
+      her lord. I have no doubt she was a more gracious and agreeable person
+      than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story of Sisera. The
+      wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something that you know, but an
+      elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality. The highest
+      fashion is intensely alive,&mdash;not alive necessarily to the truest and
+      best things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in all its
+      extremities and to the farthest point of its surface, so that the feather
+      in its bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a fighting-cock, and the rosette
+      on its slipper as clean-cut and pimpant (pronounce it English fashion,&mdash;it
+      is a good word) as a dahlia. As a general rule, that society where
+      flattery is acted is much more agreeable than that where it is spoken.
+      Don't you see why? Attention and deference don't require you to make fine
+      speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness (lies) and returning all
+      the compliments paid you. This is one reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,&mdash;said
+      the Model.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [My reflection. Oh! oh! no wonder you did n't get married. Served you
+      right.] My remark. Surely, Madam,&mdash;if you mean by flattery telling
+      people boldly to their faces that they are this or that, which they are
+      not. But a woman who does not carry about with her wherever she goes a
+      halo of good feeling and desire to make everybody contented,&mdash;an
+      atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of at least six feet radius, which
+      wraps every human being upon whom she voluntarily bestows her presence,
+      and so flatters him with the comfortable thought that she is rather glad
+      he is alive than otherwise, isn't worth the trouble of talking to, as a
+      woman; she may do well enough to hold discussions with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I don't think the Model exactly liked this. She said,&mdash;a
+      little spitefully, I thought,&mdash;that a sensible man might stand a
+      little praise, but would of course soon get sick of it, if he were in the
+      habit of getting much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, yes,&mdash;I replied,&mdash;just as men get sick of tobacco. It is
+      notorious how apt they are to get tired of that vegetable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;That 's so!&mdash;said the young fellow John,&mdash;I've got tired
+      of my cigars and burnt 'em all up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am heartily glad to hear it,&mdash;said the Model,&mdash;I wish they
+      were all disposed of in the same way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So do I,&mdash;said the young fellow John.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Can't you get your friends to unite with you in committing those odious
+      instruments of debauchery to the flames in which you have consumed your
+      own?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wish I could,&mdash;said the young fellow John.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be a noble sacrifice,&mdash;said the Model, and every American
+      woman would be grateful to you. Let us burn them all in a heap out in the
+      yard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That a'n't my way,&mdash;said the young fellow John;&mdash;I burn 'em one
+      't' time,&mdash;little end in my mouth and big end outside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I watched for the effect of this sudden change of programme, when
+      it should reach the calm stillness of the Model's interior apprehension,
+      as a boy watches for the splash of a stone which he has dropped into a
+      well. But before it had fairly reached the water, poor Iris, who had
+      followed the conversation with a certain interest until it turned this
+      sharp corner, (for she seems rather to fancy the young fellow John,)
+      laughed out such a clear, loud laugh, that it started us all off, as the
+      locust-cry of some full-throated soprano drags a multitudinous chorus
+      after it. It was plain that some dam or other had broken in the soul of
+      this young girl, and she was squaring up old scores of laughter, out of
+      which she had been cheated, with a grand flood of merriment that swept all
+      before it. So we had a great laugh all round, in which the Model&mdash;who,
+      if she had as many virtues as there are spokes to a wheel, all compacted
+      with a personality as round and complete as its tire, yet wanted that one
+      little addition of grace, which seems so small, and is as important as the
+      linchpin in trundling over the rough ways of life&mdash;had not the tact
+      to join. She seemed to be &ldquo;stuffy&rdquo; about it, as the young fellow John
+      said. In fact, I was afraid the joke would have cost us both our new
+      lady-boarders. It had no effect, however, except, perhaps, to hasten the
+      departure of the elder of the two, who could, on the whole, be spared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I had meant to make this note of our conversation a text for a few
+      axioms on the matter of breeding. But it so happened, that, exactly at
+      this point of my record, a very distinguished philosopher, whom several of
+      our boarders and myself go to hear, and whom no doubt many of my readers
+      follow habitually, treated this matter of manners. Up to this point, if I
+      have been so fortunate as to coincide with him in opinion, and so
+      unfortunate as to try to express what he has more felicitously said,
+      nobody is to blame; for what has been given thus far was all written
+      before the lecture was delivered. But what shall I do now? He told us it
+      was childish to lay down rules for deportment,&mdash;but he could not help
+      laying down a few.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus,&mdash;Nothing so vulgar as to be in a hurry. True, but hard of
+      application. People with short legs step quickly, because legs are
+      pendulums, and swing more times in a minute the shorter they are.
+      Generally a natural rhythm runs through the whole organization: quick
+      pulse, fast breathing, hasty speech, rapid trains of thought, excitable
+      temper. Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of
+      good-breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or, at least, they must
+      work their limbs or features.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Talking of one's own ails and grievances.&mdash;Bad enough, but not so bad
+      as insulting the person you talk with by remarking on his ill-looks, or
+      appealing to notice any of his personal peculiarities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apologizing.&mdash;A very desperate habit,&mdash;one that is rarely cured.
+      Apology is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first
+      thing a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his apology. It
+      is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your small failures of so
+      much consequence that you must make a talk about them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait, and
+      eyes that do not wander,&mdash;shyness of personalities, except in certain
+      intimate communions,&mdash;to be light in hand in conversation, to have
+      ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without them,&mdash;to
+      belong to the company you are in, and not to yourself,&mdash;to have
+      nothing in your dress or furniture so fine that you cannot afford to spoil
+      it and get another like it, yet to preserve the harmonies, throughout your
+      person and&mdash;dwelling: I should say that this was a fair capital of
+      manners to begin with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an
+      overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our
+      generic humanity. It is just here that the very highest society asserts
+      its superior breeding. Among truly elegant people of the highest ton, you
+      will find more real equality in social intercourse than in a country
+      village. As nuns drop their birth-names and become Sister Margaret and
+      Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop their personal distinctions and
+      become brothers and sisters of conversational charity. Nor are fashionable
+      people without their heroism. I believe there are men who have shown as
+      much self-devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to the supper-table
+      as ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized his name. There are
+      Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing can hold back from
+      their errands of mercy. They find out the red-handed, gloveless
+      undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his corner, and
+      distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the green herb. They reach
+      even the poor relation, whose dreary apparition saddens the perfumed
+      atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-room. I have known one of these angels
+      ask, of her own accord, that a desolate middle-aged man, whom nobody
+      seemed to know, should be presented to her by the hostess. He wore no
+      shirt-collar,&mdash;he had on black gloves,&mdash;and was flourishing a
+      red bandanna handkerchief! Match me this, ye proud children of poverty,
+      who boast of your paltry sacrifices for each other! Virtue in humble life!
+      What is that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in pearls and
+      diamonds? As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before the social
+      mendicant,&mdash;the white billows of her beauty heaving under the foam of
+      the traitorous laces that half revealed them,&mdash;I should have wept
+      with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private
+      demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness and
+      vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which political
+      chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of our
+      fellow-citizens. It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited knowledge
+      goes, that the President of the United States has always been what might
+      be called in general terms a gentleman. But what if at some future time
+      the choice of the people should fall upon one on whom that lofty title
+      could not, by any stretch of charity, be bestowed? This may happen,&mdash;how
+      soon the future only knows. Think of this miserable man of coming
+      political possibilities,&mdash;an unpresentable boor sucked into office by
+      one of those eddies in the flow of popular sentiment which carry straws
+      and chips into the public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of the
+      monarchs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf of
+      political oblivion! Think of him, I say, and of the concentrated gaze of
+      good society through its thousand eyes, all confluent, as it were, in one
+      great burning-glass of ice that shrivels its wretched object in fiery
+      torture, itself cold as the glacier of an unsunned cavern! No,&mdash;there
+      will be angels of good-breeding then as now, to shield the victim of free
+      institutions from himself and from his torturers. I can fancy a lovely
+      woman playfully withdrawing the knife which he would abuse by making it an
+      instrument for the conveyance of food,&mdash;or, failing in this kind
+      artifice, sacrificing herself by imitating his use of that implement; how
+      much harder than to plunge it into her bosom, like Lucretia! I can see her
+      studying in his provincial dialect until she becomes the Champollion of
+      New England or Western or Southern barbarisms. She has learned that haow
+      means what; that think-in' is the same thing as thinking, or she has found
+      out the meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no
+      single-tongued phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of
+      the Hudson and at its embouchure, and elsewhere,&mdash;what they say when
+      they think they say first, (fe-eest,&mdash;fe as in the French le),&mdash;or
+      that cheer means chair,&mdash;or that urritation means irritation,&mdash;and
+      so of other enormities. Nothing surprises her. The highest breeding, you
+      know, comes round to the Indian standard,&mdash;to take everything coolly,&mdash;nil
+      admirari,&mdash;if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for
+      the same thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to foot to
+      see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not grown a little
+      older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice, or if your complexion
+      is not a little faded, and so on, and then convey the fact to you, in the
+      style in which the Poor Relation addressed the divinity-student,&mdash;go
+      with them as much as you like. I hate the sight of the wretches. Don't for
+      mercy's sake think I hate them; the distinction is one my friend or I drew
+      long ago. No matter where you find such people; they are clowns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a lady
+      as her Irish servant, whose pretty &ldquo;saving your presence,&rdquo; when she has to
+      say something which offends her natural sense of good manners, has a hint
+      in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood of old Milesian kings,
+      which very likely runs in her veins,&mdash;thinned by two hundred years of
+      potato, which, being an underground fruit, tends to drag down the
+      generations that are made of it to the earth from which it came, and,
+      filling their veins with starch, turn them into a kind of human vegetable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I say, if you like such people, go with them. But I am going to make a
+      practical application of the example at the beginning of this particular
+      record, which some young people who are going to choose professional
+      advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for. If you are making choice
+      of a physician, be sure you get one, if possible, with a cheerful and
+      serene countenance. A physician is not&mdash;at least, ought not to be&mdash;an
+      executioner; and a sentence of death on his face is as bad as a warrant
+      for execution signed by the Governor. As a general rule, no man has a
+      right to tell another by word or look that he is going to die. It may be
+      necessary in some extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last extreme of
+      impertinence which one human being can offer to another. &ldquo;You have killed
+      me,&rdquo; said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told him he was
+      incurable. He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead in six'
+      weeks. If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone, persons
+      will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought to know it, and
+      not be cheated out of their natural birthright of hope of recovery, which
+      is intended to accompany sick people as long as life is comfortable, and
+      is graciously replaced by the hope of heaven, or at least of rest, when
+      life has become a burden which the bearer is ready to let fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death. The chance
+      of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a certain time
+      is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse people. As you go
+      down the social scale, you reach a point at length where the common talk
+      in sick rooms is of churchyards and sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual
+      vivisection is forever carried on, upon the person of the miserable
+      sufferer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer the
+      one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body. If you can get
+      along with people who carry a certificate in their faces that their
+      goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your children cannot.
+      And whatever offends one of these little ones cannot be right in the eyes
+      of Him who loved them so well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably select
+      gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then all will be
+      right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This repetition of the above words,&mdash;gentleman and lady,&mdash;which
+      could not be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are made
+      of them by those who ought to know what they mean. Thus, at a marriage
+      ceremony, once, of two very excellent persons who had been at service,
+      instead of, Do you take this man, etc.? and, Do you take this woman? how
+      do you think the officiating clergyman put the questions? It was, Do you,
+      Miss So and So, take this GENTLEMAN? and, Do you, Mr. This or That, take
+      this LADY?! What would any English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England
+      herself, have thought, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her and
+      her bridegroom anything but plain woman and man at such a time?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she
+      happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered these
+      monstrous words&mdash;monstrous in such a connection&mdash;had known the
+      ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that
+      seized upon many of the persons who were present,&mdash;had guessed what a
+      sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the
+      shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,&mdash;so
+      inherent in their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of
+      religion cannot exclude its impertinences,&mdash;the good man would have
+      given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that superb and full-blown
+      vulgarism. Any persons whom it could please could have no better notion of
+      what the words referred to signify than of the meaning of apsides and
+      asymptotes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MAN! Sir! WOMAN! Sir! Gentility is a fine thing, not to be undervalued, as
+      I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes before that.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+         &ldquo;When Adam delved and Eve span,
+          Who was then the gentleman?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from the
+      finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat is below a
+      certain level. Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and all the graceful
+      ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the surface, the elegances and
+      suavities of life die out one by one as we sink through the social scale.
+      Fortunately, the virtues are more tenacious of life, and last pretty well
+      until we get down to the mud of absolute pauperism, where they do not
+      flourish greatly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I had almost forgotten about our boarders. As the Model of all the
+      Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is the reason
+      we are not all very sorry. Surely we all like good persons. She is a good
+      person. Therefore we like her.&mdash;Only we don't.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the principle
+      which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit and embodied in
+      the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably immortal, this syllogism, I
+      say, is one that most persons have had occasion to construct and demolish,
+      respecting somebody or other, as I have done for the Model. &ldquo;Pious and
+      painefull.&rdquo; Why has that excellent old phrase gone out of use? Simply
+      because these good painefull or painstaking persons proved to be such
+      nuisances in the long run, that the word &ldquo;painefull&rdquo; came, before people
+      thought of it, to mean pain-giving instead of painstaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;So, the old fellah's off to-morrah,&mdash;said the young man John.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Old fellow?&mdash;said I,&mdash;whom do you mean?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why, the one that came with our little beauty, the old fellah in
+      petticoats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Now that means something,&mdash;said I to myself.&mdash;These rough
+      young rascals very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with
+      their eyes shut. A real woman does a great many things without knowing why
+      she does them; but these pattern machines mix up their intellects with
+      everything they do, just like men. They can't help it, no doubt; but we
+      can't help getting sick of them, either. Intellect is to a woman's nature
+      what her watch-spring skirt is to her dress; it ought to underlie her
+      silks and embroideries, but not to show itself too staringly on the
+      outside.&mdash;You don't know, perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is
+      the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest. Whatever
+      comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and
+      whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its
+      birthplace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man John did not hear my soliloquy, of course, but sent up one
+      more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a statement,
+      that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives no visits, as is
+      commonly supposed, from virtuous people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why, I ask again, (of my reader,) should a person who never did anybody
+      any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and intelligent, nay, a
+      particularly enlightened and exemplary member of society, fail to inspire
+      interest, love, and devotion? Because of the reversed current in the flow
+      of thought and emotion. The red heart sends all its instincts up to the
+      white brain to be analyzed, chilled, blanched, and so become pure reason,
+      which is just exactly what we do not want of woman as woman. The current
+      should run the other-way. The nice, calm, cold thought, which in women
+      shapes itself so rapidly that they hardly know it as thought, should
+      always travel to the lips via the heart. It does so in those women whom
+      all love and admire. It travels the wrong way in the Model. That is the
+      reason why the Little Gentleman said &ldquo;I hate her, I hate her.&rdquo; That is the
+      reason why the young man John called her the &ldquo;old fellah,&rdquo; and banished
+      her to the company of the great Unpresentable. That is the reason why I,
+      the Professor, am picking her to pieces with scalpel and forceps. That is
+      the reason why the young girl whom she has befriended repays her kindness
+      with gratitude and respect, rather than with the devotion and passionate
+      fondness which lie sleeping beneath the calmness of her amber eyes. I can
+      see her, as she sits between this estimable and most correct of personages
+      and the misshapen, crotchety, often violent and explosive little man on
+      the other side of her, leaning and swaying towards him as she speaks, and
+      looking into his sad eyes as if she found some fountain in them at which
+      her soul could quiet its thirst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and high
+      culture. It is not
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
+     Zephyr with Aurora playing,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      when the two meet
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;&mdash;on beds of violets blue,
+     And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      that claim such women as their offspring. It is rather the east wind, as
+      it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a clear-eyed wintry
+      noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England ice-quarry.&mdash;Don't
+      throw up your cap now, and hurrah as if this were giving up everything,
+      and turning against the best growth of our latitudes,&mdash;the daughters
+      of the soil. The brain-women never interest us like the heart women; white
+      roses please less than red. But our Northern seasons have a narrow green
+      streak of spring, as well as a broad white zone of winter,&mdash;they have
+      a glowing band of summer and a golden stripe of autumn in their
+      many-colored wardrobe; and women are born to us that wear all these hues
+      of earth and heaven in their souls. Our ice-eyed brain-women are really
+      admirable, if we only ask of them just what they can give, and no more.
+      Only compare them, talking or writing, with one of those babbling,
+      chattering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know enough even to keep
+      out of print, and who are interesting to us only as specimens of arrest of
+      development for our psychological cabinets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues! We can spare you now. A little clear
+      perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way. Go! be
+      useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable, talk pure
+      reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of an achromatic
+      understanding. Goodbye! Where is my Beranger? I must read a verse or two
+      of &ldquo;Fretillon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Fair play for all. But don't claim incompatible qualities for anybody.
+      Justice is a very rare virtue in our community. Everything that public
+      sentiment cares about is put into a Papin's digester, and boiled under
+      high pressure till all is turned into one homogeneous pulp, and the very
+      bones give up their jelly. What are all the strongest epithets of our
+      dictionary to us now? The critics and politicians, and especially the
+      philanthropists, have chewed them, till they are mere wads of
+      syllable-fibre, without a suggestion of their old pungency and power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Justice! A good man respects the rights even of brute matter and arbitrary
+      symbols. If he writes the same word twice in succession, by accident, he
+      always erases the one that stands second; has not the first-comer the
+      prior right? This act of abstract justice, which I trust many of my
+      readers, like myself, have often performed, is a curious
+      anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute wickedness of human
+      dispositions. Why doesn't a man always strike out the first of the two
+      words, to gratify his diabolical love of injustice?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So, I say, we owe a genuine, substantial tribute of respect to these
+      filtered intellects which have left their womanhood on the strainer. They
+      are so clear that it is a pleasure at times to look at the world of
+      thought through them. But the rose and purple tints of richer natures they
+      cannot give us, and it is not just to them to ask it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way one
+      would hardly at first think of. It loves vitality above all things,
+      sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept under by the
+      laws of good-breeding,&mdash;but still it loves abundant life, opulent and
+      showy organizations,&mdash;the spherical rather than the plane
+      trigonometry of female architecture,&mdash;plenty of red blood, flashing
+      eyes, tropical voices, and forms that bear the splendors of dress without
+      growing pale beneath their lustre. Among these you will find the most
+      delicious women you will ever meet,&mdash;women whom dress and flattery
+      and the round of city gayeties cannot spoil,&mdash;talking with whom, you
+      forget their diamonds and laces,&mdash;and around whom all the nice
+      details of elegance, which the cold-blooded beauty next them is scanning
+      so nicely, blend in one harmonious whole, too perfect to be disturbed by
+      the petulant sparkle of a jewel, or the yellow glare of a bangle, or the
+      gay toss of a feather.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion or
+      wealth. Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and loyalty, I
+      think I love ease and independence better than the golden slavery of
+      perpetual matinees and soirees, or the pleasures of accumulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the frivolous
+      class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff about. Fashion
+      is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social intercourse.
+      What business has a man who knows nothing about the beautiful, and cannot
+      pronounce the word view, to talk about fashion to a set of people who, if
+      one of the quality left a card at their doors, would contrive to keep it
+      on the very top of their heap of the names of their two-story
+      acquaintances, till it was as yellow as the Codex Vaticanus?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wealth, too,&mdash;what an endless repetition of the same foolish
+      trivialities about it! Take the single fact of its alleged uncertain
+      tenure and transitory character. In old times, when men were all the time
+      fighting and robbing each other,&mdash;in those tropical countries where
+      the Sabeans and the Chaldeans stole all a man's cattle and camels, and
+      there were frightful tornadoes and rains of fire from heaven, it was true
+      enough that riches took wings to themselves not unfrequently in a very
+      unexpected way. But, with common prudence in investments, it is not so
+      now. In fact, there is nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole,
+      as money. A man's learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of
+      remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children
+      live and keep his memory green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not think there is much courage or originality in giving utterance to
+      truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by conventional
+      trumpery. The only distinction which it is necessary to point out to
+      feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the breadth and depth of
+      that significance which gives to fashion and fortune their tremendous
+      power, we do not indorse the extravagances which often disgrace the one,
+      nor the meanness which often degrades the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A remark which seems to contradict a universally current opinion is not
+      generally to be taken &ldquo;neat,&rdquo; but watered with the ideas of common-sense
+      and commonplace people. So, if any of my young friends should be tempted
+      to waste their substance on white kids and &ldquo;all-rounds,&rdquo; or to insist on
+      becoming millionaires at once, by anything I have said, I will give them
+      references to some of the class referred to, well known to the public as
+      providers of literary diluents, who will weaken any truth so that there is
+      not an old woman in the land who cannot take it with perfect impunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am afraid some of the blessed saints in diamonds will think I mean to
+      flatter them. I hope not;&mdash;if I do, set it down as a weakness. But
+      there is so much foolish talk about wealth and fashion, (which, of course,
+      draw a good many heartless and essentially vulgar people into the glare of
+      their candelabra, but which have a real respectability and meaning, if we
+      will only look at them stereoscopically, with both eyes instead of one,)
+      that I thought it a duty to speak a few words for them. Why can't somebody
+      give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and
+      another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lest my parish should suppose we have forgotten graver matters in these
+      lesser topics, I beg them to drop these trifles and read the following
+      lesson for the day.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          THE TWO STREAMS.
+
+     Behold the rocky wall
+     That down its sloping sides
+     Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
+     In rushing river-tides!
+
+     Yon stream, whose sources run
+     Turned by a pebble's edge,
+     Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
+     Through the cleft mountain-ledge.
+
+     The slender rill had strayed,
+     But for the slanting stone,
+     To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
+     Of foam-flecked Oregon.
+
+     So from the heights of Will
+     Life's parting stream descends,
+     And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
+     Each widening torrent bends,
+
+     From the same cradle's side,
+     From the same mother's knee,
+     &mdash;One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
+     One to the Peaceful Sea!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Our landlady's daughter is a young lady of some pretensions to gentility.
+      She wears her bonnet well back on her head, which is known by all to be a
+      mark of high breeding. She wears her trains very long, as the great ladies
+      do in Europe. To be sure, their dresses are so made only to sweep the
+      tapestried floors of chateaux and palaces; as those odious aristocrats of
+      the other side do not go draggling through the mud in silks and satins,
+      but, forsooth, must ride in coaches when they are in full dress. It is
+      true, that, considering various habits of the American people, also the
+      little accidents which the best-kept sidewalks are liable to, a lady who
+      has swept a mile of them is not exactly in such a condition that one would
+      care to be her neighbor. But then there is no need of being so hard on
+      these slight weaknesses of the poor, dear women as our little deformed
+      gentleman was the other day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;There are no such women as the Boston women, Sir,&mdash;he said.
+      Forty-two degrees, north latitude, Rome, Sir, Boston, Sir! They had grand
+      women in old Rome, Sir,&mdash;and the women bore such men&mdash;children
+      as never the world saw before. And so it was here, Sir. I tell you, the
+      revolution the Boston boys started had to run in woman's milk before it
+      ran in man's blood, Sir!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But confound the make-believe women we have turned loose in our streets!&mdash;where
+      do they come from? Not out of Boston parlors, I trust. Why, there is n't a
+      beast or a bird that would drag its tail through the dirt in the way these
+      creatures do their dresses. Because a queen or a duchess wears long robes
+      on great occasions, a maid-of-all-work or a factory-girl thinks she must
+      make herself a nuisance by trailing through the street, picking up and
+      carrying about with her pah!&mdash;that's what I call getting vulgarity
+      into your bones and marrow. Making believe be what you are not is the
+      essence of vulgarity. Show over dirt is the one attribute of vulgar
+      people. If any man can walk behind one of these women and see what she
+      rakes up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he has got a tough stomach.
+      I wouldn't let one of 'em into my room without serving 'em as David served
+      Saul at the cave in the wilderness,&mdash;cut off his skirts, Sir! cut off
+      his skirts!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suggested, that I had seen some pretty stylish ladies who offended in
+      the way he condemned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stylish women, I don't doubt,&mdash;said the Little Gentleman.&mdash;Don't
+      tell me that a true lady ever sacrifices the duty of keeping all about her
+      sweet and clean to the wish of making a vulgar show. I won't believe it of
+      a lady. There are some things that no fashion has any right to touch, and
+      cleanliness is one of those things. If a woman wishes to show that her
+      husband or her father has got money, which she wants and means to spend,
+      but doesn't know how, let her buy a yard or two of silk and pin it to her
+      dress when she goes out to walk, but let her unpin it before she goes into
+      the house;&mdash;there may be poor women that will think it worth
+      disinfecting. It is an insult to a respectable laundress to carry such
+      things into a house for her to deal with. I don't like the Bloomers any
+      too well,&mdash;in fact, I never saw but one, and she&mdash;or he, or it&mdash;had
+      a mob of boys after her, or whatever you call the creature, as if she had
+      been a&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Little Gentleman stopped short,&mdash;flushed somewhat, and looked
+      round with that involuntary, suspicious glance which the subjects of any
+      bodily misfortune are very apt to cast round them. His eye wandered over
+      the company, none of whom, excepting myself and one other, had, probably,
+      noticed the movement. They fell at last on Iris,&mdash;his next neighbor,
+      you remember.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;We know in a moment, on looking suddenly at a person, if that
+      person's eyes have been fixed on us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes we are conscious of it before we turn so as to see the person.
+      Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice, of love, leak
+      out in this way. There is no need of Mrs. Felix Lorraine's reflection in
+      the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting evil for us behind our backs.
+      We know it, as we know by the ominous stillness of a child that some
+      mischief or other is going-on. A young girl betrays, in a moment, that her
+      eyes have been feeding on the face where you find them fixed, and not
+      merely brushing over it with their pencils of blue or brown light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A certain involuntary adjustment assimilates us, you may also observe, to
+      that upon which we look. Roses redden the cheeks of her who stoops to
+      gather them, and buttercups turn little people's chins yellow. When we
+      look at a vast landscape, our chests expand as if we would enlarge to fill
+      it. When we examine a minute object, we naturally contract, not only our
+      foreheads, but all our dimensions. If I see two men wrestling, I wrestle
+      too, with my limbs and features. When a country-fellow comes upon the
+      stage, you will see twenty faces in the boxes putting on the bumpkin
+      expression. There is no need of multiplying instances to reach this
+      generalization; every person and thing we look upon puts its special mark
+      upon us. If this is repeated often enough, we get a permanent resemblance
+      to it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it. Husband and
+      wife come to look alike at last, as has often been noticed. It is a common
+      saying of a jockey, that he is &ldquo;all horse&rdquo;; and I have often fancied that
+      milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an angular movement of the arm,
+      that remind one of a pump and the working of its handle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this came in by accident, just because I happened to mention that the
+      Little Gentleman found that Iris had been looking at him with her soul in
+      her eyes, when his glance rested on her after wandering round the company.
+      What he thought, it is hard to say; but the shadow of suspicion faded off
+      from his face, and he looked calmly into the amber eyes, resting his cheek
+      upon the hand that wore the red jewel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;If it were a possible thing,&mdash;women are such strange
+      creatures! Is there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play
+      them? Just see how they marry! A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood
+      is like one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd, fantastic
+      root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above and bifurcated
+      below, will always contrive to make a man&mdash;such as he is&mdash;out of
+      it. I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a
+      Gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband
+      out of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;A child,&mdash;yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child!
+      Do you know how Art brings all ages together? There is no age to the
+      angels and ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he shares
+      their youth until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim. The youthful
+      painter talks of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a brother, and the
+      veteran forgets that Raphael died at an age to which his own is of
+      patriarchal antiquity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom Nature
+      has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain. Pity, I suppose. They say
+      that leads to love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and
+      determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was going
+      on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were drifting. I
+      say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I can look through
+      this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent feebleness of
+      organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very hard to cheat, is only
+      waiting as the sapper waits in his mine, knowing that all is in readiness
+      and the slow-match burning quietly down to the powder. He will leave it
+      by-and-by, and then it will take care of itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a house and
+      the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the building is on
+      fire. Hark! There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive, crisp, not loud, but
+      very knowing little creeping crackle that is tolerably intelligible. There
+      is a whiff of something floating about, suggestive of toasting shingles.
+      Also a sharp pyroligneous-acid pungency in the air that stings one's eyes.
+      Let us get up and see what is going on.&mdash;Oh,&mdash;oh,&mdash;oh! do
+      you know what has got hold of you? It is the great red dragon that is born
+      of the little red eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red manes,
+      and his thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red eyes glaring
+      at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues lapping the
+      beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath warping the
+      panels and cracking the glass and making old timber sweat that had
+      forgotten it was ever alive with sap. Run for your life! leap! or you will
+      be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing but a coroner would take for the
+      wreck of a human being!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away comparison,
+      I shall be much obliged to him. All I intended to say was, that we need
+      not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know that they are full of
+      combustibles and that a spark has got among them. I don't pretend to say
+      or know what it is that brings these two persons together;&mdash;and when
+      I say together, I only mean that there is an evident affinity of some kind
+      or other which makes their commonest intercourse strangely significant, as
+      that each seems to understand a look or a word of the other. When the
+      young girl laid her hand on the Little Gentleman's arm,&mdash;which so
+      greatly shocked the Model, you may remember,&mdash;I saw that she had
+      learned the lion-tamer's secret. She masters him, and yet I can see she
+      has a kind of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the
+      monster that he makes a baby of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of two things must happen. The first is love, downright love, on the
+      part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man. You may laugh,
+      if you like. But women are apt to love the men who they think have the
+      largest capacity of loving;&mdash;and who can love like one that has
+      thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth and beauty, and seen it
+      fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the parched lips of him whose
+      fabled punishment is the perpetual type of human longing and
+      disappointment? What would become of him, if this fresh soul should stoop
+      upon him in her first young passion, as the flamingo drops out of the sky
+      upon some lonely and dark lagoon in the marshes of Cagliari, with a
+      flutter of scarlet feathers and a kindling of strange fires in the shadowy
+      waters that hold her burning image?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Marry her, of course?&mdash;Why, no, not of course. I should think
+      the chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her than
+      she to marry him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is one other thing that might happen. If the interest he awakes in
+      her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in it, she will
+      glance off from him into some great passion or other. All excitements run
+      to love in women of a certain&mdash;let us not say age, but youth. An
+      electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar
+      of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned into a
+      love-magnet by a tingling current of life running round her. I should like
+      to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she
+      did not turn so as to point north and south,&mdash;as she would, if the
+      love-currents are like those of the earth our mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's &ldquo;Boy of Windermere&rdquo;? This boy
+      used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud, mimicking the hooting
+      of the owls, who would answer him
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               &ldquo;with quivering peals,
+     And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
+     Redoubled and redoubled.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for their
+      voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant
+      waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with new
+      force upon his perceptions.&mdash;Read the sonnet, if you please;&mdash;it
+      is Wordsworth all over,&mdash;trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid
+      in description, prolix in detail, true metaphysically, but immensely
+      suggestive of &ldquo;imagination,&rdquo; to use a mild term, when related as an actual
+      fact of a sprightly youngster. All I want of it is to enforce the
+      principle, that, when the door of the soul is once opened to a guest,
+      there is no knowing who will come in next.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and
+      characters. Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in the
+      drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but there is a
+      perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin of her drawings,
+      and there is one book which I know she keeps to run riot in, where, if
+      anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to read her thoughts. This
+      book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at it honorably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman's chamber.
+      How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only guess. His hours are
+      late, as I have said; often, on waking late in the night, I see the light
+      through cracks in his window-shutters on the wall of the house opposite.
+      If the times of witchcraft were not over, I should be afraid to be so
+      close a neighbor to a place from which there come such strange noises.
+      Sometimes it is the dragging of something heavy over the floor, that makes
+      me shiver to hear it,&mdash;it sounds so like what people that kill other
+      people have to do now and then. Occasionally I hear very sweet strains of
+      music,&mdash;whether of a wind or stringed instrument, or a human voice,
+      strange as it may seem, I have often tried to find out, but through the
+      partition I could not be quite sure. If I have not heard a woman cry and
+      moan, and then again laugh as though she would die laughing, I have heard
+      sounds so like them that&mdash;I am a fool to confess it&mdash;I have
+      covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in my dreams,
+      that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that so-called witch
+      that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,&mdash;a sort of fancy
+      that she visited the Little Gentleman,&mdash;a young woman in
+      old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,&mdash;not a
+      neck-lace, but a dull-stain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course you don't suppose that I have any foolish superstitions about
+      the matter,&mdash;I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take all that
+      nonsense out of any man's head! It is not our beliefs that frighten us
+      half so much as our fancies. A man not only believes, but knows he runs a
+      risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but it does n't worry him
+      much. On the other hand, carry that man across a pasture a little way from
+      some dreary country-village, and show him an old house where there were
+      strange deaths a good many years ago, and there are rumors of ugly spots
+      on the walls,&mdash;the old man hung himself in the garret, that is
+      certain, and ever since the country-people have called it &ldquo;the haunted
+      house,&rdquo;&mdash;the owners have n't been able to let it since the last
+      tenants left on account of the noises,&mdash;so it has fallen into sad
+      decay, and the moss grows on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the
+      clapboards have turned black, and the windows rattle like teeth that
+      chatter with fear, and the walls of the house begin to lean as if its
+      knees were shaking, &mdash;take the man who did n't mind the real risk of
+      the cars to that old house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him
+      to sleep there alone,&mdash;how do you think he will like it? He doesn't
+      believe one word of ghosts,&mdash;but then he knows, that, whether waking
+      or sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with ghostly
+      images. It is not what we believe, as I said before, that frightens us
+      commonly, but what we conceive. A principle that reaches a good way if I
+      am not mistaken. I say, then, that, if these odd sounds coming from the
+      Little Gentleman's chamber sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get
+      to sleep, it is not because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or
+      mysterious way. The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head was
+      one that was founded on the landlady's story of his having a pile of gold;
+      it was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of sweating gold
+      was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews odious and afford
+      a pretext for plundering them. As for the sound like a woman laughing and
+      crying, I never said it was a woman's voice; for, in the first place, I
+      could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly, he may have an organ, or some
+      queer instrument or other, with what they call the vox humana stop. If he
+      moves his bed round to get away from the window, or for any such reason,
+      there is nothing very frightful in that simple operation. Most of our
+      foolish conceits explain themselves in some such simple way. And, yet, for
+      all that, I confess, that, when I woke up the other evening, and heard,
+      first a sweet complaining cry, and then footsteps, and then the dragging
+      sound,&mdash;nothing but his bed, I am quite sure,&mdash;I felt a stirring
+      in the roots of my hair as the feasters did in Keats's terrible poem of
+      &ldquo;Lamia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie awake
+      and get listening for sounds. Just keep your ears open any time after
+      midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a dark night. What
+      horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises you will hear! The
+      stillness of night is a vulgar error. All the dead things seem to be
+      alive. Crack! That is the old chest of drawers; you never hear it crack in
+      the daytime. Creak! There's a door ajar; you know you shut them all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Where can that latch be that rattles so? Is anybody trying it softly? or,
+      worse than any body, is&mdash;&mdash;? (Cold shiver.) Then a sudden gust
+      that jars all the windows;&mdash;very strange!&mdash;there does not seem
+      to be any wind about that it belongs to. When it stops, you hear the worms
+      boring in the powdery beams overhead. Then steps outside,&mdash;a stray
+      animal, no doubt. All right,&mdash;but a gentle moisture breaks out all
+      over you; and then something like a whistle or a cry,&mdash;another gust
+      of wind, perhaps; that accounts for the rustling that just made your heart
+      roll over and tumble about, so that it felt more like a live rat under
+      your ribs than a part of your own body; then a crash of something that has
+      fallen,&mdash;blown over, very likely&mdash;&mdash;Pater noster, qui es in
+      coelis! for you are damp and cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed
+      trembling so that the death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No,&mdash;night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings. Who
+      ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it, of that
+      Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,&mdash;foxes, and owls,
+      and crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on moonshiny
+      nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the eyes of dead
+      fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach? Our old mother Nature
+      has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when she comes in her dress of
+      blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops; but when she follows us
+      up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black velvet and diamonds, every
+      creak of her sandals and every whisper of her lips is full of mystery and
+      fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not believe there is anything
+      about this singular little neighbor of mine which is as it should not be.
+      Probably a visit to his room would clear up all that has puzzled me, and
+      make me laugh at the notions which began, I suppose, in nightmares, and
+      ended by keeping my imagination at work so as almost to make me
+      uncomfortable at times. But it is not so easy to visit him as some of our
+      other boarders, for various reasons which I will not stop to mention. I
+      think some of them are rather pleased to get &ldquo;the Professor&rdquo; under their
+      ceilings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man John, for instance, asked me to come up one day and try some
+      &ldquo;old Burbon,&rdquo; which he said was A 1. On asking him what was the number of
+      his room, he answered, that it was forty-'leven, sky-parlor floor, but
+      that I shouldn't find it, if he did n't go ahead to show me the way. I
+      followed him to his habitat, being very willing to see in what kind of
+      warren he burrowed, and thinking I might pick up something about the
+      boarders who had excited my curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mighty close quarters they were where the young man John bestowed himself
+      and his furniture; this last consisting of a bed, a chair, a bureau, a
+      trunk, and numerous pegs with coats and &ldquo;pants&rdquo; and &ldquo;vests,&rdquo;&mdash;as he
+      was in the habit of calling waist-coats and pantaloons or trousers,&mdash;hanging
+      up as if the owner had melted out of them. Several prints were pinned up
+      unframed,&mdash;among them that grand national portrait-piece, &ldquo;Barnum
+      presenting Ossian E. Dodge to Jenny Lind,&rdquo; and a picture of a famous trot,
+      in which I admired anew the cabalistic air of that imposing array of
+      expressions, and especially the Italicized word, &ldquo;Dan Mace names b. h.
+      Major Slocum,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Hiram Woodruff names g. m. Lady Smith.&rdquo; &ldquo;Best three in
+      five. Time: 2.40, 2.46, 2.50.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That set me thinking how very odd this matter of trotting horses is, as an
+      index of the mathematical exactness of the laws of living mechanism. I saw
+      Lady Suffolk trot a mile in 2.26. Flora Temple has trotted close down to
+      2.20; and Ethan Allen in 2.25, or less. Many horses have trotted their
+      mile under 2.30; none that I remember in public as low down as 2.20. From
+      five to ten seconds, then, in about a hundred and sixty is the whole range
+      of the maxima of the present race of trotting horses. The same thing is
+      seen in the running of men. Many can run a mile in five minutes; but when
+      one comes to the fractions below, they taper down until somewhere about
+      4.30 the maximum is reached. Averages of masses have been studied more
+      than averages of maxima and minima. We know from the Registrar-General's
+      Reports, that a certain number of children&mdash;say from one to two dozen&mdash;die
+      every year in England from drinking hot water out of spouts of teakettles.
+      We know, that, among suicides, women and men past a certain age almost
+      never use fire-arms. A woman who has made up her mind to die is still
+      afraid of a pistol or a gun. Or is it that the explosion would derange her
+      costume?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I say, averages of masses we have, but our tables of maxima we owe to the
+      sporting men more than to the philosophers. The lesson their experience
+      teaches is, that Nature makes no leaps,&mdash;does nothing per saltum. The
+      greatest brain that ever lived, no doubt, was only a small fraction of an
+      idea ahead of the second best. Just look at the chess-players. Leaving out
+      the phenomenal exceptions, the nice shades that separate the skilful ones
+      show how closely their brains approximate,&mdash;almost as closely as
+      chronometers. Such a person is a &ldquo;knight-player,&rdquo;&mdash;he must have that
+      piece given him. Another must have two pawns. Another, &ldquo;pawn and two,&rdquo; or
+      one pawn and two moves. Then we find one who claims &ldquo;pawn and move,&rdquo;
+       holding himself, with this fractional advantage, a match for one who would
+      be pretty sure to beat him playing even.&mdash;So much are minds alike;
+      and you and I think we are &ldquo;peculiar,&rdquo;&mdash;that Nature broke her
+      jelly-mould after shaping our cerebral convolutions. So I reflected,
+      standing and looking at the picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I say, Governor,&mdash;broke in the young man John,&mdash;them
+      bosses '11 stay jest as well, if you'll only set down. I've had 'em this
+      year, and they haven't stirred.&mdash;He spoke, and handed the chair
+      towards me,&mdash;seating himself, at the same time, on the end of the
+      bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You have lived in this house some time?&mdash;I said,&mdash;with a note of
+      interrogation at the end of the statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do I look as if I'd lost much flesh&mdash;said he, answering my question
+      by another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No,&mdash;said I;&mdash;for that matter, I think you do credit to &ldquo;the
+      bountifully furnished table of the excellent lady who provides so
+      liberally for the company that meets around her hospitable board.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      [The sentence in quotation-marks was from one of those disinterested
+      editorials in small type, which I suspect to have been furnished by a
+      friend of the landlady's, and paid for as an advertisement. This impartial
+      testimony to the superior qualities of the establishment and its head
+      attracted a number of applicants for admission, and a couple of new
+      boarders made a brief appearance at the table. One of them was of the
+      class of people who grumble if they don't get canvas-backs and woodcocks
+      every day, for three-fifty per week. The other was subject to
+      somnambulism, or walking in the night, when he ought to have been asleep
+      in his bed. In this state he walked into several of the boarders'
+      chambers, his eyes wide open, as is usual with somnambulists, and, from
+      some odd instinct or other, wishing to know what the hour was, got
+      together a number of their watches, for the purpose of comparing them, as
+      it would seem. Among them was a repeater, belonging to our young
+      Marylander. He happened to wake up while the somnambulist was in his
+      chamber, and, not knowing his infirmity, caught hold of him and gave him a
+      dreadful shaking, after which he tied his hands and feet, and so left him
+      till morning, when he introduced him to a gentleman used to taking care of
+      such cases of somnambulism.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you, my reader, will please to skip backward, over this parenthesis,
+      you will come to our conversation, which it has interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It a'n't the feed,&mdash;said the young man John,&mdash;it's the old
+      woman's looks when a fellah lays it in too strong. The feed's well enough.
+      After geese have got tough, 'n' turkeys have got strong, 'n' lamb's got
+      old, 'n' veal's pretty nigh beef, 'n' sparragrass 's growin' tall 'n' slim
+      'n' scattery about the head, 'n' green peas are gettin' so big 'n' hard
+      they'd be dangerous if you fired 'em out of a revolver, we get hold of all
+      them delicacies of the season. But it's too much like feedin' on live
+      folks and devourin' widdah's substance, to lay yourself out in the eatin'
+      way, when a fellah 's as hungry as the chap that said a turkey was too
+      much for one 'n' not enough for two. I can't help lookin' at the old
+      woman. Corned-beef-days she's tolerable calm. Roastin'-days she worries
+      some, 'n' keeps a sharp eye on the chap that carves. But when there's
+      anything in the poultry line, it seems to hurt her feelin's so to see the
+      knife goin' into the breast and joints comin' to pieces, that there's no
+      comfort in eatin'. When I cut up an old fowl and help the boarders, I
+      always feel as if I ought to say, Won't you have a slice of widdah?&mdash;instead
+      of chicken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man John fell into a train of reflections which ended in his
+      producing a Bologna sausage, a plate of &ldquo;crackers,&rdquo; as we Boston folks
+      call certain biscuits, and the bottle of whiskey described as being A 1.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the influence of the crackers and sausage, he grew cordial and
+      communicative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was time, I thought, to sound him as to those of our boarders who had
+      excited my curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What do you think of our young Iris?&mdash;I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fust-rate little filly;-he said.&mdash;Pootiest and nicest little chap
+      I've seen since the schoolma'am left. Schoolma'am was a brown-haired one,&mdash;eyes
+      coffee-color. This one has got wine-colored eyes,&mdash;'n' that 's the
+      reason they turn a fellah's head, I suppose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is a splendid blonde,&mdash;I said,&mdash;the other was a brunette.
+      Which style do you like best?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Which do I like best, boiled mutton or roast mutton?&mdash;said the young
+      man John. Like 'em both,&mdash;it a'n't the color of 'em makes the
+      goodness. I 've been kind of lonely since schoolma'am went away. Used to
+      like to look at her. I never said anything particular to her, that I
+      remember, but&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't know whether it was the cracker and sausage, or that the young
+      fellow's feet were treading on the hot ashes of some longing that had not
+      had time to cool, but his eye glistened as he stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose she wouldn't have looked at a fellah like me,&mdash;he said,&mdash;but
+      I come pretty near tryin'. If she had said, Yes, though, I shouldn't have
+      known what to have done with her. Can't marry a woman now-a-days till
+      you're so deaf you have to cock your head like a parrot to hear what she
+      says, and so longsighted you can't see what she looks like nearer than
+      arm's-length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here is another chance for you,&mdash;I said.&mdash;What do you want nicer
+      than such a young lady as Iris?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It's no use,&mdash;he answered.&mdash;I look at them girls and feel as the
+      fellah did when he missed catchin' the trout.&mdash;'To'od 'a' cost more
+      butter to cook him 'n' he's worth,&mdash;says the fellah.&mdash;Takes a
+      whole piece o' goods to cover a girl up now-a-days. I'd as lief undertake
+      to keep a span of elephants,&mdash;and take an ostrich to board, too,&mdash;as
+      to marry one of 'em. What's the use? Clerks and counter-jumpers ain't
+      anything. Sparragrass and green peas a'n't for them,&mdash;not while
+      they're young and tender. Hossback-ridin' a'n't for them,&mdash;except
+      once a year, on Fast-day. And marryin' a'n't for them. Sometimes a fellah
+      feels lonely, and would like to have a nice young woman, to tell her how
+      lonely he feels. And sometimes a fellah,&mdash;here the young man John
+      looked very confidential, and, perhaps, as if a little ashamed of his
+      weakness,&mdash;sometimes a fellah would like to have one o' them small
+      young ones to trot on his knee and push about in a little wagon,&mdash;a
+      kind of a little Johnny, you know;&mdash;it's odd enough, but, it seems to
+      me, nobody can afford them little articles, except the folks that are so
+      rich they can buy everything, and the folks that are so poor they don't
+      want anything. It makes nice boys of us young fellahs, no doubt! And it's
+      pleasant to see fine young girls sittin', like shopkeepers behind their
+      goods, waitin', and waitin', and waitin', 'n' no customers,&mdash;and the
+      men lingerin' round and lookin' at the goods, like folks that want to be
+      customers, but have n't the money!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do you think the deformed gentleman means to make love to Iris?&mdash;I
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What! Little Boston ask that girl to marry him! Well, now, that's cumin'
+      of it a little too strong. Yes, I guess she will marry him and carry him
+      round in a basket, like a lame bantam: Look here!&mdash;he said,
+      mysteriously;&mdash;one of the boarders swears there's a woman comes to
+      see him, and that he has heard her singin' and screechin'. I should like
+      to know what he's about in that den of his. He lays low 'n' keeps dark,&mdash;and,
+      I tell you, there's a good many of the boarders would like to get into his
+      chamber, but he don't seem to want 'em. Biddy could tell somethin' about
+      what she's seen when she 's been to put his room to rights. She's a Paddy
+      'n' a fool, but she knows enough to keep her tongue still. All I know is,
+      I saw her crossin' herself one day when she came out of that room. She
+      looked pale enough, 'n' I heard her mutterin' somethin' or other about the
+      Blessed Virgin. If it had n't been for the double doors to that chamber of
+      his, I'd have had a squint inside before this; but, somehow or other, it
+      never seems to happen that they're both open at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What do you think he employs himself about? said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man John winked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I waited patiently for the thought, of which this wink was the blossom, to
+      come to fruit in words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't believe in witches,&mdash;said the young man John.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were both silent for a few minutes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Did you ever see the young girl's drawing-books,&mdash;I said,
+      presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All but one,&mdash;he answered;&mdash;she keeps a lock on that, and won't
+      show it. Ma'am Allen, (the young rogue sticks to that name, in speaking of
+      the gentleman with the diamond,) Ma'am Allen tried to peek into it one day
+      when she left it on the sideboard. &ldquo;If you please,&rdquo; says she,&mdash;'n'
+      took it from him, 'n' gave him a look that made him curl up like a
+      caterpillar on a hot shovel. I only wished he had n't, and had jest given
+      her a little sass, for I've been takin' boxin'-lessons, 'n' I 've got a
+      new way of counterin' I want to try on to somebody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The end of all this was, that I came away from the young fellow's
+      room, feeling that there were two principal things that I had to live for,
+      for the next six weeks or six months, if it should take so long. These
+      were, to get a sight of the young girl's drawing-book, which I suspected
+      had her heart shut up in it, and to get a look into the Little Gentleman's
+      room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't doubt you think it rather absurd that I should trouble myself
+      about these matters. You tell me, with some show of reason, that all I
+      shall find in the young girl's&mdash;book will be some outlines of angels
+      with immense eyes, traceries of flowers, rural sketches, and caricatures,
+      among which I shall probably have the pleasure of seeing my own features
+      figuring. Very likely. But I'll tell you what I think I shall find. If
+      this child has idealized the strange little bit of humanity over which she
+      seems to have spread her wings like a brooding dove,&mdash;if, in one of
+      those wild vagaries that passionate natures are so liable to, she has
+      fairly sprung upon him with her clasping nature, as the sea-flowers fold
+      about the first stray shell-fish that brushes their outspread tentacles,
+      depend upon it, I shall find the marks of it in this drawing-book of hers,&mdash;if
+      I can ever get a look at it,&mdash;fairly, of course, for I would not play
+      tricks to satisfy my curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, if I can get into this Little Gentleman's room under any fair
+      pretext, I shall, no doubt, satisfy myself in five minutes that he is just
+      like other people, and that there is no particular mystery about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The night after my visit to the young man John, I made all these and many
+      more reflections. It was about two o'clock in the morning,&mdash;bright
+      starlight,&mdash;so light that I could make out the time on my
+      alarm-clock,&mdash;when I woke up trembling and very moist. It was the
+      heavy dragging sound, as I had often heard it before that waked me.
+      Presently a window was softly closed. I had just begun to get over the
+      agitation with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when I heard
+      the sound which seemed to me as of a woman's voice,&mdash;the clearest,
+      purest soprano which one could well conceive of. It was not loud, and I
+      could not distinguish a word, if it was a woman's voice; but there were
+      recurring phrases of sound and snatches of rhythm that reached me, which
+      suggested the idea of complaint, and sometimes, I thought, of passionate
+      grief and despair. It died away at last,&mdash;and then I heard the
+      opening of a door, followed by a low, monotonous sound, as of one talking,&mdash;and
+      then the closing of a door,&mdash;and presently the light on the opposite
+      wall disappeared and all was still for the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By George! this gets interesting,&mdash;I said, as I got out of bed for a
+      change of night-clothes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had this in my pocket the other day, but thought I would n't read it at
+      our celebration. So I read it to the boarders instead, and print it to
+      finish off this record with.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               ROBINSON OF LEYDEN.
+
+     He sleeps not here; in hope and prayer
+     His wandering flock had gone before,
+     But he, the shepherd, might not share
+     Their sorrows on the wintry shore.
+
+     Before the Speedwell's anchor swung,
+     Ere yet the Mayflower's sail was spread,
+     While round his feet the Pilgrims clung,
+     The pastor spake, and thus he said:&mdash;
+
+     &ldquo;Men, brethren, sisters, children dear!
+     God calls you hence from over sea;
+     Ye may not build by Haerlem Meer,
+     Nor yet along the Zuyder-Zee.
+
+     &ldquo;Ye go to bear the saving word
+     To tribes unnamed and shores untrod:
+     Heed well the lessons ye have heard
+     From those old teachers taught of God.
+
+     &ldquo;Yet think not unto them was lent
+     All light for all the coming days,
+     And Heaven's eternal wisdom spent
+     In making straight the ancient ways.
+
+     &ldquo;The living fountain overflows
+     For every flock, for every lamb,
+     Nor heeds, though angry creeds oppose
+     With Luther's dike or Calvin's dam.&rdquo;
+
+     He spake; with lingering, long embrace,
+     With tears of love and partings fond,
+     They floated down the creeping Maas,
+     Along the isle of Ysselmond.
+
+     They passed the frowning towers of Briel,
+     The &ldquo;Hook of Holland's&rdquo; shelf of sand,
+     And grated soon with lifting keel
+     The sullen shores of Fatherland.
+
+     No home for these!&mdash;too well they knew
+     The mitred king behind the throne;
+     The sails were set, the pennons flew,
+     And westward ho! for worlds unknown.
+
+     &mdash;And these were they who gave us birth,
+     The Pilgrims of the sunset wave,
+     Who won for us this virgin earth,
+     And freedom with the soil they gave.
+
+     The pastor slumbers by the Rhine,
+     &mdash;In alien earth the exiles lie,
+     &mdash;Their nameless graves our holiest shrine,
+     His words our noblest battle-cry!
+
+     Still cry them, and the world shall hear,
+     Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea!
+     Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer,
+     Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our boarding-house
+      since my last record, as if something or other were going on. There is no
+      particular change that I can think of in the aspect of things; yet I have
+      a feeling as if some game of life were quietly playing and strange forces
+      were at work, underneath this smooth surface of every-day boardinghouse
+      life, which would show themselves some fine morning or other in events, if
+      not in catastrophes. I have been watchful, as I said I should be, but have
+      little to tell as yet. You may laugh at me, and very likely think me
+      foolishly fanciful to trouble myself about what is going on in a
+      middling-class household like ours. Do as you like. But here is that
+      terrible fact to begin with,&mdash;a beautiful young girl, with the blood
+      and the nerve-fibre that belong to Nature's women, turned loose among live
+      men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      -Terrible fact?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very terrible. Nothing more so. Do you forget the angels who lost heaven
+      for the daughters of men? Do you forget Helen, and the fair women who made
+      mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was born? If jealousies
+      that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,&mdash;if pangs that waste men
+      to shadows and drive them into raving madness or moping melancholy,&mdash;if
+      assassination and suicide are dreadful possibilities, then there is always
+      something frightful about a lovely young woman.&mdash;I love to look at
+      this &ldquo;Rainbow,&rdquo; as her father used sometimes to call her, of ours.
+      Handsome creature that she is in forms and colors,&mdash;the very picture,
+      as it seems to me, of that &ldquo;golden blonde&rdquo; my friend whose book you read
+      last year fell in love with when he was a boy, (as you remember, no
+      doubt,)&mdash;handsome as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not
+      her beauty alone that holds my eyes upon her. Let me tell you one of my
+      fancies, and then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she
+      has for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is in the hearts of many men and women&mdash;let me add children&mdash;that
+      there is a Great Secret waiting for them,&mdash;a secret of which they get
+      hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later years. These
+      hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden startling flashes,&mdash;second
+      wakings, as it were,&mdash;a waking out of the waking state, which last is
+      very apt to be a half-sleep. I have many times stopped short and held my
+      breath, and felt the blood leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden
+      clairvoyant flashes. Of course I cannot tell what kind of a secret this
+      is, but I think of it as a disclosure of certain relations of our personal
+      being to time and space, to other intelligences, to the procession of
+      events, and to their First Great Cause. This secret seems to be broken up,
+      as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word and there a
+      syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is written out
+      for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life. I do not think it
+      could be; for I am disposed to consider our beliefs about such a possible
+      disclosure rather as a kind of premonition of an enlargement of our
+      faculties in some future state than as an expectation to be fulfilled for
+      most of us in this life. Persons, however, have fallen into trances,&mdash;as
+      did the Reverend William Tennent, among many others,&mdash;and learned
+      some things which they could not tell in our human words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this infinite
+      secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women are those that
+      carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great mystery. There are
+      women's faces, some real, some ideal, which contain something in them that
+      becomes a positive element in our creed, so direct and palpable a
+      revelation is it of the infinite purity and love. I remember two faces of
+      women with wings, such as they call angels, of Fra Angelico,&mdash;and I
+      just now came across a print of Raphael's Santa Apollina, with something
+      of the same quality,&mdash;which I was sure had their prototypes in the
+      world above ours. No wonder the Catholics pay their vows to the Queen of
+      Heaven! The unpoetical side of Protestantism is, that it has no women to
+      be worshipped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great Secret
+      to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces of it.
+      Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty of a plain
+      countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the lips of a woman,
+      not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a message for us, and
+      wait almost with awe to hear their accents. But this young girl has at
+      once the beauty of feature and the unspoken mystery of expression. Can she
+      tell me anything?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it which I
+      have been groping after through so many friendships that I have tired of,
+      and through&mdash;Hush! Is the door fast? Talking loud is a bad trick in
+      these curious boarding-houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind you of
+      and to use for a special illustration. Riding along over a rocky road,
+      suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing gravel changes to a
+      deep heavy rumble. There is a great hollow under your feet,&mdash;a huge
+      unsunned cavern. Deep, deep beneath you in the core of the living rock, it
+      arches its awful vault, and far away it stretches its winding galleries,
+      their roofs dripping into streams where fishes have been swimming and
+      spawning in the dark until their scales are white as milk and their eyes
+      have withered out, obsolete and useless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it is in life. We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces, grinding
+      over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,&mdash;now and
+      then jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must ride over or
+      round as we best may, sometimes bringing short up against a
+      disappointment, but still working along with the creaking and rattling and
+      grating and jerking that belong to the journey of life, even in the
+      smoothest-rolling vehicle. Suddenly we hear the deep underground
+      reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of some abyss of thought
+      or passion beneath us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wish the girl would go. I don't like to look at her so much, and yet I
+      cannot help it. Always that same expression of something that I ought to
+      know,&mdash;something that she was made to tell and I to hear,&mdash;lying
+      there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of her eyes and
+      make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell
+      the truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the
+      dry stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an
+      hour of passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track. The
+      Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three Words. Set
+      your mind at ease about that,&mdash;there are reasons I could give you
+      which settle all that matter. I don't wonder, however, that you confounded
+      the Great Secret with the Three Words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to tell. When
+      that is said, they are like China-crackers on the morning of the fifth of
+      July. And just as that little patriotic implement is made with a slender
+      train which leads to the magazine in its interior, so a sharp eye can
+      almost always see the train leading from a young girl's eye or lip to the
+      &ldquo;I love you&rdquo; in her heart. But the Three Words are not the Great Secret I
+      mean. No, women's faces are only one of the tablets on which that is
+      written in its partial, fragmentary symbols. It lies deeper than Love,
+      though very probably Love is a part of it. Some, I think,&mdash;Wordsworth
+      might be one of them,&mdash;spell out a portion of it from certain
+      beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others. I can mention
+      several poems of his that have shadowy hints which seem to me to come near
+      the region where I think it lies. I have known two persons who pursued it
+      with the passion of the old alchemists,&mdash;all wrong evidently, but
+      infatuated, and never giving up the daily search for it until they got
+      tremulous and feeble, and their dreams changed to visions of things that
+      ran and crawled about their floor and ceilings, and so they died. The
+      vulgar called them drunkards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this young
+      girl's face produces on me. It is akin to those influences a friend of
+      mine has described, you may remember, as coming from certain voices. I
+      cannot translate it into words,&mdash;only into feelings; and these I have
+      attempted to shadow by showing that her face hinted that revelation of
+      something we are close to knowing, which all imaginative persons are
+      looking for either in this world or on the very threshold of the next.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful incomprehensibleness of
+      my description of the expression in a young girl's face. You forget what a
+      miserable surface-matter this language is in which we try to reproduce our
+      interior state of being. Articulation is a shallow trick. From the light
+      Poh! which we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless scribbler's
+      impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest utterances which comes
+      from our throats in our moments of deepest need, is only a space of some
+      three or four inches. Words, which are a set of clickings, hissings,
+      lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared to tones and expression of
+      the features. I give it up; I thought I could shadow forth in some feeble
+      way, by their aid, the effect this young girl's face produces on my
+      imagination; but it is of no use. No doubt your head aches, trying to make
+      something of my description. If there is here and there one that can make
+      anything intelligible out of my talk about the Great Secret, and who has
+      spelt out a syllable or two of it on some woman's face, dead or living,
+      that is all I can expect. One should see the person with whom he converses
+      about such matters. There are dreamy-eyed people to whom I should say all
+      these things with a certainty of being understood;&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          That moment that his face I see,
+          I know the man that must hear me
+          To him my tale I teach.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar
+      for this August number, so that they will never see it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious
+      attempt, which may go for nothing, and you can have your money refunded,
+      if you will make the change.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
+      unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
+      breakfast-table. The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she again
+      seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards him. That
+      slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each
+      other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side, is
+      a physical fact I have often noticed. Then there is a tendency in all the
+      men's eyes to converge on her; and I do firmly believe, that, if all their
+      chairs were examined, they would be found a little obliquely placed, so as
+      to favor the direction in which their occupants love to look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting opposite
+      to me, is no exception to the rule. She brought down some mignonette one
+      morning, which she had grown in her chamber. She gave a sprig to her
+      little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and sent another by the hand of
+      Bridget to this old gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,&mdash;he said, and put it gallantly
+      in his button-hole.&mdash;After breakfast he must see some of her
+      drawings. Very fine performances,&mdash;very fine!&mdash;truly elegant
+      productions, truly elegant!&mdash;Had seen Miss Linwood's needlework in
+      London, in the year (eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he
+      said,)&mdash;patronized by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,&mdash;elegant,
+      truly elegant productions, very fine performances; these drawings reminded
+      him of them;&mdash;wonderful resemblance to Nature; an extraordinary art,
+      painting; Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures that he remembered
+      seeing when he was a boy. Used to remember some lines about a portrait
+      Written by Mr. Cowper, beginning,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+         &ldquo;Oh that those lips had language!  Life has pass'd
+          With me but roughly since I heard thee last.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother of
+      his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and looking,
+      not as his mother, but as his daughter should look. The dead young mother
+      was looking at the old man, her child, as she used to look at him so many,
+      many years ago. He stood still as if in a waking dream, his eyes fixed on
+      the drawings till their outlines grew indistinct and they ran into each
+      other, and a pale, sweet face shaped itself out of the glimmering light
+      through which he saw them.&mdash;What is there quite so profoundly human
+      as an old man's memory of a mother who died in his earlier years? Mother
+      she remains till manhood, and by-and-by she grows to be as a sister; and
+      at last, when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he looks back upon her in
+      her fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he caresses, not his parent,
+      but, as it were, his child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words with
+      which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!&mdash;he said.&mdash;All
+      gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms of her
+      great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest little
+      picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody that you
+      don't want to see.&mdash;The old gentleman put his hand to his forehead so
+      as to shade his eyes. I saw he was looking at the dim photograph of
+      memory, and turned from him to Iris.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How many drawing-books have you filled,&mdash;I said,&mdash;since you
+      began to take lessons?&mdash;This was the first,&mdash;she answered,&mdash;since
+      she was here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of
+      large size she had covered with drawings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I turned over the leaves of the book before us. Academic studies,
+      principally of the human figure. Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so forth.
+      Limbs from statues. Hands and feet from Nature. What a superb drawing of
+      an arm! I don't remember it among the figures from Michel Angelo, which
+      seem to have been her patterns mainly. From Nature, I think, or after a
+      cast from Nature.&mdash;Oh!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,&mdash;I said, taking
+      up the drawing-book with a lock on it,&mdash;Yes,&mdash;she said.&mdash;I
+      should like to see her style of working on a small scale.&mdash;There was
+      nothing in it worth showing,&mdash;she said; and presently I saw her try
+      the lock, which proved to be fast. We are all caricatured in it, I haven't
+      the least doubt. I think, though, I could tell by her way of dealing with
+      us what her fancies were about us boarders. Some of them act as if they
+      were bewitched with her, but she does not seem to notice it much. Her
+      thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor more than on anybody else. The
+      young fellow John appears to stand second in her good graces. I think he
+      has once or twice sent her what the landlady's daughter calls bo-kays of
+      flowers,&mdash;somebody has, at any rate.&mdash;I saw a book she had,
+      which must have come from the divinity-student. It had a dreary
+      title-page, which she had enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,&mdash;a
+      face from memory, apparently,&mdash;one of those faces that small children
+      loathe without knowing why, and which give them that inward disgust for
+      heaven so many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these
+      are &ldquo;good men,&rdquo; and that heaven is full of such.&mdash;The gentleman with
+      the diamond&mdash;the Koh-i-noor, so called by us&mdash;was not
+      encouraged, I think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap. He
+      pulls his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never
+      sees him, as it should seem. The young Marylander, who I thought would
+      have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks from his
+      corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to say, I wish
+      you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,&mdash;which would,
+      perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present one. But nothing
+      comes of all this,&mdash;and nothing has come of my sagacious idea of
+      finding out the girl's fancies by looking into her locked drawing-book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made an
+      attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber. For this
+      purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was just ready
+      to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk, followed him as he
+      toiled back to his room. He rested on the landing and faced round toward
+      me. There was something in his eye which said, Stop there! So we finished
+      our conversation on the landing. The next day, I mustered assurance enough
+      to knock at his door, having a pretext ready.&mdash;No answer.&mdash;Knock
+      again. A door, as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and locked, and
+      presently I heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen
+      boots. The bolts and the lock of the inner door were unfastened,&mdash;with
+      unnecessary noise, I thought,&mdash;and he came into the passage. He
+      pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which I stood.
+      He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as &ldquo;Mr. Copley&rdquo; used to
+      paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in; and a quaint-looking key in
+      his hand. Our conversation was short, but long enough to convince me that
+      the Little Gentleman did not want my company in his chamber, and did not
+      mean to have it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,&mdash;a
+      schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits. I mean to give up such
+      nonsense and mind my own business.&mdash;Hark! What the deuse is that odd
+      noise in his chamber?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when I
+      was a boy, that diabolized my imagination,&mdash;I mean, that gave me a
+      distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the
+      neighborhood where I was born and bred. The first was a series of marks
+      called the &ldquo;Devil's footsteps.&rdquo; These were patches of sand in the
+      pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush blackberry, the
+      &ldquo;dewberry,&rdquo; as our Southern neighbors call it, in prettier and more
+      Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers,&mdash;where
+      even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet &ldquo;everlasting&rdquo; could not grow, but all was
+      bare and blasted. The second was a mark in one of the public buildings
+      near my home,&mdash;the college dormitory named after a Colonial Governor.
+      I do not think many persons are aware of the existence of this mark,&mdash;little
+      having been said about the story in print, as it was considered very
+      desirable, for the sake of the Institution, to hush it up. In the
+      northwest corner, and on the level of the third or fourth story, there are
+      signs of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be
+      mistaken. A considerable portion of that corner must have been carried
+      away, from within outward. It was an unpleasant affair; and I do not care
+      to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred things
+      in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was variously
+      explained, took place. The story of the Appearance in the chamber was, I
+      suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to the building there
+      could be no question; and the zig-zag line, where the mortar is a little
+      thicker than before, is still distinctly visible. The queer burnt spots,
+      called the &ldquo;Devil's footsteps,&rdquo; had never attracted attention before this
+      time, though there is no evidence that they had not existed previously,
+      except that of the late Miss M., a &ldquo;Goody,&rdquo; so called, or sweeper, who was
+      positive on the subject, but had a strange horror of referring to an
+      affair of which she was thought to know something.&mdash;I tell you it was
+      not so pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in
+      an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper-chambers, and a
+      most ghostly garret,&mdash;with the &ldquo;Devil's footsteps&rdquo; in the fields
+      behind the house and in front of it the patched dormitory where the
+      unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled those godless youths
+      at their mock devotions, so that one of them was epileptic from that day
+      forward, and another, after a dreadful season of mental conflict, took
+      holy orders and became renowned for his ascetic sanctity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced by
+      these two singular facts I have just mentioned. There was a dark
+      storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly see a
+      heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which seemed to
+      me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their fright to have
+      huddled together and climbed up on each other's backs,&mdash;as the people
+      did in that awful crush where so many were killed, at the execution of
+      Holloway and Haggerty. Then the Lady's portrait, up-stairs, with the
+      sword-thrusts through it,&mdash;marks of the British officers' rapiers,&mdash;and
+      the tall mirror in which they used to look at their red coats,&mdash;confound
+      them for smashing its mate?&mdash;and the deep, cunningly wrought
+      arm-chair in which Lord Percy used to sit while his hair was dressing;&mdash;he
+      was a gentleman, and always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save
+      the silk covering my grandmother embroidered. Then the little room
+      downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on the
+      hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,&mdash;&ldquo;the
+      study&rdquo; in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of armed
+      men,&mdash;sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will show
+      you the &ldquo;dents&rdquo; left by the butts of their muskets all over the floor.
+      With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild stories
+      those awful country-boys that came to live in our service brought with
+      them;&mdash;of contracts written in blood and left out over night, not to
+      be found the next morning, (removed by the Evil One, who takes his nightly
+      round among our dwellings, and filed away for future use,)&mdash;of dreams
+      coming true,&mdash;of death-signs,&mdash;of apparitions, no wonder that my
+      imagination got excited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly see a
+      ghost is all very well-in the day-time. All the reason in the world will
+      never get those impressions of childhood, created by just such
+      circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head. That is the
+      only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of curiosity with which I
+      watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy with which I lie awake
+      whenever I hear anything going on in his chamber after midnight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred for the
+      present. You will see in what way it happened that my thoughts were turned
+      from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how I got my fancy full of
+      material images,&mdash;faces, heads, figures, muscles, and so forth,&mdash;in
+      such a way that I should have no chance in this number to gratify any
+      curiosity you may feel, if I had the means of so doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this time.
+      It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it that I should
+      sit to him for my portrait. When a soul draws a body in the great lottery
+      of life, where every one is sure of a prize, such as it is, the said soul
+      inspects the said body with the same curious interest with which one who
+      has ventured into a &ldquo;gift enterprise&rdquo; examines the &ldquo;massive silver
+      pencil-case&rdquo; with the coppery smell and impressible tube, or the &ldquo;splendid
+      gold ring&rdquo; with the questionable specific gravity, which it has been his
+      fortune to obtain in addition to his purchase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The soul, having studied the article of which it finds itself proprietor,
+      thinks, after a time, it knows it pretty well. But there is this
+      difference between its view and that of a person looking at us:&mdash;we
+      look from within, and see nothing but the mould formed by the elements in
+      which we are incased; other observers look from without, and see us as
+      living statues. To be sure, by the aid of mirrors, we get a few glimpses
+      of our outside aspect; but this occasional impression is always modified
+      by that look of the soul from within outward which none but ourselves can
+      take. A portrait is apt, therefore, to be a surprise to us. The artist
+      looks only from without. He sees us, too, with a hundred aspects on our
+      faces we are never likely to see. No genuine expression can be studied by
+      the subject of it in the looking-glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More than this; he sees us in a way in which many of our friends or
+      acquaintances never see us. Without wearing any mask we are conscious of,
+      we have a special face for each friend. For, in the first place, each puts
+      a special reflection of himself upon us, on the principle of assimilation
+      you found referred to in my last record, if you happened to read that
+      document. And secondly, each of our friends is capable of seeing just so
+      far, and no farther, into our face, and each sees in it the particular
+      thing that he looks for. Now the artist, if he is truly an artist, does
+      not take any one of these special views. Suppose he should copy you as you
+      appear to the man who wants your name to a subscription-list, you could
+      hardly expect a friend who entertains you to recognize the likeness to the
+      smiling face which sheds its radiance at his board. Even within your own
+      family, I am afraid there is a face which the rich uncle knows, that is
+      not so familiar to the poor relation. The artist must take one or the
+      other, or something compounded of the two, or something different from
+      either. What the daguerreotype and photograph do is to give the features
+      and one particular look, the very look which kills all expression, that of
+      self-consciousness. The artist throws you off your guard, watches you in
+      movement and in repose, puts your face through its exercises, observes its
+      transitions, and so gets the whole range of its expression. Out of all
+      this he forms an ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your exact look at
+      any one time or to any particular person. Such a portrait cannot be to
+      everybody what the ungloved call &ldquo;as nat'ral as life.&rdquo; Every good picture,
+      therefore, must be considered wanting in resemblance by many persons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist shapes your
+      features from his outline. It is that you resemble so many relatives to
+      whom you yourself never had noticed any particular likeness in your
+      countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances, thus:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I never
+      thought I had a sign of it. The mother's eyebrow and grayish-blue eye,
+      those I knew I had. But there is a something which recalls a smile that
+      faded away from my sister's lips&mdash;how many years ago! I thought it so
+      pleasant in her, that I love myself better for having a trace of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Are we not young? Are we not fresh and blooming? Wait, a bit. The artist
+      takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines, diverging outwards
+      from the eye over the temple. Five years.&mdash;The artist draws one
+      tolerably distinct and two faint lines, perpendicularly between the
+      eyebrows. Ten years.&mdash;The artist breaks up the contours round the
+      mouth, so that they look a little as a hat does that has been sat upon and
+      recovered itself, ready, as one would say, to crumple up again in the same
+      creases, on smiling or other change of feature.&mdash;Hold on! Stop that!
+      Give a young fellow a chance! Are we not whole years short of that
+      interesting period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc., etc.,
+      etc.?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There now! That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article, getting
+      a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the wrongs of the
+      toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye and the reflection
+      of a red curtain on our cheek. Is he not a POET that painted us?
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          &ldquo;Blest be the art that can immortalize!&rdquo;
+                                         COWPER.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school
+      with any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive
+      appellation, and in his features as special and definite an expression of
+      his sole individuality as if he were the first created of his race: As
+      soon as we are old enough to get the range of three or four generations
+      well in hand, and to take in large family histories, we never see an
+      individual in a face of any stock we know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern,
+      with fragmentary tints from this and that ancestor. The analysis of a face
+      into its ancestral elements requires that it should be examined in the
+      very earliest infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it
+      brings with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief space
+      when Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his silent
+      servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he has
+      wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all the
+      traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after feature, from the
+      slight outline to the finished portrait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our
+      bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as
+      identified with ourselves. In early years, while the child &ldquo;feels its life
+      in every limb,&rdquo; it lives in the body and for the body to a very great
+      extent. It ought to be so. There have been many very interesting children
+      who have shown a wonderful indifference to the things of earth and an
+      extraordinary development of the spiritual nature. There is a perfect
+      literature of their biographies, all alike in their essentials; the same
+      &ldquo;disinclination to the usual amusements of childhood &ldquo;; the same
+      remarkable sensibility; the same docility; the same conscientiousness; in
+      short, an almost uniform character, marked by beautiful traits, which we
+      look at with a painful admiration. It will be found that most of these
+      children are the subjects of some constitutional unfitness for living, the
+      most frequent of which I need not mention. They are like the beautiful,
+      blushing, half-grown fruit that falls before its time because its core is
+      gnawed out. They have their meaning,&mdash;they do not-live in vain,&mdash;but
+      they are windfalls. I am convinced that many healthy children are injured
+      morally by being forced to read too much about these little meek sufferers
+      and their spiritual exercises. Here is a boy that loves to run, swim, kick
+      football, turn somersets, make faces, whittle, fish, tear his clothes,
+      coast, skate, fire crackers, blow squash &ldquo;tooters,&rdquo; cut his name on
+      fences, read about Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat the
+      widest-angled slices of pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts with
+      his back teeth and bite out the better part of another boy's apple with
+      his front ones, turn up coppers, &ldquo;stick&rdquo; knives, call names, throw stones,
+      knock off hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, &ldquo;cut behind&rdquo; anything on
+      wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth, &ldquo;holler&rdquo; Fire! on slight
+      evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an engine-company, or, in his own
+      words, &ldquo;blow for tub No. 11,&rdquo; or whatever it may be;&mdash;isn't that a
+      pretty nice sort of a boy, though he has not got anything the matter with
+      him that takes the taste of this world out? Now, when you put into such a
+      hot-blooded, hard-fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's hand a sad-looking
+      volume or pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin, white-faced child, whose
+      life is really as much a training for death as the last month of a
+      condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in common between his
+      own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the experiences of the
+      doomed offspring of invalid parents? The time comes when we have learned
+      to understand the music of sorrow, the beauty of resigned suffering, the
+      holy light that plays over the pillow of those who die before their time,
+      in humble hope and trust. But it is not until he has worked his way
+      through the period of honest hearty animal existence, which every robust
+      child should make the most of,&mdash;not until he has learned the use of
+      his various faculties, which is his first duty,&mdash;that a boy of
+      courage and animal vigor is in a proper state to read these tearful
+      records of premature decay. I have no doubt that disgust is implanted in
+      the minds of many healthy children by early surfeits of pathological
+      piety. I do verily believe that He who took children in His arms and
+      blessed them loved the healthiest and most playful of them just as well as
+      those who were richest in the tuberculous virtues. I know what I am
+      talking about, and there are more parents in this country who will be
+      willing to listen to what I say than there are fools to pick a quarrel
+      with me. In the sensibility and the sanctity which often accompany
+      premature decay I see one of the most beautiful instances of the principle
+      of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence. But to get the
+      spiritual hygiene of robust natures out of the exceptional regimen of
+      invalids is just simply what we Professors call &ldquo;bad practice&rdquo;; and I know
+      by experience that there are worthy people who not only try it on their
+      own children, but actually force it on those of their neighbors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed,
+      or done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized. A polite note
+      from Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at their
+      Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted. We repaired to
+      that scientific Golgotha.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the woman
+      in the toy called a &ldquo;weather-house,&rdquo; both on the same wooden arm suspended
+      on a pivot,&mdash;so that when one comes to the door, the other retires
+      backwards, and vice versa. The more particular speciality of one is to
+      lubricate your entrance and exit,&mdash;that of the other to polish you
+      off phrenologically in the recesses of the establishment. Suppose yourself
+      in a room full of casts and pictures, before a counterful of books with
+      taking titles. I wonder if the picture of the brain is there, &ldquo;approved&rdquo;
+       by a noted Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor's, folio
+      plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim. An extra convolution, No. 9,
+      Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which was not to be seen
+      in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very liberally supplied by the
+      artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of &ldquo;organs.&rdquo; Professor Bumpus
+      is seated in front of a row of women, &mdash;horn-combers and
+      gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of life,&mdash;looking so
+      credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or Joe Smith should come
+      along, he could string the whole lot of them on his cheapest lie, as a boy
+      strings a dozen &ldquo;shiners&rdquo; on a stripped twig of willow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let the
+      horn-combers wait,&mdash;he shall be bumped without inspecting the
+      antechamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tape round the head,&mdash;22 inches. (Come on, old 23 inches, if you
+      think you are the better man!)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Feels thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles as those horrid old
+      women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the provision-stalls at the
+      Quincy Market. Vitality, No. 5 or 6, or something or other. Victuality,
+      (organ at epigastrium,) some other number equally significant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mild champooing of head now commences. 'Extraordinary revelations!
+      Cupidiphilous, 6! Hymeniphilous, 6 +! Paediphilous, 5! Deipniphilous, 6!
+      Gelasmiphilous, 6! Musikiphilous, 5! Uraniphilous, 5! Glossiphilous, 8!!
+      and so on. Meant for a linguist.&mdash;Invaluable information. Will invest
+      in grammars and dictionaries immediately.&mdash;I have nothing against the
+      grand total of my phrenological endowments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I never set great store by my head, and did not think Messrs. Bumpus and
+      Crane would give me so good a lot of organs as they did, especially
+      considering that I was a dead-head on that occasion. Much obliged to them
+      for their politeness. They have been useful in their way by calling
+      attention to important physiological facts. (This concession is due to our
+      immense bump of Candor.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A short Lecture on Phrenology, read to the Boarders at our
+      Breakfast-Table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a Pseudo-science. A
+      Pseudo-science consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting
+      arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its
+      doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells
+      against it, is excluded. It is invariably connected with some lucrative
+      practical application. Its professors and practitioners are usually shrewd
+      people; they are very serious with the public, but wink and laugh a good
+      deal among themselves. The believing multitude consists of women of both
+      sexes, feeble minded inquirers, poetical optimists, people who always get
+      cheated in buying horses, philanthropists who insist on hurrying up the
+      millennium, and others of this class, with here and there a clergyman,
+      less frequently a lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a
+      horse-jockey or a member of the detective police.&mdash;I do not say that
+      Phrenology was one of the Pseudo-sciences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies. It may
+      contain many truths, and even valuable ones. The rottenest bank starts
+      with a little specie. It puts out a thousand promises to pay on the
+      strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly a good one.
+      The practitioners of the Pseudo-sciences know that common minds, after
+      they have been baited with a real fact or two, will jump at the merest rag
+      of a lie, or even at the bare hook. When we have one fact found us, we are
+      very apt to supply the next out of our own imagination. (How many persons
+      can read Judges xv. 16 correctly the first time?) The Pseudo-sciences take
+      advantage of this.&mdash;I did not say that it was so with Phrenology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was
+      something in Phrenology. A broad, high forehead, it is commonly agreed,
+      promises intellect; one that is &ldquo;villanous low&rdquo; and has a huge hind-head
+      back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature. I have as rarely met an
+      unbiassed and sensible man who really believed in the bumps. It is
+      observed, however, that persons with what the Phrenologists call &ldquo;good
+      heads&rdquo; are more prone than others toward plenary belief in the doctrine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that the
+      moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable substance of
+      the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary, I might be puzzled.
+      But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar cheese, I call on him to
+      prove the truth of the Gaseous nature of our satellite, before I purchase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological statement.
+      It is only necessary to show that its truth is not proved, and cannot be,
+      by the common course of argument. The walls of the head are double, with a
+      great air-chamber between them, over the smallest and most closely crowded
+      &ldquo;organs.&rdquo; Can you tell how much money there is in a safe, which also has
+      thick double walls, by kneading its knobs with your fingers? So when a man
+      fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the organs of Individuality,
+      Size, etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt of the outside of
+      my strong-box and told me that there was a five-dollar or a
+      ten-dollar-bill under this or that particular rivet. Perhaps there is;
+      only he does n't know anything about at. But this is a point that I, the
+      Professor, understand, my friends, or ought to, certainly, better than you
+      do. The next argument you will all appreciate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of
+      Phrenology, which is very similar to that of the Pseudo-sciences. An
+      example will show it most conveniently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A. is a notorious thief. Messrs. Bumpus and Crane examine him and find a
+      good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness. Positive fact for Phrenology. Casts
+      and drawings of A. are multiplied, and the bump does not lose in the act
+      of copying.&mdash;I did not say it gained.&mdash;What do you look so for?
+      (to the boarders.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A. But B. has no bump at all
+      over Acquisitiveness. Negative fact; goes against Phrenology.&mdash;Not a
+      bit of it. Don't you see how small Conscientiousness is? That's the reason
+      B. stole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then comes C., ten times as much a thief as either A. or B.,&mdash;used
+      to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own pockets and
+      put its contents in another, if he could find no other way of committing
+      petty larceny. Unfortunately, C. has a hollow, instead of a bump, over
+      Acquisitiveness. Ah, but just look and see what a bump of Alimentiveness!
+      Did not C. buy nuts and gingerbread, when a boy, with the money he stole?
+      Of course you see why he is a thief, and how his example confirms our
+      noble science.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last comes along a case which is apparently a settler, for there is a
+      little brain with vast and varied powers,&mdash;a case like that of Byron,
+      for instance. Then comes out the grand reserve-reason which covers
+      everything and renders it simply impossible ever to corner a Phrenologist.
+      &ldquo;It is not the size alone, but the quality of an organ, which determines
+      its degree of power.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh! oh! I see.&mdash;The argument may be briefly stated thus by the
+      Phrenologist: &ldquo;Heads I win, tails you lose.&rdquo; Well, that's convenient.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to the
+      Pseudo-sciences. I did not say it was a Pseudo-science.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and amazed at
+      the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of Phrenology had read
+      their characters written upon their skulls. Of course the Professor
+      acquires his information solely through his cranial inspections and
+      manipulations.&mdash;What are you laughing at? (to the boarders.)&mdash;But
+      let us just suppose, for a moment, that a tolerably cunning fellow, who
+      did not know or care anything about Phrenology, should open a shop and
+      undertake to read off people's characters at fifty cents or a dollar
+      apiece. Let us see how well he could get along without the &ldquo;organs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I will suppose myself to set up such a shop. I would invest one hundred
+      dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts, and other
+      matters that would make the most show for the money. That would do to
+      begin with. I would then advertise myself as the celebrated Professor
+      Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and wait for my first customer.
+      My first customer is a middle-aged man. I look at him,&mdash;ask him a
+      question or two, so as to hear him talk. When I have got the hang of him,
+      I ask him to sit down, and proceed to fumble his skull, dictating as
+      follows: SCALE FROM 1 TO 10.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  LIST OF FACULTIES FOR           PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL.
+        CUSTOMER.
+                               Each to be accompanied with a wink.
+
+  Amativeness, 7.        Most men love the conflicting sex, and all
+                         men love to be told they do.
+
+  Alimentiveness, 8.     Don't you see that he has burst off his
+                         lowest waistcoat-button with feeding,&mdash;hey
+
+  Acquisitiveness, 8.    Of course.  A middle-aged Yankee.
+
+  Approbativeness 7+.    Hat well brushed.  Hair ditto.  Mark the
+                         effect of that plus sign.
+
+  Self-Esteem 6.         His face shows that.
+
+  Benevolence 9.         That'll please him.
+
+  Conscientiousness 8 1/2  That fraction looks first-rate.
+
+  Mirthfulness 7         Has laughed twice since he came in.
+
+  Ideality 9             That sounds well.
+
+  Form, Size, Weight,    4 to 6.  Average everything that Color, Locality,
+                         cannot be guessed. Eventuality, etc. etc.
+
+                  And so of the other faculties.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Of course, you know, that isn't the way the Phrenologists do. They go only
+      by the bumps.&mdash;What do you keep laughing so for? (to the boarders.) I
+      only said that is the way I should practise &ldquo;Phrenology&rdquo; for a living.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                    End of my Lecture.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The Reformers have good heads, generally. Their faces are commonly
+      serene enough, and they are lambs in private intercourse, even though
+      their voices may be like
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+         The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore,
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      when heard from the platform. Their greatest spiritual danger is from the
+      perpetual flattery of abuse to which they are exposed. These lines are
+      meant to caution them.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER.
+
+               HIS TEMPTATION.
+
+     No fear lest praise should make us proud!
+     We know how cheaply that is won;
+     The idle homage of the crowd
+     Is proof of tasks as idly done.
+
+     A surface-smile may pay the toil
+     That follows still the conquering Right,
+     With soft, white hands to dress the spoil
+     That sunbrowned valor clutched in fight.
+
+     Sing the sweet song of other days,
+     Serenely placid, safely true,
+     And o'er the present's parching ways
+     Thy verse distils like evening dew.
+
+     But speak in words of living power,
+     &mdash;They fall like drops of scalding rain
+     That plashed before the burning shower
+     Swept o'er the cities of the plain!
+
+     Then scowling Hate turns deadly pale,
+     &mdash;Then Passion's half-coiled adders spring,
+     And, smitten through their leprous mail,
+     Strike right and left in hope to sting.
+
+     If thou, unmoved by poisoning wrath,
+     Thy feet on earth, thy heart above,
+     Canst walk in peace thy kingly path,
+     Unchanged in trust, unchilled in love,&mdash;
+
+     Too kind for bitter words to grieve,
+     Too firm for clamor to dismay,
+     When Faith forbids thee to believe,
+     And Meekness calls to disobey,&mdash;
+
+     Ah, then beware of mortal pride!
+     The smiling pride that calmly scorns
+     Those foolish fingers, crimson dyed
+     In laboring on thy crown of thorns!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One of our boarders&mdash;perhaps more than one was concerned in it&mdash;sent
+      in some questions to me, the other day, which, trivial as some of them
+      are, I felt bound to answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1.&mdash;Whether a lady was ever known to write a letter covering only a
+      single page?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this I answered, that there was a case on record where a lady had but
+      half a sheet of paper and no envelope; and being obliged to send through
+      the post-office, she covered only one side of the paper (crosswise,
+      lengthwise, and diagonally).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2.&mdash;What constitutes a man a gentleman?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this I gave several answers, adapted to particular classes of
+      questioners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      a. Not trying to be a gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      b. Self-respect underlying courtesy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      c. Knowledge and observance of the fitness of things in social
+      intercourse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      d. f. s. d. (as many suppose.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3.&mdash;Whether face or figure is most attractive in the female sex?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Answered in the following epigram, by a young man about town:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Quoth Tom, &ldquo;Though fair her features be,
+     It is her figure pleases me.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;What may her figure be?&rdquo; I cried.
+     &ldquo;One hundred thousand!&rdquo; he replied.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      When this was read to the boarders, the young man John said he should like
+      a chance to &ldquo;step up&rdquo; to a figger of that kind, if the girl was one of the
+      right sort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The landlady said them that merried for money didn't deserve the blessin'
+      of a good wife. Money was a great thing when them that had it made a good
+      use of it. She had seen better days herself, and knew what it was never to
+      want for anything. One of her cousins merried a very rich old gentleman,
+      and she had heerd that he said he lived ten year longer than if he'd staid
+      by himself without anybody to take care of him. There was nothin' like a
+      wife for nussin' sick folks and them that couldn't take care of
+      themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man John got off a little wink, and pointed slyly with his thumb
+      in the direction of our diminutive friend, for whom he seemed to think
+      this speech was intended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If it was meant for him, he did n't appear to know that it was. Indeed, he
+      seems somewhat listless of late, except when the conversation falls upon
+      one of those larger topics that specially interest him, and then he grows
+      excited, speaks loud and fast, sometimes almost savagely,&mdash;and, I
+      have noticed once or twice, presses his left hand to his right side, as if
+      there were something that ached, or weighed, or throbbed in that region.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he speaks in this way, the general conversation is interrupted, and
+      we all listen to him. Iris looks steadily in his face, and then he will
+      turn as if magnetized and meet the amber eyes with his own melancholy
+      gaze. I do believe that they have some kind of understanding together,
+      that they meet elsewhere than at our table, and that there is a mystery,
+      which is going to break upon us all of a sudden, involving the relations
+      of these two persons. From the very first, they have taken to each other.
+      The one thing they have in common is the heroic will. In him, it shows
+      itself in thinking his way straightforward, in doing battle for &ldquo;free
+      trade and no right of search&rdquo; on the high seas of religious controversy,
+      and especially in fighting the battles of his crooked old city. In her, it
+      is standing up for her little friend with the most queenly disregard of
+      the code of boarding-house etiquette. People may say or look what they
+      like,&mdash;she will have her way about this sentiment of hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Poor Relation is in a dreadful fidget whenever the Little Gentleman
+      says anything that interferes with her own infallibility. She seems to
+      think Faith must go with her face tied up, as if she had the toothache,&mdash;and
+      that if she opens her mouth to the quarter the wind blows from, she will
+      catch her &ldquo;death o' cold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The landlady herself came to him one day, as I have found out, and tried
+      to persuade him to hold his tongue.&mdash;The boarders was gettin' uneasy,&mdash;she
+      said,&mdash;and some of 'em would go, she mistrusted, if he talked any
+      more about things that belonged to the ministers to settle. She was a poor
+      woman, that had known better days, but all her livin' depended on her
+      boarders, and she was sure there was n't any of 'em she set so much by as
+      she did by him; but there was them that never liked to hear about sech
+      things, except on Sundays.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Little Gentleman looked very smiling at the landlady, who smiled even
+      more cordially in return, and adjusted her cap-ribbon with an unconscious
+      movement,&mdash;a reminiscence of the long-past pairing-time, when she had
+      smoothed her locks and softened her voice, and won her mate by these and
+      other bird-like graces.&mdash;My dear Madam,&mdash;he said,&mdash;I will
+      remember your interests, and speak only of matters to which I am totally
+      indifferent.&mdash;I don't doubt he meant this; but a day or two after,
+      something stirred him up, and I heard his voice uttering itself aloud,
+      thus:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      -It must be done, Sir!&mdash;he was saying,&mdash;it must be done! Our
+      religion has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has been
+      Orientalized, it has been Anglicized, and the time is at hand when it must
+      be AMERICANIZED! Now, Sir, you see what Americanizing is in politics;&mdash;it
+      means that a man shall have a vote because he is a man,&mdash;and shall
+      vote for whom he pleases, without his neighbor's interference. If he
+      chooses to vote for the Devil, that is his lookout;&mdash;perhaps he
+      thinks the Devil is better than the other candidates; and I don't doubt
+      he's often right, Sir. Just so a man's soul has a vote in the spiritual
+      community; and it doesn't do, Sir, or it won't do long, to call him
+      &ldquo;schismatic&rdquo; and &ldquo;heretic&rdquo; and those other wicked names that the old
+      murderous Inquisitors have left us to help along &ldquo;peace and goodwill to
+      men&rdquo;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As long as you could catch a man and drop him into an oubliette, or pull
+      him out a few inches longer by machinery, or put a hot iron through his
+      tongue, or make him climb up a ladder and sit on a board at the top of a
+      stake so that he should be slowly broiled by the fire kindled round it,
+      there was some sense in these words; they led to something. But since we
+      have done with those tools, we had better give up those words. I should
+      like to see a Yankee advertisement like this!&mdash;(the Little Gentleman
+      laughed fiercely as he uttered the words,&mdash;)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Patent thumb-screws,&mdash;will crush the bone in three turns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The cast-iron boot, with wedge and mallet, only five dollars!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The celebrated extension-rack, warranted to stretch a man six
+      inches in twenty minutes,&mdash;money returned, if it proves
+      unsatisfactory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should like to see such an advertisement, I say, Sir! Now, what's the
+      use of using the words that belonged with the thumb-screws, and the
+      Blessed Virgin with the knives under her petticoats and sleeves and
+      bodice, and the dry pan and gradual fire, if we can't have the things
+      themselves, Sir? What's the use of painting the fire round a poor fellow,
+      when you think it won't do to kindle one under him,&mdash;as they did at
+      Valencia or Valladolid, or wherever it was?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;What story is that?&mdash;I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why,&mdash;he answered,&mdash;at the last auto-da-fe, in 1824 or '5, or
+      somewhere there,&mdash;it's a traveller's story, but a mighty knowing
+      traveller he is,&mdash;they had a &ldquo;heretic&rdquo; to use up according to the
+      statutes provided for the crime of private opinion. They could n't quite
+      make up their minds to burn him, so they only hung him in a hogshead
+      painted all over with flames!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, Sir! when a man calls you names because you go to the ballot-box and
+      vote for your candidate, or because you say this or that is your opinion,
+      he forgets in which half of the world he was born, Sir! It won't be long,
+      Sir, before we have Americanized religion as we have Americanized
+      government; and then, Sir, every soul God sends into the world will be
+      good in the face of all men for just so much of His &ldquo;inspiration&rdquo; as
+      &ldquo;giveth him understanding&rdquo;!&mdash;None of my words, Sir! none of my words!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;If Iris does not love this Little Gentleman, what does love look
+      like when one sees it? She follows him with her eyes, she leans over
+      toward him when he speaks, her face changes with the changes of his
+      speech, so that one might think it was with her as with Christabel,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          That all her features were resigned
+          To this sole image in her mind.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      But she never looks at him with such intensity of devotion as when he says
+      anything about the soul and the soul's atmosphere, religion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Women are twice as religious as men;&mdash;all the world knows that.
+      Whether they are any better, in the eyes of Absolute Justice, might be
+      questioned; for the additional religious element supplied by sex hardly
+      seems to be a matter of praise or blame. But in all common aspects they
+      are so much above us that we get most of our religion from them,&mdash;from
+      their teachings, from their example,&mdash;above all, from their pure
+      affections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now this poor little Iris had been talked to strangely in her childhood.
+      Especially she had been told that she hated all good things,&mdash;which
+      every sensible parent knows well enough is not true of a great many
+      children, to say the least. I have sometimes questioned whether many
+      libels on human nature had not been a natural consequence of the celibacy
+      of the clergy, which was enforced for so long a period.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The child had met this and some other equally encouraging statements as to
+      her spiritual conditions, early in life, and fought the battle of
+      spiritual independence prematurely, as many children do. If all she did
+      was hateful to God, what was the meaning of the approving or else the
+      disapproving conscience, when she had done &ldquo;right&rdquo; or &ldquo;wrong&rdquo;? No
+      &ldquo;shoulder-striker&rdquo; hits out straighter than a child with its logic. Why, I
+      can remember lying in my bed in the nursery and settling questions which
+      all that I have heard since and got out of books has never been able to
+      raise again. If a child does not assert itself in this way in good season,
+      it becomes just what its parents or teachers were, and is no better than a
+      plastic image.&mdash;How old was I at the time?&mdash;I suppose about 5823
+      years old,&mdash;that is, counting from Archbishop Usher's date of the
+      Creation, and adding the life of the race, whose accumulated intelligence
+      is a part of my inheritance, to my own. A good deal older than Plato, you
+      see, and much more experienced than my Lord Bacon and most of the world's
+      teachers.&mdash;Old books, as you well know, are books of the world's
+      youth, and new books are fruits of its age. How many of all these ancient
+      folios round me are like so many old cupels! The gold has passed out of
+      them long ago, but their pores are full of the dross with which it was
+      mingled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so Iris&mdash;having thrown off that first lasso which not only
+      fetters, but chokes those whom it can hold, so that they give themselves
+      up trembling and breathless to the great soul-subduer, who has them by the
+      windpipe had settled a brief creed for herself, in which love of the
+      neighbor, whom we have seen, was the first article, and love of the
+      Creator, whom we have not seen, grew out of this as its natural
+      development, being necessarily second in order of time to the first
+      unselfish emotions which we feel for the fellow-creatures who surround us
+      in our early years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The child must have some place of worship. What would a young girl be who
+      never mingled her voice with the songs and prayers that rose all around
+      her with every returning day of rest? And Iris was free to choose.
+      Sometimes one and sometimes another would offer to carry her to this or
+      that place of worship; and when the doors were hospitably opened, she
+      would often go meekly in by herself. It was a curious fact, that two
+      churches as remote from each other in doctrine as could well be divided
+      her affections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Church of Saint Polycarp had very much the look of a Roman Catholic
+      chapel. I do not wish to run the risk of giving names to the
+      ecclesiastical furniture which gave it such a Romish aspect; but there
+      were pictures, and inscriptions in antiquated characters, and there were
+      reading-stands, and flowers on the altar, and other elegant arrangements.
+      Then there were boys to sing alternately in choirs responsive to each
+      other, and there was much bowing, with very loud responding, and a long
+      service and a short sermon, and a bag, such as Judas used to hold in the
+      old pictures, was carried round to receive contributions. Everything was
+      done not only &ldquo;decently and in order,&rdquo; but, perhaps one might say, with a
+      certain air of magnifying their office on the part of the dignified
+      clergymen, often two or three in number. The music and the free welcome
+      were grateful to Iris, and she forgot her prejudices at the door of the
+      chapel. For this was a church with open doors, with seats for all classes
+      and all colors alike,&mdash;a church of zealous worshippers after their
+      faith, of charitable and serviceable men and women, one that took care of
+      its children and never forgot its poor, and whose people were much more
+      occupied in looking out for their own souls than in attacking the faith of
+      their neighbors. In its mode of worship there was a union of two
+      qualities,&mdash;the taste and refinement, which the educated require just
+      as much in their churches as elsewhere, and the air of stateliness, almost
+      of pomp, which impresses the common worshipper, and is often not without
+      its effect upon those who think they hold outward forms as of little
+      value. Under the half-Romish aspect of the Church of Saint Polycarp, the
+      young girl found a devout and loving and singularly cheerful religious
+      spirit. The artistic sense, which betrayed itself in the dramatic
+      proprieties of its ritual, harmonized with her taste. The mingled murmur
+      of the loud responses, in those rhythmic phrases, so simple, yet so
+      fervent, almost as if every tenth heart-beat, instead of its dull tic-tac,
+      articulated itself as &ldquo;Good Lord, deliver us! &ldquo;&mdash;the sweet
+      alternation of the two choirs, as their holy song floated from side to
+      side, the keen young voices rising like a flight of singing-birds that
+      passes from one grove to another, carrying its music with it back and
+      forward,&mdash;why should she not love these gracious outward signs of
+      those inner harmonies which none could deny made beautiful the lives of
+      many of her fellow-worshippers in the humble, yet not inelegant Chapel of
+      Saint Polycarp?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young Marylander, who was born and bred to that mode of worship, had
+      introduced her to the chapel, for which he did the honors for such of our
+      boarders as were not otherwise provided for. I saw them looking over the
+      same prayer-book one Sunday, and I could not help thinking that two such
+      young and handsome persons could hardly worship together in safety for a
+      great while. But they seemed to mind nothing but their prayer-book.
+      By-and-by the silken bag was handed round.&mdash;I don't believe she will;
+      so awkward, you know;&mdash;besides, she only came by invitation. There
+      she is, with her hand in her pocket, though,&mdash;and sure enough, her
+      little bit of silver tinkled as it struck the coin beneath. God bless her!
+      she has n't much to give; but her eye glistens when she gives it, and that
+      is all Heaven asks.&mdash;That was the first time I noticed these young
+      people together, and I am sure they behaved with the most charming
+      propriety,&mdash;in fact, there was one of our silent lady-boarders with
+      them, whose eyes would have kept Cupid and Psyche to their good behavior.
+      A day or two after this I noticed that the young gentleman had left his
+      seat, which you may remember was at the corner diagonal to that of Iris,
+      so that they have been as far removed from each other as they could be at
+      the table. His new seat is three or four places farther down the table. Of
+      course I made a romance out of this, at once. So stupid not to see it! How
+      could it be otherwise?&mdash;Did you speak, Madam? I beg your pardon. (To
+      my lady-reader.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I never saw anything like the tenderness with which this young girl treats
+      her little deformed neighbor. If he were in the way of going to church, I
+      know she would follow him. But his worship, if any, is not with the throng
+      of men and women and staring children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I, the Professor, on the other hand, am a regular church-goer. I should go
+      for various reasons if I did not love it; but I am happy enough to find
+      great pleasure in the midst of devout multitudes, whether I can accept all
+      their creeds or not. One place of worship comes nearer than the rest to my
+      ideal standard, and to this it was that I carried our young girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Church of the Galileans, as it is called, is even humbler in outside
+      pretensions than the Church of Saint Polycarp. Like that, it is open to
+      all comers. The stranger who approaches it looks down a quiet street and
+      sees the plainest of chapels,&mdash;a kind of wooden tent, that owes
+      whatever grace it has to its pointed windows and the high, sharp roofs&mdash;traces,
+      both, of that upward movement of ecclesiastical architecture which soared
+      aloft in cathedral-spires, shooting into the sky as the spike of a
+      flowering aloe from the cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below. This
+      suggestion of medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which a
+      hand-bell might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was all
+      of outward show the small edifice could boast. Within there was very
+      little that pretended to be attractive. A small organ at one side, and a
+      plain pulpit, showed that the building was a church; but it was a church
+      reduced to its simplest expression:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet when the great and wise monarch of the East sat upon his throne, in
+      all the golden blaze of the spoils of Ophir and the freights of the navy
+      of Tarshish, his glory was not like that of this simple chapel in its
+      Sunday garniture. For the lilies of the field, in their season, and the
+      fairest flowers of the year, in due succession, were clustered every
+      Sunday morning over the preacher's desk. Slight, thin-tissued blossoms of
+      pink and blue and virgin white in early spring, then the full-breasted and
+      deep-hearted roses of summer, then the velvet-robed crimson and yellow
+      flowers of autumn, and in the winter delicate exotics that grew under
+      skies of glass in the false summers of our crystal palaces without knowing
+      that it was the dreadful winter of New England which was rattling the
+      doors and frosting the panes,&mdash;in their language the whole year told
+      its history of life and growth and beauty from that simple desk. There was
+      always at least one good sermon,&mdash;this floral homily. There was at
+      least one good prayer,&mdash;that brief space when all were silent, after
+      the manner of the Friends at their devotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, too, Iris found an atmosphere of peace and love. The same gentle,
+      thoughtful faces, the same cheerful but reverential spirit, the same
+      quiet, the same life of active benevolence. But in all else how different
+      from the Church of Saint Polycarp! No clerical costume, no ceremonial
+      forms, no carefully trained choirs. A liturgy they have, to be sure, which
+      does not scruple to borrow from the time-honored manuals of devotion, but
+      also does not hesitate to change its expressions to its own liking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the good people seem a little easy with each other;&mdash;they are
+      apt to nod familiarly, and have even been known to whisper before the
+      minister came in. But it is a relief to get rid of that old Sunday&mdash;no,&mdash;Sabbath
+      face, which suggests the idea that the first day of the week is
+      commemorative of some most mournful event. The truth is, these brethren
+      and sisters meet very much as a family does for its devotions, not putting
+      off their humanity in the least, considering it on the whole quite a
+      delightful matter to come together for prayer and song and good counsel
+      from kind and wise lips. And if they are freer in their demeanor than some
+      very precise congregations, they have not the air of a worldly set of
+      people. Clearly they have not come to advertise their tailors and
+      milliners, nor for the sake of exchanging criticisms on the literary
+      character of the sermon they may hear. There is no restlessness and no
+      restraint among these quiet, cheerful worshippers. One thing that keeps
+      them calm and happy during the season so evidently trying to many
+      congregations is, that they join very generally in the singing. In this
+      way they get rid of that accumulated nervous force which escapes in all
+      sorts of fidgety movements, so that a minister trying to keep his
+      congregation still reminds one of a boy with his hand over the nose of a
+      pump which another boy is working,&mdash;this spirting impatience of the
+      people is so like the jets that find their way through his fingers, and
+      the grand rush out at the final Amen! has such a wonderful likeness to the
+      gush that takes place when the boy pulls his hand away, with immense
+      relief, as it seems, to both the pump and the officiating youngster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How sweet is this blending of all voices and all hearts in one common song
+      of praise! Some will sing a little loud, perhaps,&mdash;and now and then
+      an impatient chorister will get a syllable or two in advance, or an
+      enchanted singer so lose all thought of time and place in the luxury of a
+      closing cadence that he holds on to the last semi-breve upon his private
+      responsibility; but how much more of the spirit of the old Psalmist in the
+      music of these imperfectly trained voices than in the academic niceties of
+      the paid performers who take our musical worship out of our hands!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am of the opinion that the creed of the Church of the Galileans is not
+      laid down in as many details as that of the Church of Saint Polycarp. Yet
+      I suspect, if one of the good people from each of those churches had met
+      over the bed of a suffering fellow-creature, or for the promotion of any
+      charitable object, they would have found they had more in common than all
+      the special beliefs or want of beliefs that separated them would amount
+      to. There are always many who believe that the fruits of a tree afford a
+      better test of its condition than a statement of the composts with which
+      it is dressed, though the last has its meaning and importance, no doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Between these two churches, then, our young Iris divides her affections.
+      But I doubt if she listens to the preacher at either with more devotion
+      than she does to her little neighbor when he talks of these matters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What does he believe? In the first place, there is some deep-rooted
+      disquiet lying at the bottom of his soul, which makes him very bitter
+      against all kinds of usurpation over the right of private judgment. Over
+      this seems to lie a certain tenderness for humanity in general, bred out
+      of life-long trial, I should say, but sharply streaked with fiery lines of
+      wrath at various individual acts of wrong, especially if they come in an
+      ecclesiastical shape, and recall to him the days when his mother's
+      great-grandmother was strangled on Witch Hill, with a text from the Old
+      Testament for her halter. With all this, he has a boundless belief in the
+      future of this experimental hemisphere, and especially in the destiny of
+      the free thought of its northeastern metropolis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;A man can see further, Sir,&mdash;he said one day,&mdash;from the
+      top of Boston State House, and see more that is worth seeing, than from
+      all the pyramids and turrets and steeples in all the places in the world!
+      No smoke, Sir; no fog, Sir; and a clean sweep from the Outer Light and the
+      sea beyond it to the New Hampshire mountains! Yes, Sir,&mdash;and there
+      are great truths that are higher than mountains and broader than seas,
+      that people are looking for from the tops of these hills of ours;&mdash;such
+      as the world never saw, though it might have seen them at Jerusalem, if
+      its eyes had been open!&mdash;Where do they have most crazy people? Tell
+      me that, Sir!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I answered, that I had heard it said there were more in New England than
+      in most countries, perhaps more than in any part of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very good, Sir,&mdash;he answered.&mdash;When have there been most people
+      killed and wounded in the course of this century?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the wars of the French Empire, no doubt,&mdash;I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That's it! that's it!&mdash;said the Little Gentleman;&mdash;where the
+      battle of intelligence is fought, there are most minds bruised and broken!
+      We're battling for a faith here, Sir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The divinity-student remarked, that it was rather late in the world's
+      history for men to be looking out for a new faith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did n't say a new faith,&mdash;said the Little Gentleman;&mdash;old or
+      new, it can't help being different here in this American mind of ours from
+      anything that ever was before; the people are new, Sir, and that makes the
+      difference. One load of corn goes to the sty, and makes the fat of swine,&mdash;another
+      goes to the farm-house, and becomes the muscle that clothes the right arms
+      of heroes. It is n't where a pawn stands on the board that makes the
+      difference, but what the game round it is when it is on this or that
+      square.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Can any man look round and see what Christian countries are now doing, and
+      how they are governed, and what is the general condition of society,
+      without seeing that Christianity is the flag under which the world sails,
+      and not the rudder that steers its course? No, Sir! There was a great raft
+      built about two thousand years ago,&mdash;call it an ark, rather,&mdash;the
+      world's great ark! big enough to hold all mankind, and made to be launched
+      right out into the open waves of life,&mdash;and here it has been lying,
+      one end on the shore and one end bobbing up and down in the water, men
+      fighting all the time as to who should be captain and who should have the
+      state-rooms, and throwing each other over the side because they could not
+      agree about the points of compass, but the great vessel never getting
+      afloat with its freight of nations and their rulers;&mdash;and now, Sir,
+      there is and has been for this long time a fleet of &ldquo;heretic&rdquo; lighters
+      sailing out of Boston Bay, and they have been saying, and they say now,
+      and they mean to keep saying, &ldquo;Pump out your bilge-water, shovel over your
+      loads of idle ballast, get out your old rotten cargo, and we will carry it
+      out into deep waters and sink it where it will never be seen again; so
+      shall the ark of the world's hope float on the ocean, instead of sticking
+      in the dock-mud where it is lying!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It's a slow business, this of getting the ark launched. The Jordan was n't
+      deep enough, and the Tiber was n't deep enough, and the Rhone was n't deep
+      enough, and the Thames was n't deep enough, and perhaps the Charles is n't
+      deep enough; but I don't feel sure of that, Sir, and I love to hear the
+      workmen knocking at the old blocks of tradition and making the ways smooth
+      with the oil of the Good Samaritan. I don't know, Sir,&mdash;but I do
+      think she stirs a little,&mdash;I do believe she slides;&mdash;and when I
+      think of what a work that is for the dear old three-breasted mother of
+      American liberty, I would not take all the glory of all the greatest
+      cities in the world for my birthright in the soil of little Boston!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Some of us could not help smiling at this burst of local
+      patriotism, especially when it finished with the last two words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Iris smiled, too. But it was the radiant smile of pleasure which
+      always lights up her face when her little neighbor gets excited on the
+      great topics of progress in freedom and religion, and especially on the
+      part which, as he pleases himself with believing, his own city is to take
+      in that consummation of human development to which he looks forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently she looked into his face with a changed expression,&mdash;the
+      anxiety of a mother that sees her child suffering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You are not well,&mdash;she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am never well,&mdash;he answered.&mdash;His eyes fell mechanically on
+      the death's-head ring he wore on his right hand. She took his hand as if
+      it had been a baby's, and turned the grim device so that it should be out
+      of sight. One slight, sad, slow movement of the head seemed to say, &ldquo;The
+      death-symbol is still there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A very odd personage, to be sure! Seems to know what is going on, &mdash;reads
+      books, old and new,&mdash;has many recent publications sent him, they tell
+      me, but, what is more curious, keeps up with the everyday affairs of the
+      world, too. Whether he hears everything that is said with preternatural
+      acuteness, or whether some confidential friend visits him in a quiet way,
+      is more than I can tell. I can make nothing more of the noises I hear in
+      his room than my old conjectures. The movements I mention are less
+      frequent, but I often hear the plaintive cry,&mdash;I observe that it is
+      rarely laughing of late;&mdash;I never have detected one articulate word,
+      but I never heard such tones from anything but a human voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There has been, of late, a deference approaching to tenderness, on the
+      part of the boarders generally so far as he is concerned. This is
+      doubtless owing to the air of suffering which seems to have saddened his
+      look of late. Either some passion is gnawing at him inwardly, or some
+      hidden disease is at work upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;What 's the matter with Little Boston?&mdash;said the young man
+      John to me one day.&mdash;There a'n't much of him, anyhow; but 't seems to
+      me he looks peakeder than ever. The old woman says he's in a bad way, 'n'
+      wants a puss to take care of him. Them pusses that take care of old rich
+      folks marry 'em sometimes,&mdash;'n' they don't commonly live a great
+      while after that. No, Sir! I don't see what he wants to die for, after
+      he's taken so much trouble to live in such poor accommodations as that
+      crooked body of his. I should like to know how his soul crawled into it,
+      'n' how it's goin' to get out. What business has he to die, I should like
+      to know? Let Ma'am Allen (the gentleman with the diamond) die, if he
+      likes, and be (this is a family-magazine); but we a'n't goin' to have him
+      dyin'. Not by a great sight. Can't do without him anyhow. A'n't it fun to
+      hear him blow off his steam?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I believe the young fellow would take it as a personal insult, if the
+      Little Gentleman should show any symptoms of quitting our table for a
+      better world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;In the mean time, what with going to church in company with our
+      young lady, and taking every chance I could get to talk with her, I have
+      found myself becoming, I will not say intimate, but well acquainted with
+      Miss Iris. There is a certain frankness and directness about her that
+      perhaps belong to her artist nature. For, you see, the one thing that
+      marks the true artist is a clear perception and a firm, bold hand, in
+      distinction from that imperfect mental vision and uncertain touch which
+      give us the feeble pictures and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on
+      canvas or in stone. A true artist, therefore, can hardly fail to have a
+      sharp, well-defined mental physiognomy. Besides this, many young girls
+      have a strange audacity blended with their instinctive delicacy. Even in
+      physical daring many of them are a match for boys; whereas you will find
+      few among mature women, and especially if they are mothers, who do not
+      confess, and not unfrequently proclaim, their timidity. One of these young
+      girls, as many of us hereabouts remember, climbed to the top of a jagged,
+      slippery rock lying out in the waves,&mdash;an ugly height to get up, and
+      a worse one to get down, even for a bold young fellow of sixteen. Another
+      was in the way of climbing tall trees for crows' nests,&mdash;and crows
+      generally know about how far boys can &ldquo;shin up,&rdquo; and set their household
+      establishments above that high-water mark. Still another of these young
+      ladies I saw for the first time in an open boat, tossing on the ocean
+      ground-swell, a mile or two from shore, off a lonely island. She lost all
+      her daring, after she had some girls of her own to look out for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many blondes are very gentle, yielding in character, impressible,
+      unelastic. But the positive blondes, with the golden tint running through
+      them, are often full of character. They come, probably enough, from those
+      deep-bosomed German women that Tacitus portrayed in such strong colors.
+      The negative blondes, or those women whose tints have faded out as their
+      line of descent has become impoverished, are of various blood, and in them
+      the soul has often become pale with that blanching of the hair and loss of
+      color in the eyes which makes them approach the character of Albinesses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I see in this young girl that union of strength and sensibility which,
+      when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to accompany this
+      combination of active and passive capacity, we call genius. She is not an
+      accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but there is always an air in
+      every careless figure she draws, as it were of upward aspiration,&mdash;the
+      elan of John of Bologna's Mercury,&mdash;a lift to them, as if they had on
+      winged sandals, like the herald of the Gods. I hear her singing sometimes;
+      and though she evidently is not trained, yet is there a wild sweetness in
+      her fitful and sometimes fantastic melodies,&mdash;such as can come only
+      from the inspiration of the moment,&mdash;strangely enough, reminding me
+      of those long passages I have heard from my little neighbor's room, yet of
+      different tone, and by no means to be mistaken for those weird harmonies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot pretend to deny that I am interested in the girl. Alone,
+      unprotected, as I have seen so many young girls left in boarding-houses,
+      the centre of all the men's eyes that surround the table, watched with
+      jealous sharpness by every woman, most of all by that poor relation of our
+      landlady, who belongs to the class of women that like to catch others in
+      mischief when they themselves are too mature for indiscretions, (as one
+      sees old rogues turn to thief-catchers,) one of Nature's gendarmerie, clad
+      in a complete suit of wrinkles, the cheapest coat-of-mail against the
+      shafts of the great little enemy,&mdash;so surrounded, Iris spans this
+      commonplace household-life of ours with her arch of beauty, as the
+      rainbow, whose name she borrows, looks down on a dreary pasture with its
+      feeding flocks and herds of indifferent animals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These young girls that live in boarding-houses can do pretty much as they
+      will. The female gendarmes are off guard occasionally. The sitting-room
+      has its solitary moments, when any two boarders who wish to meet may come
+      together accidentally, (accidentally, I said, Madam, and I had not the
+      slightest intention of Italicizing the word,) and discuss the social or
+      political questions of the day, or any other subject that may prove
+      interesting. Many charming conversations take place at the foot of the
+      stairs, or while one of the parties is holding the latch of a door,&mdash;in
+      the shadow of porticoes, and especially on those outside balconies which
+      some of our Southern neighbors call &ldquo;stoops,&rdquo; the most charming places in
+      the world when the moon is just right and the roses and honeysuckles are
+      in full blow,&mdash;as we used to think in eighteen hundred and never
+      mention it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On such a balcony or &ldquo;stoop,&rdquo; one evening, I walked with Iris. We were on
+      pretty good terms now, and I had coaxed her arm under mine,&mdash;my left
+      arm, of course. That leaves one's right arm free to defend the lovely
+      creature, if the rival&mdash;odious wretch! attempt, to ravish her from
+      your side. Likewise if one's heart should happen to beat a little, its
+      mute language will not be without its meaning, as you will perceive when
+      the arm you hold begins to tremble, a circumstance like to occur, if you
+      happen to be a good-looking young fellow, and you two have the &ldquo;stoop&rdquo; to
+      yourselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had it to ourselves that evening. The Koh-inoor, as we called him, was
+      in a corner with our landlady's daughter. The young fellow John was
+      smoking out in the yard. The gendarme was afraid of the evening air, and
+      kept inside, The young Marylander came to the door, looked out and saw us
+      walking together, gave his hat a pull over his forehead and stalked off. I
+      felt a slight spasm, as it were, in the arm I held, and saw the girl's
+      head turn over her shoulder for a second. What a kind creature this is!
+      She has no special interest in this youth, but she does not like to see a
+      young fellow going off because he feels as if he were not wanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had her locked drawing-book under her arm.&mdash;Let me take it,&mdash;I
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She gave it to me to carry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is full of caricatures of all of us, I am sure,&mdash;said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed, and said,&mdash;No,&mdash;not all of you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was there, of course?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why, no,&mdash;she had never taken so much pains with me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she would let me see the inside of it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She would think of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as we parted, she took a little key from her pocket and handed it to
+      me. This unlocks my naughty book,&mdash;she said,&mdash;you shall see it.
+      I am not afraid of you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't know whether the last words exactly pleased me. At any rate, I
+      took the book and hurried with it to my room. I opened it, and saw, in a
+      few glances, that I held the heart of Iris in my hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I have no verses for you this month, except these few lines
+      suggested by the season.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               MIDSUMMER.
+
+     Here! sweep these foolish leaves away,
+     I will not crush my brains to-day!
+     Look! are the southern curtains drawn?
+     Fetch me a fan, and so begone!
+
+     Not that,&mdash;the palm-tree's rustling leaf
+     Brought from a parching coral-reef!
+     Its breath is heated;&mdash;I would swing
+     The broad gray plumes,&mdash;the eagle's wing.
+
+     I hate these roses' feverish blood!
+     Pluck me a half-blown lily-bud,
+     A long-stemmed lily from the lake,
+     Cold as a coiling water-snake.
+
+     Rain me sweet odors on the air,
+     And wheel me up my Indian chair,
+     And spread some book not overwise
+     Flat out before my sleepy eyes.
+
+     &mdash;Who knows it not,&mdash;this dead recoil
+     Of weary fibres stretched with toil,
+     The pulse that flutters faint and low
+     When Summer's seething breezes blow?
+
+     O Nature! bare thy loving breast
+     And give thy child one hour of rest,
+     One little hour to lie unseen
+     Beneath thy scarf of leafy green!
+
+     So, curtained by a singing pine,
+     Its murmuring voice shall blend with mine,
+     Till, lost in dreams, my faltering lay
+     In sweeter music dies away.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      X
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               IRIS, HER BOOK
+
+     I pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
+     By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
+     Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!
+
+     For Iris had no mother to infold her,
+     Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
+     Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her.
+
+     She had not learned the mystery of awaking
+     Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow's aching,
+     Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.
+
+     Yet lived, wrought, suffered.  Lo, the pictured token!
+     Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
+     Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?
+
+     She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,
+     Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
+     And talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.
+
+     Twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wearing,
+     Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
+     Then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.
+
+     Questioning all things: Why her Lord had sent her?
+     What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her?
+     Scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.
+
+     And then all tears and anguish: Queen of Heaven,
+     Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven,
+     Save me! oh, save me!  Shall I die forgiven?
+
+     And then&mdash;Ah, God!  But nay, it little matters
+     Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters,
+     The myriad germs that Nature shapes and shatters!
+
+     If she had&mdash;Well!  She longed, and knew not wherefore
+     Had the world nothing she might live to care for?
+     No second self to say her evening prayer for?
+
+     She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
+     Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
+     Showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.
+
+     Vain?  Let it be so!  Nature was her teacher.
+     What if a lonely and unsistered creature
+     Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,
+
+     Saying, unsaddened,&mdash;This shall soon be faded,
+     And double-hued the shining tresses braided,
+     And all the sunlight of the morning shaded?
+
+     &mdash;This her poor book is full of saddest follies,
+     Of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
+     With summer roses twined and wintry hollies.
+
+     In the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
+     Somewhere, beneath some maiden's tear-dimmed glances
+     May fall her little book of dreams and fancies.
+
+     Sweet sister!  Iris, who shall never name thee,
+     Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
+     Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.
+
+     Spare her, I pray thee!  If the maid is sleeping,
+     Peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping.
+     No more!  She leaves her memory in thy keeping.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      These verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume. As I
+      turned the pages, I hesitated for a moment. Is it quite fair to take
+      advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the unsunned depths of a
+      young girl's nature, which I can look through, as the balloon-voyagers
+      tell us they see from their hanging-baskets through the translucent waters
+      which the keenest eye of such as sail over them in ships might strive to
+      pierce in vain? Why has the child trusted me with such artless
+      confessions,&mdash;self-revelations, which might be whispered by trembling
+      lips, under the veil of twilight, in sacred confessionals, but which I
+      cannot look at in the light of day without a feeling of wronging a sacred
+      confidence?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought. She did
+      not know how fearfully she had disclosed herself; she was too profoundly
+      innocent. Her soul was no more ashamed than the fair shapes that walked in
+      Eden without a thought of over-liberal loveliness. Having nobody to tell
+      her story to,&mdash;having, as she said in her verses, no musical
+      instrument to laugh and cry with her,&mdash;nothing, in short, but the
+      language of pen and pencil,&mdash;all the veinings of her nature were
+      impressed on these pages as those of a fresh leaf are transferred to the
+      blank sheets which inclose it. It was the same thing which I remember
+      seeing beautifully shown in a child of some four or five years we had one
+      day at our boarding-house. The child was a deaf mute. But its soul had the
+      inner sense that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity which
+      through natural organs realizes itself in words. Only it had to talk with
+      its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alternations of feeling
+      and shifting expressions of thought as flitted over its face, I have never
+      seen in any other human countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wonder if something of spiritual transparency is not typified in the
+      golden-blonde organization. There are a great many little creatures,&mdash;many
+      small fishes, for instance,&mdash;which are literally transparent, with
+      the exception of some of the internal organs. The heart can be seen
+      beating as if in a case of clouded crystal. The central nervous column
+      with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through the whole length of the
+      diaphanous muscles of the body. Other little creatures are so darkened
+      with pigment that we can see only their surface. Conspirators and
+      poisoners are painted with black, beady-eyes and swarthy hue; Judas, in
+      Leonardo's picture, is the model of them all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However this may be, I should say there never had been a book like this of
+      Iris,&mdash;so full of the heart's silent language, so transparent that
+      the heart itself could be seen beating through it. I should say there
+      never could have been such a book, but for one recollection, which is not
+      peculiar to myself, but is shared by a certain number of my former
+      townsmen. If you think I over-color this matter of the young girl's book,
+      hear this, which there are others, as I just said, besides myself, will
+      tell you is strictly true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /><a name="linkten" id="linkten"></a> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      THE BOOK OF THE THREE MAIDEN SISTERS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the town called Cantabridge, now a city, water-veined and gas
+      windpiped, in the street running down to the Bridge, beyond which dwelt
+      Sally, told of in a book of a friend of mine, was of old a house inhabited
+      by three maidens. They left no near kinsfolk, I believe; whether they did
+      or not, I have no ill to speak of them; for they lived and died in all
+      good report and maidenly credit. The house they lived in was of the small,
+      gambrel-roofed cottage pattern, after the shape of Esquires' houses, but
+      after the size of the dwellings of handicraftsmen. The lower story was
+      fitted up as a shop. Specially was it provided with one of those
+      half-doors now so rarely met with, which are to whole doors as spencers
+      worn by old folk are to coats. They speak of limited commerce united with
+      a social or observing disposition&mdash;on the part of the shopkeeper,&mdash;allowing,
+      as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping off such as have not the
+      excuse of business to cross the threshold. On the door-posts, at either
+      side, above the half-door, hung certain perennial articles of merchandise,
+      of which my memory still has hanging among its faded photographs a kind of
+      netted scarf and some pairs of thick woollen stockings. More articles, but
+      not very many, were stored inside; and there was one drawer, containing
+      children's books, out of which I once was treated to a minute quarto
+      ornamented with handsome cuts. This was the only purchase I ever knew to
+      be made at the shop kept by the three maiden ladies, though it is probable
+      there were others. So long as I remember the shop, the same scarf and, I
+      should say, the same stockings hung on the door-posts.&mdash;You think I
+      am exaggerating again, and that shopkeepers would not keep the same
+      article exposed for years. Come to me, the Professor, and I will take you
+      in five minutes to a shop in this city where I will show you an article
+      hanging now in the very place where more than thirty years ago I myself
+      inquired the price of it of the present head of the establishment. [ This
+      was a glass alembic, which hung up in Daniel Henchman's apothecary shop,
+      corner of Cambridge and Chambers streets.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The three maidens were of comely presence, and one of them had had claims
+      to be considered a Beauty. When I saw them in the old meeting-house on
+      Sundays, as they rustled in through the aisles in silks and satins, not
+      gay, but more than decent, as I remember them, I thought of My Lady
+      Bountiful in the history of &ldquo;Little King Pippin,&rdquo; and of the Madam Blaize
+      of Goldsmith (who, by the way, must have taken the hint of it from a
+      pleasant poem, &ldquo;Monsieur de la Palisse,&rdquo; attributed to De la Monnoye, in
+      the collection of French songs before me). There was some story of an old
+      romance in which the Beauty had played her part. Perhaps they all had had
+      lovers; for, as I said, they were shapely and seemly personages, as I
+      remember them; but their lives were out of the flower and in the berry at
+      the time of my first recollections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One after another they all three dropped away, objects of kindly attention
+      to the good people round, leaving little or almost nothing, and nobody to
+      inherit it. Not absolutely nothing, of course. There must have been a few
+      old dresses&mdash;perhaps some bits of furniture, a Bible, and the
+      spectacles the good old souls read it through, and little keepsakes, such
+      as make us cry to look at, when we find them in old drawers;&mdash;such
+      relics there must have been. But there was more. There was a manuscript of
+      some hundred pages, closely written, in which the poor things had
+      chronicled for many years the incidents of their daily life. After their
+      death it was passed round somewhat freely, and fell into my hands. How I
+      have cried and laughed and colored over it! There was nothing in it to be
+      ashamed of, perhaps there was nothing in it to laugh at, but such a
+      picture of the mode of being of poor simple good old women I do believe
+      was never drawn before. And there were all the smallest incidents
+      recorded, such as do really make up humble life, but which die out of all
+      mere literary memoirs, as the houses where the Egyptians or the Athenians
+      lived crumble and leave only their temples standing. I know, for instance,
+      that on a given day of a certain year, a kindly woman, herself a poor
+      widow, now, I trust, not without special mercies in heaven for her good
+      deeds,&mdash;for I read her name on a proper tablet in the churchyard a
+      week ago,&mdash;sent a fractional pudding from her own table to the Maiden
+      Sisters, who, I fear, from the warmth and detail of their description,
+      were fasting, or at least on short allowance, about that time. I know who
+      sent them the segment of melon, which in her riotous fancy one of them
+      compared to those huge barges to which we give the ungracious name of
+      mudscows. But why should I illustrate further what it seems almost a
+      breach of confidence to speak of? Some kind friend, who could challenge a
+      nearer interest than the curious strangers into whose hands the book might
+      fall, at last claimed it, and I was glad that it should be henceforth
+      sealed to common eyes. I learned from it that every good and, alas! every
+      evil act we do may slumber unforgotten even in some earthly record. I got
+      a new lesson in that humanity which our sharp race finds it so hard to
+      learn. The poor widow, fighting hard to feed and clothe and educate her
+      children, had not forgotten the poorer ancient maidens. I remembered it
+      the other day, as I stood by her place of rest, and I felt sure that it
+      was remembered elsewhere. I know there are prettier words than pudding,
+      but I can't help it,&mdash;the pudding went upon the record, I feel sure,
+      with the mite which was cast into the treasury by that other poor widow
+      whose deed the world shall remember forever, and with the coats and
+      garments which the good women cried over, when Tabitha, called by
+      interpretation Dorcas, lay dead in the upper chamber, with her charitable
+      needlework strewed around her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters. You will believe me more
+      readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one that
+      lay open before me. Sometimes it was a poem that held it, sometimes a
+      drawing, angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere hieroglyphic symbol of
+      which I could make nothing. A rag of cloud on one page, as I remember,
+      with a streak of red zigzagging out of it across the paper as naturally as
+      a crack runs through a China bowl. On the next page a dead bird,&mdash;some
+      little favorite, I suppose; for it was worked out with a special love, and
+      I saw on the leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life I have had
+      a letter sealed,&mdash;a round spot where the paper is slightly
+      corrugated, and, if there is writing there, the letters are somewhat faint
+      and blurred. Most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic traceries.
+      It was strange to me at first to see how often she introduced those
+      homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,&mdash;for it seemed there was
+      none of them too humble for her to love, and none too little cared for by
+      Nature to be without its beauty for her artist eye and pencil. By the side
+      of the garden-flowers,&mdash;of Spring's curled darlings, the hyacinths,
+      of rosebuds, dear to sketching maidens, of flower-de-luces and
+      morning-glories, nay, oftener than these, and more tenderly caressed by
+      the colored brush that rendered them,&mdash;were those common growths
+      which fling themselves to be crushed under our feet and our wheels, making
+      themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that we forget each of
+      them is a ray of the Divine beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,&mdash;just as we
+      see them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the
+      kindling sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens the
+      fields, to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems fair to
+      loving eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round with milk-white
+      rays; the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale blue flowers aflame, one
+      after another, sparingly, as the lights are kindled in the candelabra of
+      decaying palaces where the heirs of dethroned monarchs are dying out; the
+      red and white clovers, the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,&mdash;&ldquo;the
+      white man's foot,&rdquo; as the Indians called it,&mdash;the wiry, jointed stems
+      of that iron creeping plant which we call &ldquo;knot-grass,&rdquo; and which loves
+      its life so dearly that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe,
+      as it clings to the cracks of the pavement;&mdash;all these plants, and
+      many more, she wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.&mdash;On one
+      of the pages were some musical notes. I touched them from curiosity on a
+      piano belonging to one of our boarders. Strange! There are passages that I
+      have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if they were
+      gasping for words to interpret them. She must have heard the strains that
+      have so excited my curiosity, coming from my neighbor's chamber. The
+      illuminated border she had traced round the page that held these notes
+      took the place of the words they seemed to be aching for. Above, a long
+      monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-hued, anxious and jaded and sullen, if
+      you can imagine such an expression in water. On one side an Alpine needle,
+      as it were, of black basalt, girdled with snow. On the other a threaded
+      waterfall. The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had a strange
+      look,&mdash;one would say the cliff was bleeding;&mdash;perhaps she did
+      not mean it. Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with
+      his wings spread over some unseen object.&mdash;And on the very next page
+      a procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page of
+      Fuller's &ldquo;Holy War,&rdquo; in which I recognized without difficulty every
+      boarder at our table in all the glory of the most resplendent caricature&mdash;three
+      only excepted,&mdash;the Little Gentleman, myself, and one other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the girl's
+      little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.&mdash;There is a left
+      arm again, though;&mdash;no,&mdash;that is from the &ldquo;Fighting Gladiator,&rdquo;
+       the &ldquo;Jeune Heros combattant&rdquo; of the Louvre;&mdash;there is the broad ring
+      of the shield. From a cast, doubtless. [The separate casts of the
+      &ldquo;Gladiator's&rdquo; arm look immense; but in its place the limb looks light,
+      almost slender,&mdash;such is the perfection of that miraculous marble. I
+      never felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on
+      that statue.]&mdash;Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all
+      the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when
+      she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty
+      or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A
+      dromedary flashing up the sands,&mdash;spray of the dry ocean sailed by
+      the &ldquo;ship of the desert.&rdquo; A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned,
+      heavy in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter. [The buffalo is the lion
+      of the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough
+      collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast. And here
+      are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering curves in their
+      bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood under their white feathers; and
+      grave, high-shouldered herons standing on one foot like cripples, and
+      looking at life round them with the cold stare of monumental effigies.&mdash;A
+      very odd page indeed! Not a creature in it without a curve or a twist, and
+      not one of them a mean figure to look at. You can make your own comment; I
+      am fanciful, you know. I believe she is trying to idealize what we
+      vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light of one
+      of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of beauty, as the
+      hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections, though we cannot see
+      them as symmetrical and entire figures, like the circle and ellipse. At
+      any rate, I cannot help referring this paradise of twisted spines to some
+      idea floating in her head connected with her friend whom Nature has warped
+      in the moulding.&mdash;That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of
+      mine. I believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at
+      times,&mdash;if it does not really get freed or half freed from her own.
+      Did you ever see a case of catalepsy? You know what I mean,&mdash;transient
+      loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position in
+      which they are put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure. She had been
+      talking with him and listening to him one day when the boarders moved from
+      the table nearly all at once. But she sat as before, her cheek resting on
+      her hand, her amber eyes wide open and still. I went to her, she was
+      breathing as usual, and her heart was beating naturally enough,&mdash;but
+      she did not answer. I bent her arm; it was as plastic as softened wax, and
+      kept the place I gave it.&mdash;This will never do, though, and I
+      sprinkled a few drops of water on her forehead. She started and looked
+      round.&mdash;I have been in a dream,&mdash;she said;&mdash;I feel as if
+      all my strength were in this arm;&mdash;give me your hand!&mdash;She took
+      my right hand in her left, which looked soft and white enough, but&mdash;Good
+      Heaven! I believe she will crack my bones! All the nervous power in her
+      body must have flashed through those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps
+      her iron window-bars,&mdash;she who could hardly glove herself when in her
+      common health. Iris turned pale, and the tears came to her eyes;&mdash;she
+      saw she had given pain. Then she trembled, and might have fallen but for
+      me;&mdash;the poor little soul had been in one of those trances that
+      belong to the spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly those of
+      women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To come back to this wondrous book of Iris. Two pages faced each other
+      which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind. On the left
+      hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked with a single bird.
+      No trace of earth, but still the winged creature seemed to be soaring
+      upward and upward. Facing it, one of those black dungeons such as Piranesi
+      alone of all men has pictured. I am sure she must have seen those awful
+      prisons of his, out of which the Opium-Eater got his nightmare vision,
+      described by another as &ldquo;cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous
+      and forbidden things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions
+      among mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscriptions.&rdquo;
+       Such a black dungeon faced the page that held the blue sky and the single
+      bird; at the bottom of it something was coiled,&mdash;what, and whether
+      meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not make out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I told you the young girl's soul was in this book. As I turned over the
+      last leaves I could not help starting. There were all sorts of faces among
+      the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders that ran round the
+      pages. They had mostly the outline of childish or womanly or manly beauty,
+      without very distinct individuality. But at last it seemed to me that some
+      of them were taking on a look not wholly unfamiliar to me; there were
+      features that did not seem new.&mdash;Can it be so? Was there ever such
+      innocence in a creature so full of life? She tells her heart's secrets as
+      a three-years-old child betrays itself without need of being questioned!
+      This was no common miss, such as are turned out in scores from the
+      young-lady-factories, with parchments warranting them accomplished and
+      virtuous,&mdash;in case anybody should question the fact. I began to
+      understand her;&mdash;and what is so charming as to read the secret of a
+      real femme incomprise?&mdash;for such there are, though they are not the
+      ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off
+      whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores
+      of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's insight is
+      sometimes worth a life's experience. I have frequently seen children, long
+      exercised by pain and exhaustion, whose features had a strange look of
+      advanced age. Too often one meets such in our charitable institutions.
+      Their faces are saddened and wrinkled, as if their few summers were
+      threescore years and ten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, many youthful poets have written as if their hearts were old
+      before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool and
+      saddening as that of evening in more common lives. The profound melancholy
+      of those lines of Shelley,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;I could lie down like a tired child
+      And weep away the life of care
+      Which I have borne and yet must bear.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      came from a heart, as he says, &ldquo;too soon grown old,&rdquo;&mdash;at twenty-six
+      years, as dull people count time, even when they talk of poets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,&mdash;only this
+      gift of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as well as
+      in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of feeling and
+      imagery that takes me by surprise. And then besides, and most of all, I am
+      puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy confidence in me. Perhaps I owe
+      it to my&mdash;Well, no matter! How one must love the editor who first
+      calls him the venerable So-and-So!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down. The world is always
+      ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what
+      to do with genius. Talent is a docile creature. It bows its head meekly
+      while the world slips the collar over it. It backs into the shafts like a
+      lamb. It draws its load cheerfully, and is patient of the bit and of the
+      whip. But genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes
+      it hard to train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius,&mdash;namely,
+      that it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will, and
+      therefore more distinctly human in its character. Genius, on the other
+      hand, is much more like those instincts which govern the admirable
+      movements of the lower creatures, and therefore seems to have something of
+      the lower or animal character. A goose flies by a chart which the Royal
+      Geographical Society could not mend. A poet, like the goose, sails without
+      visible landmarks to unexplored regions of truth, which philosophy has yet
+      to lay down on its atlas. The philosopher gets his track by observation;
+      the poet trusts to his inner sense, and makes the straighter and swifter
+      line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet, to look at it in another light, is not even the lowest instinct
+      more truly divine than any voluntary human act done by the suggestion of
+      reason? What is a bee's architecture but an unobstructed divine thought?&mdash;what
+      is a builder's approximative rule but an obstructed thought of the
+      Creator, a mutilated and imperfect copy of some absolute rule Divine
+      Wisdom has established, transmitted through a human soul as an image
+      through clouded glass?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Talent is a very common family-trait; genius belongs rather to
+      individuals;&mdash;just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family,
+      but rarely a whole brood of either. Talent is often to be envied, and
+      genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other
+      of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual
+      insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's
+      vested ideas,&mdash;blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible
+      private truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;What is the use of my weighing out antitheses in this way, like a
+      rhetorical grocer?&mdash;You know twenty men of talent, who are making
+      their way in the world; you may, perhaps, know one man of genius, and very
+      likely do not want to know any more. For a divine instinct, such as drives
+      the goose southward and the poet heavenward, is a hard thing to manage,
+      and proves too strong for many whom it possesses. It must have been a
+      terrible thing to have a friend like Chatterton or Burns. And here is a
+      being who certainly has more than talent, at once poet and artist in
+      tendency, if not yet fairly developed,&mdash;a woman, too;&mdash;and
+      genius grafted on womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem, as
+      you may see a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which cannot
+      keep pace with its evolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think now you know something of this young person. She wants nothing but
+      an atmosphere to expand in. Now and then one meets with a nature for which
+      our hard, practical New England life is obviously utterly incompetent. It
+      comes up, as a Southern seed, dropped by accident in one of our gardens,
+      finds itself trying to grow and blow into flower among the homely roots
+      and the hardy shrubs that surround it. There is no question that certain
+      persons who are born among us find themselves many degrees too far north.
+      Tropical by organization, they cannot fight for life with our eastern and
+      northwestern breezes without losing the color and fragrance into which
+      their lives would have blossomed in the latitude of myrtles and oranges.
+      Strange effects are produced by suffering any living thing to be developed
+      under conditions such as Nature had not intended for it. A French
+      physiologist confined some tadpoles under water in the dark. Removed from
+      the natural stimulus of light, they did not develop legs and arms at the
+      proper period of their growth, and so become frogs; they swelled and
+      spread into gigantic tadpoles. I have seen a hundred colossal human
+      tadpoles, overgrown Zarvce or embryos; nay, I am afraid we Protestants
+      should look on a considerable proportion of the Holy Father's one hundred
+      and thirty-nine millions as spiritual larvae, sculling about in the dark
+      by the aid of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs,
+      and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven into the
+      lungs made to receive it. Of course we never try to keep young souls in
+      the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or two of legs
+      by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been bred and fed!
+      Never! Never. Never?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now to go back to our plant. You may know, that, for the earlier stages of
+      development of almost any vegetable, you only want air, water, light, and
+      warmth. But by-and-by, if it is to have special complex principles as a
+      part of its organization, they must be supplied by the soil;&mdash;your
+      pears will crack, if the root of the tree gets no iron,&mdash;your
+      asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do. Just at the period of
+      adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to come into flower and to set
+      its fruit. Then it is that many young natures, having exhausted the
+      spiritual soil round them of all it contains of the elements they demand,
+      wither away, undeveloped and uncolored, unless they are transplanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pray for these dear young souls! This is the second natural birth;&mdash;for
+      I do not speak of those peculiar religious experiences which form the
+      point of transition in many lives between the consciousness of a general
+      relation to the Divine nature and a special personal relation. The litany
+      should count a prayer for them in the list of its supplications; masses
+      should be said for them as for souls in purgatory; all good Christians
+      should remember them as they remember those in peril through travel or
+      sickness or in warfare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would transport this child to Rome at once, if I had my will. She should
+      ripen under an Italian sun. She should walk under the frescoed vaults of
+      palaces, until her colors deepened to those of Venetian beauties, and her
+      forms were perfected into rivalry with the Greek marbles, and the east
+      wind was out of her soil. Has she not exhausted this lean soil of the
+      elements her growing nature requires?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know. The magnolia grows and comes into full flower on Cape Ann,
+      many degrees out of its proper region. I was riding once along that
+      delicious road between the hills and the sea, when we passed a thicket
+      where there seemed to be a chance of finding it. In five minutes I had
+      fallen on the trees in full blossom, and filled my arms with the sweet,
+      resplendent flowers. I could not believe I was in our cold, northern
+      Essex, which, in the dreary season when I pass its slate-colored,
+      unpainted farm-houses, and huge, square, windy, 'squire-built &ldquo;mansions,&rdquo;
+       looks as brown and unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all
+      trodden out and the colored fringe worn from all its border.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a poet
+      or a painter come to his full growth here just as well? Yes, but if the
+      gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak of Nature springs
+      up in a single spot among the beeches and alders, is there not as much
+      reason to think the perfumed flower of imaginative genius will find it
+      hard to be born and harder to spread its leaves in the clear, cold
+      atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone of humanity?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Take the poet. On the one hand, I believe that a person with the poetical
+      faculty finds material everywhere. The grandest objects of sense and
+      thought are common to all climates and civilizations. The sky, the woods,
+      the waters, the storms, life, death love, the hope and vision of eternity,&mdash;these
+      are images that write themselves in poetry in every soul which has
+      anything of the divine gift.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished life, in
+      distinction from a rich and suggestive one. Which our common New England
+      life might be considered, I will not decide. But there are some things I
+      think the poet misses in our western Eden. I trust it is not unpatriotic
+      to mention them in this point of view as they come before us in so many
+      other aspects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which we
+      grow. At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked up an
+      Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow. At Canoe Meadow, in the Berkshire
+      Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads. So everywhere Indian
+      arrowheads. Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who knows? who
+      cares? There is no history to the red race,&mdash;there is hardly an
+      individual in it;&mdash;a few instincts on legs and holding a tomahawk&mdash;there
+      is the Indian of all time. The story of one red ant is the story of all
+      red ants. So, the poet, in trying to wing his way back through the life
+      that has kindled, flitted, and faded along our watercourses and on our
+      southern hillsides for unknown generations, finds nothing to breathe or
+      fly in; he meets
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;A vast vacuity! all unawares,
+     Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
+     Ten thousand fathom deep.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      But think of the Old World,&mdash;that part of it which is the seat of
+      ancient civilization! The stakes of the Britons' stockades are still
+      standing in the bed of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's
+      bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of the
+      Caesars. In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of yesterday,&mdash;Rome,
+      under her kings, is but an intruding newcomer, as we contemplate her in
+      the shadow of the Cyclopean walls of Fiesole or Volterra. It makes a man
+      human to live on these old humanized soils. He cannot help marching in
+      step with his kind in the rear of such a procession. They say a dead man's
+      hand cures swellings, if laid on them. There is nothing like the dead cold
+      hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the
+      solemn flow of the life of our race. Rousseau came out of one of his sad
+      self-torturing fits, as he cast his eye on the arches of the old Roman
+      aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving railroad
+      village. The new &ldquo;depot,&rdquo; the smartly-painted pine houses, the spacious
+      brick hotel, the white meeting-house, and the row of youthful and leggy
+      trees before it, are exhilarating. They speak of progress, and the time
+      when there shall be a city, with a His Honor the Mayor, in the place of
+      their trim but transient architectural growths. Pardon me, if I prefer the
+      pyramids. They seem to me crystals formed from a stronger solution of
+      humanity than the steeple of the new meeting-house. I may be wrong, but
+      the Tiber has a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the Pons
+      Alius, even more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles eddying
+      round the piles of West Boston Bridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, again, we Yankees are a kind of gypsies,&mdash;a mechanical and
+      migratory race. A poet wants a home. He can dispense with an apple-parer
+      and a reaping-machine. I feel this more for others than for myself, for
+      the home of my birth and childhood has been as yet exempted from the
+      change which has invaded almost everything around it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Pardon me a short digression. To what small things our memory and
+      our affections attach themselves! I remember, when I was a child, that one
+      of the girls planted some Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs in the southwest corner
+      of our front-yard. Well, I left the paternal roof and wandered in other
+      lands, and learned to think in the words of strange people. But after many
+      years, as I looked on the little front-yard again, it occurred to me that
+      there used to be some Star-of-Bethlehems in the southwest corner. The
+      grass was tall there, and the blade of the plant is very much like grass,
+      only thicker and glossier. Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles
+      when he hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of
+      Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my monumental
+      memorial-flower. Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly in her bosom; the
+      glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they are there still, though
+      they never flower, darkened as they are by the shade of the elms and
+      rooted in the matted turf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial as
+      that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you
+      remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone with a
+      whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the back-yard,
+      insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory. This intussusception
+      of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful storing away among
+      the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in the material structure of the
+      thinking centre itself. In the very core of the brain, in the part where
+      Des Cartes placed the soul, is a small mineral deposit, consisting, as I
+      have seen it in the microscope, of grape-like masses of crystalline
+      matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the
+      Star-of-Bethlehems, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest
+      home-feeling. Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the dwelling of
+      pleasant old Neighbor Walrus. I remember the sweet honeysuckle that I saw
+      in flower against the wall of his house a few months ago, as long as I
+      remember the sky and stars. That clump of peonies, butting their purple
+      heads through the soil every spring in just the same circle, and by-and-by
+      unpacking their hard balls of buds in flowers big enough to make a double
+      handful of leaves, has come up in just that place, Neighbor Walrus tells
+      me, for more years than I have passed on this planet. It is a rare
+      privilege in our nomadic state to find the home of one's childhood and its
+      immediate neighborhood thus unchanged. Many born poets, I am afraid,
+      flower poorly in song, or not at all, because they have been too often
+      transplanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then a good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;&mdash;their
+      voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery without
+      elasticity or oil. I wish it were fair to print a letter a young girl,
+      about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since. &ldquo;I am *** *** ***,&rdquo;
+       she says, and tells her whole name outright. Ah!&mdash;said I, when I read
+      that first frank declaration,&mdash;you are one of the right sort!&mdash;She
+      was. A winged creature among close-clipped barn door fowl. How tired the
+      poor girl was of the dull life about her,&mdash;the old woman's &ldquo;skeleton
+      hand&rdquo; at the window opposite, drawing her curtains,&mdash;&ldquo;Ma'am shooing
+      away the hens,&rdquo;&mdash;the vacuous country eyes staring at her as only
+      country eyes can stare,&mdash;a routine of mechanical duties, and the
+      soul's half-articulated cry for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,&mdash;pray
+      for her, and for all such! Faith often cures their longings; but it is so
+      hard to give a soul to heaven that has not first been trained in the
+      fullest and sweetest human affections! Too often they fling their hearts
+      away on unworthy objects. Too often they pine in a secret discontent,
+      which spreads its leaden cloud over the morning of their youth. The
+      immeasurable distance between one of these delicate natures and the
+      average youths among whom is like to be her only choice makes one's heart
+      ache. How many women are born too finely organized in sense and soul for
+      the highway they must walk with feet unshod! Life is adjusted to the wants
+      of the stronger sex. There are plenty of torrents to be crossed in its
+      journey; but their stepping-stones are measured by the stride of man, and
+      not of woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart. So says the great
+      medical authority, Laennec. Incurable cases of this kind used to find
+      their hospitals in convents. We have the disease in New England,&mdash;but
+      not the hospitals. I don't like to think of it. I will not believe our
+      young Iris is going to die out in this way. Providence will find her some
+      great happiness, or affliction, or duty,&mdash;and which would be best for
+      her, I cannot tell. One thing is sure: the interest she takes in her
+      little neighbor is getting to be more engrossing than ever. Something is
+      the matter with him, and she knows it, and I think worries herself about
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wonder sometimes how so fragile and distorted a frame has kept the fiery
+      spirit that inhabits it so long its tenant. He accounts for it in his own
+      way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The air of the Old World is good for nothing, he said, one day.&mdash;Used
+      up, Sir,&mdash;breathed over and over again. You must come to this side,
+      Sir, for an atmosphere fit to breathe nowadays. Did not worthy Mr.
+      Higginson say that a breath of New England's air is better than a sup of
+      Old England's ale? I ought to have died when I was a boy, Sir; but I could
+      n't die in this Boston air,&mdash;and I think I shall have to go to New
+      York one of these days, when it's time for me to drop this bundle,&mdash;or
+      to New Orleans, where they have the yellow fever,&mdash;or to
+      Philadelphia, where they have so many doctors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was some time ago; but of late he has seemed, as I have before said,
+      to be ailing. An experienced eye, such as I think I may call mine, can
+      tell commonly whether a man is going to die, or not, long before he or his
+      friends are alarmed about him. I don't like it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Iris has told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her
+      family, and that she is afraid she has it. Those who are so endowed look
+      upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him. According to the degree
+      to which it covers him, his death will be near or more remote. It is an
+      awful faculty; but science gives one too much like it. Luckily for our
+      friends, most of us who have the scientific second-sight school ourselves
+      not to betray our knowledge by word or look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Day by day, as the Little Gentleman comes to the table, it seems to me
+      that the shadow of some approaching change falls darker and darker over
+      his countenance. Nature is struggling with something, and I am afraid she
+      is under in the wrestling-match. You do not care much, perhaps, for my
+      particular conjectures as to the nature of his difficulty. I should say,
+      however, from the sudden flushes to which he is subject, and certain other
+      marks which, as an expert, I know how to interpret, that his heart was in
+      trouble; but then he presses his hand to the right side, as if there were
+      the centre of his uneasiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I say difficulty about the heart, I do not mean any of those
+      sentimental maladies of that organ which figure more largely in romances
+      than on the returns which furnish our Bills of Mortality. I mean some
+      actual change in the organ itself, which may carry him off by slow and
+      painful degrees, or strike him down with one huge pang and only time for a
+      single shriek,&mdash;as when the shot broke through the brave Captain
+      Nolan's breast, at the head of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and with a
+      loud cry he dropped dead from his saddle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought it only fair to say something of what I apprehended to some who
+      were entitled to be warned. The landlady's face fell when I mentioned my
+      fears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor man!&mdash;she said.&mdash;And will leave the best room empty! Has
+      n't he got any sisters or nieces or anybody to see to his things, if he
+      should be took away? Such a sight of cases, full of everything! Never
+      thought of his failin' so suddin. A complication of diseases, she
+      expected. Liver-complaint one of 'em?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After this first involuntary expression of the too natural selfish
+      feelings, (which we must not judge very harshly, unless we happen to be
+      poor widows ourselves, with children to keep filled, covered, and taught,&mdash;rents
+      high,&mdash;beef eighteen to twenty cents per pound,)&mdash;after this
+      first squeak of selfishness, followed by a brief movement of curiosity, so
+      invariable in mature females, as to the nature of the complaint which
+      threatens the life of a friend or any person who may happen to be
+      mentioned as ill,&mdash;the worthy soul's better feelings struggled up to
+      the surface, and she grieved for the doomed invalid, until a tear or two
+      came forth and found their way down a channel worn for them since the
+      early days of her widowhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, this dreadful, dreadful business of being the prophet of evil! Of all
+      the trials which those who take charge of others' health and lives have to
+      undergo, this is the most painful. It is all so plain to the practised
+      eye!&mdash;and there is the poor wife, the doting mother, who has never
+      suspected anything, or at least has clung always to the hope which you are
+      just going to wrench away from her!&mdash;I must tell Iris that I think
+      her poor friend is in a precarious state. She seems nearer to him than
+      anybody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did tell her. Whatever emotion it produced, she kept a still face,
+      except, perhaps, a little trembling of the lip.&mdash;Could I be certain
+      that there was any mortal complaint?&mdash;Why, no, I could not be
+      certain; but it looked alarming to me.&mdash;He shall have some of my
+      life,&mdash;she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose this to have been a fancy of hers, or a kind of magnetic power
+      she could give out;&mdash;at any rate, I cannot help thinking she wills
+      her strength away from herself, for she has lost vigor and color from that
+      day. I have sometimes thought he gained the force she lost; but this may
+      have been a whim, very probably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day she came suddenly to me, looking deadly pale. Her lips moved, as
+      if she were speaking; but I could not at first hear a word. Her hair
+      looked strangely, as if lifting itself, and her eyes were full of wild
+      light. She sunk upon a chair, and I thought was falling into one of her
+      trances. Something had frozen her blood with fear; I thought, from what
+      she said, half audibly, that she believed she had seen a shrouded figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night, at about eleven o'clock, I was sent for to see the Little
+      Gentleman, who was taken suddenly ill. Bridget, the servant, went before
+      me with a light. The doors were both unfastened, and I found myself
+      ushered, without hindrance, into the dim light of the mysterious apartment
+      I had so longed to enter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I found these stanzas in the young girl's book among many others. I give
+      them as characterizing the tone of her sadder moments.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               UNDER THE VIOLETS.
+
+     Her hands are cold; her face is white;
+     No more her pulses come and go;
+     Her eyes are shut to life and light;
+     Fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
+     And lay her where the violets blow.
+
+     But not beneath a graven stone,
+     To plead for tears with alien eyes;
+     A slender cross of wood alone
+     Shall say, that here a maiden lies
+     In peace beneath the peaceful skies.
+
+     And gray old trees of hugest limb
+     Shall wheel their circling shadows round
+     To make the scorching sunlight dim
+     That drinks the greenness from the ground,
+     And drop their dead leaves on her mound.
+
+     When o'er their boughs the squirrels run,
+     And through their leaves the robins call,
+     And, ripening in the autumn sun,
+     The acorns and the chestnuts fall,
+     Doubt not that she will heed them all.
+
+     For her the morning choir shall sing
+     Its matins from the branches high,
+     And every minstrel voice of spring,
+     That trills beneath the April sky,
+     Shall greet her with its earliest cry.
+
+     When, turning round their dial-track,
+     Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
+     Her little mourners, clad in black,
+     The crickets, sliding through the grass,
+     Shall pipe for her an evening mass.
+
+     At last the rootlets of the trees
+     Shall find the prison where she lies,
+     And bear the buried dust they seize
+     In leaves and blossoms to the skies.
+     So may the soul that warmed it rise!
+
+     If any, born of kindlier blood,
+     Should ask, What maiden lies below?
+     Say only this: A tender bud,
+     That tried to blossom in the snow,
+     Lies withered where the violets blow.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      You will know, perhaps, in the course of half an hour's reading, what has
+      been haunting my hours of sleep and waking for months. I cannot tell, of
+      course, whether you are a nervous person or not. If, however, you are such
+      a person,&mdash;if it is late at night,&mdash;if all the rest of the
+      household have gone off to bed,&mdash;if the wind is shaking your windows
+      as if a human hand were rattling the sashes,&mdash;if your candle or lamp
+      is low and will soon burn out,&mdash;let me advise you to take up some
+      good quiet sleepy volume, or attack the &ldquo;Critical Notices&rdquo; of the last
+      Quarterly and leave this to be read by daylight, with cheerful voices
+      round, and people near by who would hear you, if you slid from your chair
+      and came down in a lump on the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not say that your heart will beat as mine did, I am willing to
+      confess, when I entered the dim chamber. Did I not tell you that I was
+      sensitive and imaginative, and that I had lain awake with thinking what
+      were the strange movements and sounds which I heard late at night in my
+      little neighbor's apartment? It had come to that pass that I was truly
+      unable to separate what I had really heard from what I had dreamed in
+      those nightmares to which I have been subject, as before mentioned. So,
+      when I walked into the room, and Bridget, turning back, closed the door
+      and left me alone with its tenant, I do believe you could have grated a
+      nutmeg on my skin, such a &ldquo;goose-flesh&rdquo; shiver ran over it. It was not
+      fear, but what I call nervousness,&mdash;unreasoning, but irresistible; as
+      when, for instance, one looking at the sun going down says, &ldquo;I will count
+      fifty before it disappears&rdquo;; and as he goes on and it becomes doubtful
+      whether he will reach the number, he gets strangely flurried, and his
+      imagination pictures life and death and heaven and hell as the issues
+      depending on the completion or non-completion of the fifty he is counting.
+      Extreme curiosity will excite some people as much as fear, or what
+      resembles fear, acts on some other less impressible natures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I may find myself in the midst of strange facts in this little conjurer's
+      room. Or, again, there may be nothing in this poor invalid's chamber but
+      some old furniture, such as they say came over in the Mayflower. All this
+      is just what I mean to, find out while I am looking at the Little
+      Gentleman, who has suddenly become my patient. The simplest things turn
+      out to be unfathomable mysteries; the most mysterious appearances prove to
+      be the most commonplace objects in disguise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wonder whether the boys who live in Roxbury and Dorchester are ever
+      moved to tears or filled with silent awe as they look upon the rocks and
+      fragments of &ldquo;puddingstone&rdquo; abounding in those localities. I have my
+      suspicions that those boys &ldquo;heave a stone&rdquo; or &ldquo;fire a brickbat,&rdquo; composed
+      of the conglomerate just mentioned, without any more tearful or
+      philosophical contemplations than boys of less favored regions expend on
+      the same performance. Yet a lump of puddingstone is a thing to look at, to
+      think about, to study over, to dream upon, to go crazy with, to beat one's
+      brains out against. Look at that pebble in it. From what cliff was it
+      broken? On what beach rolled by the waves of what ocean? How and when
+      imbedded in soft ooze, which itself became stone, and by-and-by was lifted
+      into bald summits and steep cliffs, such as you may see on
+      Meetinghouse-Hill any day&mdash;yes, and mark the scratches on their faces
+      left when the boulder-carrying glaciers planed the surface of the
+      continent with such rough tools that the storms have not worn the marks
+      out of it with all the polishing of ever so many thousand years?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or as you pass a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it any
+      bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little
+      worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the
+      stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish. One of these specks
+      magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its
+      centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and
+      by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,&mdash;life
+      beginning in the microcosm, as in the great worlds of the firmament, with
+      the revolution that turns the surface in ceaseless round to the source of
+      life and light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk! Before you have solved their
+      mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified slag, or
+      a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces. Mysteries are common
+      enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and Dorchester think of
+      &ldquo;brickbats&rdquo; and the spawn of creatures that live in roadside puddles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly plain,
+      when we can get at them so as to turn them over. How many ghosts that
+      &ldquo;thick men's blood with cold&rdquo; prove to be shirts hung out to dry! How many
+      mermaids have been made out of seals! How many times have horse-mackerels
+      been taken for the sea-serpent!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the matter
+      with the patient. That is what I say to myself, as I draw a chair to the
+      bedside. The bed is an old-fashioned, dark mahogany four-poster. It was
+      never that which made the noise of something moving. It is too heavy to be
+      pushed about the room.&mdash;The Little Gentleman was sitting, bolstered
+      up by pillows, with his hands clasped and their united palms resting on
+      the back of the head, one of the three or four positions specially
+      affected by persons whose breathing is difficult from disease of the heart
+      or other causes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sit down, Sir,&mdash;he said,&mdash;sit down! I have come to the hill
+      Difficulty, Sir, and am fighting my way up.&mdash;His speech was laborious
+      and interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Don't talk,&mdash;I said,&mdash;except to answer my questions.&mdash;And I
+      proceeded to &ldquo;prospect&rdquo; for the marks of some local mischief, which you
+      know is at the bottom of all these attacks, though we do not always find
+      it. I suppose I go to work pretty much like other professional folks of my
+      temperament. Thus:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wrist, if you please.&mdash;I was on his right side, but he presented his
+      left wrist, crossing it over the other.&mdash;I begin to count, holding
+      watch in left hand. One, two, three, four,&mdash;What a handsome hand!
+      wonder if that splendid stone is a carbuncle.&mdash;One, two, three, four,
+      five, six, seven,&mdash;Can't see much, it is so dark, except one white
+      object.&mdash;One, two, three, four,&mdash;Hang it! eighty or ninety in
+      the minute, I guess.&mdash;Tongue, if you please.&mdash;Tongue is put out.
+      Forget to look at it, or, rather, to take any particular notice of it;&mdash;but
+      what is that white object, with the long arm stretching up as if pointing
+      to the sky, just as Vesalius and Spigelius and those old fellows used to
+      put their skeletons? I don't think anything of such objects, you know; but
+      what should he have it in his chamber for? As I had found his pulse
+      irregular and intermittent, I took out a stethoscope, which is a
+      pocket-spyglass for looking into people's chests with your ears, and laid
+      it over the place where the heart beats. I missed the usual beat of the
+      organ.&mdash;How is this?&mdash;I said,&mdash;where is your heart gone to?&mdash;He
+      took the stethoscope and shifted it across to the right side; there was a
+      displacement of the organ.&mdash;I am ill-packed,&mdash;he said;&mdash;there
+      was no room for my heart in its place as it is with other men.&mdash;God
+      help him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is hard to draw the line between scientific curiosity and the desire
+      for the patient's sake to learn all the details of his condition. I must
+      look at this patient's chest, and thump it and listen to it. For this is a
+      case of ectopia cordis, my boy,&mdash;displacement of the heart; and it is
+      n't every day you get a chance to overhaul such an interesting
+      malformation. And so I managed to do my duty and satisfy my curiosity at
+      the same time. The torso was slight and deformed; the right arm
+      attenuated,&mdash;the left full, round, and of perfect symmetry. It had
+      run away with the life of the other limbs,&mdash;a common trick enough of
+      Nature's, as I told you before. If you see a man with legs withered from
+      childhood, keep out of the way of his arms, if you have a quarrel with
+      him. He has the strength of four limbs in two; and if he strikes you, it
+      is an arm-blow plus a kick administered from the shoulder instead of the
+      haunch, where it should have started from.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still examining him as a patient, I kept my eyes about me to search all
+      parts of the chamber and went on with the double process, as before.&mdash;Heart
+      hits as hard as a fist,&mdash;bellows-sound over mitral valves
+      (professional terms you need not attend to).&mdash;What the deuse is that
+      long case for? Got his witch grandmother mummied in it? And three big
+      mahogany presses,&mdash;hey?&mdash;A diabolical suspicion came over me
+      which I had had once before,&mdash;that he might be one of our modern
+      alchemists,&mdash;you understand, make gold, you know, or what looks like
+      it, sometimes with the head of a king or queen or of Liberty to embellish
+      one side of the piece.&mdash;Don't I remember hearing him shut a door and
+      lock it once? What do you think was kept under that lock? Let's have
+      another look at his hand, to see if there are any calluses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One can tell a man's business, if it is a handicraft, very often by just
+      taking a look at his open hand. Ah! Four calluses at the end of the
+      fingers of the right hand. None on those of the left. Ah, ha! What do
+      those mean?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this seems longer in the telling, of course, than it was in fact.
+      While I was making these observations of the objects around me, I was also
+      forming my opinion as to the kind of case with which I had to deal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are three wicks, you know, to the lamp of a man's life: brain,
+      blood, and breath. Press the brain a little, its light goes out, followed
+      by both the others. Stop the heart a minute and out go all three of the
+      wicks. Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently the fluid ceases to
+      supply the other centres of flame, and all is soon stagnation, cold, and
+      darkness. The &ldquo;tripod of life&rdquo; a French physiologist called these three
+      organs. It is all clear enough which leg of the tripod is going to break
+      down here. I could tell you exactly what the difficulty is;&mdash;which
+      would be as intelligible and amusing as a watchmaker's description of a
+      diseased timekeeper to a ploughman. It is enough to say, that I found just
+      what I expected to, and that I think this attack is only the prelude of
+      more serious consequences,&mdash;which expression means you very well know
+      what.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now the secrets of this life hanging on a thread must surely come out.
+      If I have made a mystery where there was none, my suspicions will be
+      shamed, as they have often been before. If there is anything strange, my
+      visits will clear it up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat an hour or two by the side of the Little Gentleman's bed, after
+      giving him some henbane to quiet his brain, and some foxglove, which an
+      imaginative French professor has called the &ldquo;Opium of the Heart.&rdquo; Under
+      their influence he gradually fell into an uneasy, half-waking slumber, the
+      body fighting hard for every breath, and the mind wandering off in strange
+      fancies and old recollections, which escaped from his lips in broken
+      sentences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The last of 'em,&mdash;he said,&mdash;the last of 'em all,&mdash;thank
+      God! And the grave he lies in will look just as well as if he had been
+      straight. Dig it deep, old Martin, dig it deep,&mdash;and let it be as
+      long as other folks' graves. And mind you get the sods flat, old man,&mdash;flat
+      as ever a straight-backed young fellow was laid under. And then, with a
+      good tall slab at the head, and a foot-stone six foot away from it, it'll
+      look just as if there was a man underneath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man! Who said he was a man? No more men of that pattern to bear his
+      name!&mdash;Used to be a good-looking set enough.&mdash;Where 's all the
+      manhood and womanhood gone to since his great-grandfather was the
+      strongest man that sailed out of the town of Boston, and poor Leah there
+      the handsomest woman in Essex, if she was a witch?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Give me some light,&mdash;he said,&mdash;more light. I want to see
+      the picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had started either from a dream or a wandering reverie. I was not
+      unwilling to have more light in the apartment, and presently had lighted
+      an astral lamp that stood on a table.&mdash;He pointed to a portrait
+      hanging against the wall.&mdash;Look at her,&mdash;he said,&mdash;look at
+      her! Wasn't that a pretty neck to slip a hangman's noose over?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The portrait was of a young woman, something more than twenty years old,
+      perhaps. There were few pictures of any merit painted in New England
+      before the time of Smibert, and I am at a loss to know what artist could
+      have taken this half-length, which was evidently from life. It was
+      somewhat stiff and flat, but the grace of the figure and the sweetness of
+      the expression reminded me of the angels of the early Florentine painters.
+      She must have been of some consideration, for she was dressed in paduasoy
+      and lace with hanging sleeves, and the old carved frame showed how the
+      picture had been prized by its former owners. A proud eye she had, with
+      all her sweetness.&mdash;I think it was that which hanged her, as his
+      strong arm hanged Minister George Burroughs;&mdash;but it may have been a
+      little mole on one cheek, which the artist had just hinted as a beauty
+      rather than a deformity. You know, I suppose, that nursling imps addict
+      themselves, after the fashion of young opossums, to these little
+      excrescences. &ldquo;Witch-marks&rdquo; were good evidence that a young woman was one
+      of the Devil's wet-nurses;&mdash;I should like to have seen you make fun
+      of them in those days!&mdash;Then she had a brooch in her bodice, that
+      might have been taken for some devilish amulet or other; and she wore a
+      ring upon one of her fingers, with a red stone in it, that flamed as if
+      the painter had dipped his pencil in fire;&mdash;who knows but that it was
+      given her by a midnight suitor fresh from that fierce element, and
+      licensed for a season to leave his couch of flame to tempt the
+      unsanctified hearts of earthly maidens and brand their cheeks with the
+      print of his scorching kisses?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She and I,&mdash;he said, as he looked steadfastly at the canvas,&mdash;she
+      and I are the last of 'em.&mdash;She will stay, and I shall go. They never
+      painted me,&mdash;except when the boys used to make pictures of me with
+      chalk on the board-fences. They said the doctors would want my skeleton
+      when I was dead.&mdash;You are my friend, if you are a doctor,&mdash;a'n't
+      you?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I just gave him my hand. I had not the heart to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I want to lie still,&mdash;he said,&mdash;after I am put to bed upon the
+      hill yonder. Can't you have a great stone laid over me, as they did over
+      the first settlers in the old burying-ground at Dorchester, so as to keep
+      the wolves from digging them up? I never slept easy over the sod;&mdash;I
+      should like to lie quiet under it. And besides,&mdash;he said, in a kind
+      of scared whisper,&mdash;I don't want to have my bones stared at, as my
+      body has been. I don't doubt I was a remarkable case; but, for God's sake,
+      oh, for God's sake, don't let 'em make a show of the cage I have been shut
+      up in and looked through the bars of for so many years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have heard it said that the art of healing makes men hard-hearted and
+      indifferent to human suffering. I am willing to own that there is often a
+      professional hardness in surgeons, just as there is in theologians,&mdash;only
+      much less in degree than in these last. It does not commonly improve the
+      sympathies of a man to be in the habit of thrusting knives into his
+      fellow-creatures and burning them with red-hot irons, any more than it
+      improves them to hold the blinding-white cantery of Gehenna by its cool
+      handle and score and crisp young souls with it until they are scorched
+      into the belief of&mdash;Transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception.
+      And, to say the plain truth, I think there are a good many coarse people
+      in both callings. A delicate nature will not commonly choose a pursuit
+      which implies the habitual infliction of suffering, so readily as some
+      gentler office. Yet, while I am writing this paragraph, there passes by my
+      window, on his daily errand of duty, not seeing me, though I catch a
+      glimpse of his manly features through the oval glass of his chaise, as he
+      drives by, a surgeon of skill and standing, so friendly, so modest, so
+      tenderhearted in all his ways, that, if he had not approved himself at
+      once adroit and firm, one would have said he was of too kindly a mould to
+      be the minister of pain, even if he were saving pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may be sure that some men, even among those who have chosen the task
+      of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more thoughtful and truly
+      compassionate in the midst of their cruel experience. They become less
+      nervous, but more sympathetic. They have a truer sensibility for others'
+      pain, the more they study pain and disease in the light of science. I have
+      said this without claiming any special growth in humanity for myself,
+      though I do hope I grow tenderer in my feelings as I grow older. At any
+      rate, this was not a time in which professional habits could keep down
+      certain instincts of older date than these.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This poor little man's appeal to my humanity against the supposed rapacity
+      of Science, which he feared would have her &ldquo;specimen,&rdquo; if his ghost should
+      walk restlessly a thousand years, waiting for his bones to be laid in the
+      dust, touched my heart. But I felt bound to speak cheerily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;We won't die yet awhile, if we can help it,&mdash;I said,&mdash;and
+      I trust we can help it. But don't be afraid; if I live longest, I will see
+      that your resting place is kept sacred till the dandelions and buttercups
+      blow over you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed to have got his wits together by this time, and to have a vague
+      consciousness that he might have been saying more than he meant for
+      anybody's ears.&mdash;I have been talking a little wild, Sir, eh? he said.&mdash;There
+      is a great buzzing in my head with those drops of yours, and I doubt if my
+      tongue has not been a little looser than I would have it, Sir. But I don't
+      much want to live, Sir; that's the truth of the matter, and it does rather
+      please me to think that fifty years from now nobody will know that the
+      place where I lie does n't hold as stout and straight a man as the best of
+      'em that stretch out as if they were proud of the room they take. You may
+      get me well, if you can, Sir, if you think it worth while to try; but I
+      tell you there has been no time for this many a year when the smell of
+      fresh earth was not sweeter to me than all the flowers that grow out of
+      it. There's no anodyne like your good clean gravel, Sir. But if you can
+      keep me about awhile, and it amuses you to try, you may show your skill
+      upon me, if you like. There is a pleasure or two that I love the daylight
+      for, and I think the night is not far off, at best.&mdash;I believe I
+      shall sleep now; you may leave me, and come, if you like, in the morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before I passed out, I took one more glance round the apartment. The
+      beautiful face of the portrait looked at me, as portraits often do, with a
+      frightful kind of intelligence in its eyes. The drapery fluttered on the
+      still outstretched arm of the tall object near the window;&mdash;a crack
+      of this was open, no doubt, and some breath of wind stirred the hanging
+      folds. In my excited state, I seemed to see something ominous in that arm
+      pointing to the heavens. I thought of the figures in the Dance of Death at
+      Basle, and that other on the panels of the covered Bridge at Lucerne, and
+      it seemed to me that the grim mask who mingles with every crowd and glides
+      over every threshold was pointing the sick man to his far home, and would
+      soon stretch out his bony hand and lead him or drag him on the unmeasured
+      journey towards it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fancy had possession of me, and I shivered again as when I first
+      entered the chamber. The picture and the shrouded shape; I saw only these
+      two objects. They were enough. The house was deadly still, and the
+      night-wind, blowing through an open window, struck me as from a field of
+      ice, at the moment I passed into the creaking corridor. As I turned into
+      the common passage, a white figure, holding a lamp, stood full before me.
+      I thought at first it was one of those images made to stand in niches and
+      hold a light in their hands. But the illusion was momentary, and my eyes
+      speedily recovered from the shock of the bright flame and snowy drapery to
+      see that the figure was a breathing one. It was Iris, in one of her
+      statue-trances. She had come down, whether sleeping or waking, I knew not
+      at first, led by an instinct that told her she was wanted,&mdash;or,
+      possibly, having overheard and interpreted the sound of our movements,&mdash;or,
+      it may be, having learned from the servant that there was trouble which
+      might ask for a woman's hand. I sometimes think women have a sixth sense,
+      which tells them that others, whom they cannot see or hear, are in
+      suffering. How surely we find them at the bedside of the dying! How
+      strongly does Nature plead for them, that we should draw our first breath
+      in their arms, as we sigh away our last upon their faithful breasts!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With white, bare feet, her hair loosely knotted, clad as the starlight
+      knew her, and the morning when she rose from slumber, save that she had
+      twisted a scarf round her long dress, she stood still as a stone before
+      me, holding in one hand a lighted coil of waxtaper, and in the other a
+      silver goblet. I held my own lamp close to her, as if she had been a
+      figure of marble, and she did not stir. There was no breach of propriety
+      then, to scare the Poor Relation with and breed scandal out of. She had
+      been &ldquo;warned in a dream,&rdquo; doubtless suggested by her waking knowledge and
+      the sounds which had reached her exalted sense. There was nothing more
+      natural than that she should have risen and girdled her waist, and lighted
+      her taper, and found the silver goblet with &ldquo;Ex dono pupillorum&rdquo; on it,
+      from which she had taken her milk and possets through all her childish
+      years, and so gone blindly out to find her place at the bedside,&mdash;a
+      Sister of Charity without the cap and rosary; nay, unknowing whither her
+      feet were leading her, and with wide blank eyes seeing nothing but the
+      vision that beckoned her along.&mdash;Well, I must wake her from her
+      slumber or trance.&mdash;I called her name, but she did not heed my voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Devil put it into my head that I would kiss one handsome young girl
+      before I died, and now was my chance. She never would know it, and I
+      should carry the remembrance of it with me into the grave, and a rose
+      perhaps grow out of my dust, as a brier did out of Lord Lovers, in memory
+      of that immortal moment! Would it wake her from her trance? and would she
+      see me in the flush of my stolen triumph, and hate and despise me ever
+      after? Or should I carry off my trophy undetected, and always from that
+      time say to myself, when I looked upon her in the glory of youth and the
+      splendor of beauty, &ldquo;My lips have touched those roses and made their
+      sweetness mine forever&rdquo;? You think my cheek was flushed, perhaps, and my
+      eyes were glittering with this midnight flash of opportunity. On the
+      contrary, I believe I was pale, very pale, and I know that I trembled. Ah,
+      it is the pale passions that are the fiercest,&mdash;it is the violence of
+      the chill that gives the measure of the fever! The fighting-boy of our
+      school always turned white when he went out to a pitched battle with the
+      bully of some neighboring village; but we knew what his bloodless cheeks
+      meant,&mdash;the blood was all in his stout heart,&mdash;he was a slight
+      boy, and there was not enough to redden his face and fill his heart both
+      at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps it is making a good deal of a slight matter, to tell the internal
+      conflicts in the heart of a quiet person something more than juvenile and
+      something less than senile, as to whether he should be guilty of an
+      impropriety, and, if he were, whether he would get caught in his
+      indiscretion. And yet the memory of the kiss that Margaret of Scotland
+      gave to Alain Chartier has lasted four hundred years, and put it into the
+      head of many an ill-favored poet, whether Victoria, or Eugenie, would do
+      as much by him, if she happened to pass him when he was asleep. And have
+      we ever forgotten that the fresh cheek of the young John Milton tingled
+      under the lips of some high-born Italian beauty, who, I believe, did not
+      think to leave her card by the side of the slumbering youth, but has
+      bequeathed the memory of her pretty deed to all coming time? The sound of
+      a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal
+      longer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind
+      suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is taking an
+      enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance
+      slip through his fingers. Iris woke up, of her own accord, before I had
+      made up my mind what I was going to do about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I remember how charmingly she looked, I don't blame myself at all for
+      being tempted; but if I had been fool enough to yield to the impulse, I
+      should certainly have been ashamed to tell of it. She did not know what to
+      make of it, finding herself there alone, in such guise, and me staring at
+      her. She looked down at her white robe and bare feet, and colored,&mdash;then
+      at the goblet she held in her hand, then at the taper; and at last her
+      thoughts seemed to clear up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know it all,&mdash;she said.&mdash;He is going to die, and I must go and
+      sit by him. Nobody will care for him as I shall, and I have nobody else to
+      care for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I assured her that nothing was needed for him that night but rest, and
+      persuaded her that the excitement of her presence could only do harm. Let
+      him sleep, and he would very probably awake better in the morning. There
+      was nothing to be said, for I spoke with authority; and the young girl
+      glided away with noiseless step and sought her own chamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tremor passed away from my limbs, and the blood began to burn in my
+      cheeks. The beautiful image which had so bewitched me faded gradually from
+      my imagination, and I returned to the still perplexing mysteries of my
+      little neighbor's chamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All was still there now. No plaintive sounds, no monotonous murmurs, no
+      shutting of windows and doors at strange hours, as if something or
+      somebody were coming in or going out, or there was something to be hidden
+      in those dark mahogany presses. Is there an inner apartment that I have
+      not seen? The way in which the house is built might admit of it. As I
+      thought it over, I at once imagined a Bluebeard's chamber. Suppose, for
+      instance, that the narrow bookshelves to the right are really only a
+      masked door, such as we remember leading to the private study of one of
+      our most distinguished townsmen, who loved to steal away from his stately
+      library to that little silent cell. If this were lighted from above, a
+      person or persons might pass their days there without attracting attention
+      from the household, and wander where they pleased at night,&mdash;to
+      Copp's-Hill burial-ground, if they liked,&mdash;I said to myself,
+      laughing, and pulling the bed-clothes over my head. There is no logic in
+      superstitious-fancies any more than in dreams. A she-ghost wouldn't want
+      an inner chamber to herself. A live woman, with a valuable soprano voice,
+      wouldn't start off at night to sprain her ankles over the old graves of
+      the North-End cemetery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is all very easy for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this page in
+      the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and anserine
+      unchristian names, because I had these fancies running through my head. I
+      don't care much for your abuse. The question is not, what it is reasonable
+      for a man to think about, but what he actually does think about, in the
+      dark, and when he is alone, and his whole body seems but one great nerve
+      of hearing, and he sees the phosphorescent flashes of his own eyeballs as
+      they turn suddenly in the direction of the last strange noise,&mdash;what
+      he actually does think about, as he lies and recalls all the wild stories
+      his head is full of, his fancy hinting the most alarming conjectures to
+      account for the simplest facts about him, his common-sense laughing them
+      to scorn the next minute, but his mind still returning to them, under one
+      shape or another, until he gets very nervous and foolish, and remembers
+      how pleasant it used to be to have his mother come and tuck him up and go
+      and sit within call, so that she could hear him at any minute, if he got
+      very much scared and wanted her. Old babies that we are!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Daylight will clear up all that lamp-light has left doubtful. I longed for
+      the morning to come, for I was more curious than ever. So, between my
+      fancies and anticipations, I had but a poor night of it, and came down
+      tired to the breakfast-table. My visit was not to be made until after this
+      morning hour; there was nothing urgent, so the servant was ordered to tell
+      me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the first breakfast at which the high chair at the side of Iris had
+      been unoccupied.&mdash;You might jest as well take away that chair,&mdash;said
+      our landlady,&mdash;he'll never want it again. He acts like a man that 's
+      struck with death, 'n' I don't believe he 'll ever come out of his chamber
+      till he 's laid out and brought down a corpse.&mdash;These good women do
+      put things so plainly! There were two or three words in her short remark
+      that always sober people, and suggest silence or brief moral reflections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Life is dreadful uncerting,&mdash;said the Poor Relation,&mdash;and
+      pulled in her social tentacles to concentrate her thoughts on this fact of
+      human history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;If there was anything a fellah could do,&mdash;said the young man
+      John, so called,&mdash;a fellah 'd like the chance o' helpin' a little
+      cripple like that. He looks as if he couldn't turn over any handier than a
+      turtle that's laid on his back; and I guess there a'n't many people that
+      know how to lift better than I do. Ask him if he don't want any watchers.
+      I don't mind settin' up any more 'n a cat-owl. I was up all night twice
+      last month.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [My private opinion is, that there was no small amount of punch absorbed
+      on those two occasions, which I think I heard of at the time];&mdash;but
+      the offer is a kind one, and it is n't fair to question how he would like
+      sitting up without the punch and the company and the songs and smoking. He
+      means what he says, and it would be a more considerable achievement for
+      him to sit quietly all night by a sick man than for a good many other
+      people. I tell you this odd thing: there are a good many persons, who,
+      through the habit of making other folks uncomfortable, by finding fault
+      with all their cheerful enjoyments, at last get up a kind of hostility to
+      comfort in general, even in their own persons. The correlative to loving
+      our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.
+      Look at old misers; first they starve their dependants, and then
+      themselves. So I think it more for a lively young fellow to be ready to
+      play nurse than for one of those useful but forlorn martyrs who have taken
+      a spite against themselves and love to gratify it by fasting and watching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The time came at last for me to make my visit. I found Iris sitting
+      by the Little Gentleman's pillow. To my disappointment, the room was
+      darkened. He did not like the light, and would have the shutters kept
+      nearly closed. It was good enough for me; what business had I to be
+      indulging my curiosity, when I had nothing to do but to exercise such
+      skill as I possessed for the benefit of my patient? There was not much to
+      be said or done in such a case; but I spoke as encouragingly as I could,
+      as I think we are always bound to do. He did not seem to pay any very
+      anxious attention, but the poor girl listened as if her own life and more
+      than her own life were depending on the words I uttered. She followed me
+      out of the room, when I had got through my visit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How long?&mdash;she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Uncertain. Any time; to-day,&mdash;next week, next month,&mdash;I
+      answered.&mdash;One of those cases where the issue is not doubtful, but
+      may be sudden or slow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The women of the house were kind, as women always are in trouble. But Iris
+      pretended that nobody could spare the time as well as she, and kept her
+      place, hour after hour, until the landlady insisted that she'd be killin'
+      herself, if she begun at that rate, 'n' haf to give up, if she didn't want
+      to be clean beat out in less 'n a week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the table we were graver than common. The high chair was set back
+      against the wall, and a gap left between that of the young girl and her
+      nearest neighbor's on the right. But the next morning, to our great
+      surprise, that good-looking young Marylander had very quietly moved his
+      own chair to the vacant place. I thought he was creeping down that way,
+      but I was not prepared for a leap spanning such a tremendous parenthesis
+      of boarders as this change of position included. There was no denying that
+      the youth and maiden were a handsome pair, as they sat side by side. But
+      whatever the young girl may have thought of her new neighbor she never
+      seemed for a moment to forget the poor little friend who had been taken
+      from her side. There are women, and even girls, with whom it is of no use
+      to talk. One might as well reason with a bee as to the form of his cell,
+      or with an oriole as to the construction of his swinging nest, as try to
+      stir these creatures from their own way of doing their own work. It was
+      not a question with Iris, whether she was entitled by any special relation
+      or by the fitness of things to play the part of a nurse. She was a wilful
+      creature that must have her way in this matter. And it so proved that it
+      called for much patience and long endurance to carry through the duties,
+      say rather the kind offices, the painful pleasures, which she had chosen
+      as her share in the household where accident had thrown her. She had that
+      genius of ministration which is the special province of certain women,
+      marked even among their helpful sisters by a soft, low voice, a quiet
+      footfall, a light hand, a cheering smile, and a ready self-surrender to
+      the objects of their care, which such trifles as their own food, sleep, or
+      habits of any kind never presume to interfere with. Day after day, and too
+      often through the long watches of the night, she kept her place by the
+      pillow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That girl will kill herself over me, Sir,&mdash;said the poor Little
+      Gentleman to me, one day,&mdash;she will kill herself, Sir, if you don't
+      call in all the resources of your art to get me off as soon as may be. I
+      shall wear her out, Sir, with sitting in this close chamber and watching
+      when she ought to be sleeping, if you leave me to the care of Nature
+      without dosing me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was rather strange pleasantry, under the circumstances. But there are
+      certain persons whose existence is so out of parallel with the larger laws
+      in the midst of which it is moving, that life becomes to them as death and
+      death as life.&mdash;How am I getting along?&mdash;he said, another
+      morning. He lifted his shrivelled hand, with the death's-head ring on it,
+      and looked at it with a sad sort of complacency. By this one movement,
+      which I have seen repeatedly of late, I know that his thoughts have gone
+      before to another condition, and that he is, as it were, looking back on
+      the infirmities of the body as accidents of the past. For, when he was
+      well, one might see him often looking at the handsome hand with the
+      flaming jewel on one of its fingers. The single well-shaped limb was the
+      source of that pleasure which in some form or other Nature almost always
+      grants to her least richly endowed children. Handsome hair, eyes,
+      complexion, feature, form, hand, foot, pleasant voice, strength, grace,
+      agility, intelligence,&mdash;how few there are that have not just enough
+      of one at least of these gifts to show them that the good Mother, busy
+      with her millions of children, has not quite forgotten them! But now he
+      was thinking of that other state, where, free from all mortal impediments,
+      the memory of his sorrowful burden should be only as that of the case he
+      has shed to the insect whose &ldquo;deep-damasked wings&rdquo; beat off the golden
+      dust of the lily-anthers, as he flutters in the ecstasy of his new life
+      over their full-blown summer glories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No human being can rest for any time in a state of equilibrium, where the
+      desire to live and that to depart just balance each other. If one has a
+      house, which he has lived and always means to live in, he pleases himself
+      with the thought of all the conveniences it offers him, and thinks little
+      of its wants and imperfections. But once having made up his mind to move
+      to a better, every incommodity starts out upon him, until the very
+      ground-plan of it seems to have changed in his mind, and his thoughts and
+      affections, each one of them packing up its little bundle of
+      circumstances, have quitted their several chambers and nooks and migrated
+      to the new home, long before its apartments are ready to receive their
+      coming tenant. It is so with the body. Most persons have died before they
+      expire,&mdash;died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is
+      only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.
+      The fact of the tranquillity with which the great majority of dying
+      persons await this locking of those gates of life through which its airy
+      angels have been going and coming, from the moment of the first cry, is
+      familiar to those who have been often called upon to witness the last
+      period of life. Almost always there is a preparation made by Nature for
+      unearthing a soul, just as on the smaller scale there is for the removal
+      of a milktooth. The roots which hold human life to earth are absorbed
+      before it is lifted from its place. Some of the dying are weary and want
+      rest, the idea of which is almost inseparable in the universal mind from
+      death. Some are in pain, and want to be rid of it, even though the anodyne
+      be dropped, as in the legend, from the sword of the Death-Angel. Some are
+      stupid, mercifully narcotized that they may go to sleep without long
+      tossing about. And some are strong in faith and hope, so that, as they
+      draw near the next world, they would fair hurry toward it, as the caravan
+      moves faster over the sands when the foremost travellers send word along
+      the file that water is in sight. Though each little party that follows in
+      a foot-track of its own will have it that the water to which others think
+      they are hastening is a mirage, not the less has it been true in all ages
+      and for human beings of every creed which recognized a future, that those
+      who have fallen worn out by their march through the Desert have dreamed at
+      least of a River of Life, and thought they heard its murmurs as they lay
+      dying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The change from the clinging to the present to the welcoming of the future
+      comes very soon, for the most part, after all hope of life is
+      extinguished, provided this be left in good degree to Nature, and not
+      insolently and cruelly forced upon those who are attacked by illness, on
+      the strength of that odious foreknowledge often imparted by science,
+      before the white fruit whose core is ashes, and which we call death, has
+      set beneath the pallid and drooping flower of sickness. There is a
+      singular sagacity very often shown in a patient's estimate of his own
+      vital force. His physician knows the state of his material frame well
+      enough, perhaps,&mdash;that this or that organ is more or less impaired or
+      disintegrated; but the patient has a sense that he can hold out so much
+      longer,&mdash;sometimes that he must and will live for a while, though by
+      the logic of disease he ought to die without any delay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Little Gentleman continued to fail, until it became plain that his
+      remaining days were few. I told the household what to expect. There was a
+      good deal of kind feeling expressed among the boarders, in various modes,
+      according to their characters and style of sympathy. The landlady was
+      urgent that he should try a certain nostrum which had saved somebody's
+      life in jest sech a case. The Poor Relation wanted me to carry, as from
+      her, a copy of &ldquo;Allein's Alarm,&rdquo; etc. I objected to the title, reminding
+      her that it offended people of old, so that more than twice as many of the
+      book were sold when they changed the name to &ldquo;A Sure Guide to Heaven.&rdquo; The
+      good old gentleman whom I have mentioned before has come to the time of
+      life when many old men cry easily, and forget their tears as children do.&mdash;He
+      was a worthy gentleman,&mdash;he said,&mdash;a very worthy gentleman, but
+      unfortunate,&mdash;very unfortunate. Sadly deformed about the spine and
+      the feet. Had an impression that the late Lord Byron had some malformation
+      of this kind. Had heerd there was something the matter with the
+      ankle-j'ints of that nobleman, but he was a man of talents. This gentleman
+      seemed to be a man of talents. Could not always agree with his statements,&mdash;thought
+      he was a little over-partial to this city, and had some free opinions; but
+      was sorry to lose him,&mdash;and if&mdash;there was anything&mdash;he&mdash;could&mdash;.
+      In the midst of these kind expressions, the gentleman with the diamond,
+      the Koh-i-noor, as we called him, asked, in a very unpleasant sort of way,
+      how the old boy was likely to cut up,&mdash;meaning what money our friend
+      was going to leave behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young fellow John spoke up, to the effect that this was a diabolish
+      snobby question, when a man was dying and not dead.&mdash;To this the
+      Koh-i-noor replied, by asking if the other meant to insult him. Whereto
+      the young man John rejoined that he had no particul'r intentions one way
+      or t'other.-The Kohi-noor then suggested the young man's stepping out into
+      the yard, that he, the speaker, might &ldquo;slap his chops.&rdquo;&mdash;Let 'em
+      alone, said young Maryland,&mdash;it 'll soon be over, and they won't hurt
+      each other much.&mdash;So they went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Koh-i-noor entertained the very common idea, that, when one quarrels
+      with another, the simple thing to do is to knock the man down, and there
+      is the end of it. Now those who have watched such encounters are aware of
+      two things: first, that it is not so easy to knock a man down as it is to
+      talk about it; secondly, that, if you do happen to knock a man down, there
+      is a very good chance that he will be angry, and get up and give you a
+      thrashing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So the Koh-i-noor thought he would begin, as soon as they got into the
+      yard, by knocking his man down, and with this intention swung his arm
+      round after the fashion of rustics and those unskilled in the noble art,
+      expecting the young fellow John to drop when his fist, having completed a
+      quarter of a circle, should come in contact with the side of that young
+      man's head. Unfortunately for this theory, it happens that a blow struck
+      out straight is as much shorter, and therefore as much quicker than the
+      rustic's swinging blow, as the radius is shorter than the quarter of a
+      circle. The mathematical and mechanical corollary was, that the Koh-i-noor
+      felt something hard bring up suddenly against his right eye, which
+      something he could have sworn was a paving-stone, judging by his
+      sensations; and as this threw his person somewhat backwards, and the young
+      man John jerked his own head back a little, the swinging blow had nothing
+      to stop it; and as the Jewel staggered between the hit he got and the blow
+      he missed, he tripped and &ldquo;went to grass,&rdquo; so far as the back-yard of our
+      boardinghouse was provided with that vegetable. It was a signal
+      illustration of that fatal mistake, so frequent in young and ardent
+      natures with inconspicuous calves and negative pectorals, that they can
+      settle most little quarrels on the spot by &ldquo;knocking the man down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We are in the habit of handling our faces so carefully, that a heavy blow,
+      taking effect on that portion of the surface, produces a most unpleasant
+      surprise, which is accompanied with odd sensations, as of seeing sparks,
+      and a kind of electrical or ozone-like odor, half-sulphurous in character,
+      and which has given rise to a very vulgar and profane threat sometimes
+      heard from the lips of bullies. A person not used to pugilistic gestures
+      does not instantly recover from this surprise. The Koh-i-noor exasperated
+      by his failure, and still a little confused by the smart hit he had
+      received, but furious, and confident of victory over a young fellow a good
+      deal lighter than himself, made a desperate rush to bear down all before
+      him and finish the contest at once. That is the way all angry greenhorns
+      and incompetent persons attempt to settle matters. It does n't do, if the
+      other fellow is only cool, moderately quick, and has a very little
+      science. It didn't do this time; for, as the assailant rushed in with his
+      arms flying everywhere, like the vans of a windmill, he ran a prominent
+      feature of his face against a fist which was travelling in the other
+      direction, and immediately after struck the knuckles of the young man's
+      other fist a severe blow with the part of his person known as the
+      epigastrium to one branch of science and the bread-basket to another. This
+      second round closed the battle. The Koh-i-noor had got enough, which in
+      such cases is more than as good as a feast. The young fellow asked him if
+      he was satisfied, and held out his hand. But the other sulked, and
+      muttered something about revenge.&mdash;Jest as ye like,&mdash;said the
+      young man John.&mdash;Clap a slice o' raw beefsteak on to that mouse o'
+      yours 'n' 't'll take down the swellin'. (Mouse is a technical term for a
+      bluish, oblong, rounded elevation occasioned by running one's forehead or
+      eyebrow against another's knuckles.) The young fellow was particularly
+      pleased that he had had an opportunity of trying his proficiency in the
+      art of self-defence without the gloves. The Koh-i-noor did not favor us
+      with his company for a day or two, being confined to his chamber, it was
+      said, by a slight feverish, attack. He was chop-fallen always after this,
+      and got negligent in his person. The impression must have been a deep one;
+      for it was observed, that, when he came down again, his moustache and
+      whiskers had turned visibly white about the roots. In short, it disgraced
+      him, and rendered still more conspicuous a tendency to drinking, of which
+      he had been for some time suspected. This, and the disgust which a young
+      lady naturally feels at hearing that her lover has been &ldquo;licked by a
+      fellah not half his size,&rdquo; induced the landlady's daughter to take that
+      decided step which produced a change in the programme of her career I may
+      hereafter allude to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I never thought he would come to good, when I heard him attempting to
+      sneer at an unoffending city so respectable as Boston. After a man begins
+      to attack the State-House, when he gets bitter about the Frog-Pond, you
+      may be sure there is not much left of him. Poor Edgar Poe died in the
+      hospital soon after he got into this way of talking; and so sure as you
+      find an unfortunate fellow reduced to this pass, you had better begin
+      praying for him, and stop lending him money, for he is on his last legs.
+      Remember poor Edgar! He is dead and gone; but the State-House has its
+      cupola fresh-gilded, and the Frog-Pond has got a fountain that squirts up
+      a hundred feet into the air and glorifies that humble sheet with a fine
+      display of provincial rainbows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;I cannot fulfil my promise in this number. I expected to gratify
+      your curiosity, if you have become at all interested in these puzzles,
+      doubts, fancies, whims, or whatever you choose to call them, of mine. Next
+      month you shall hear all about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;It was evening, and I was going to the sick-chamber. As I paused at
+      the door before entering, I heard a sweet voice singing. It was not the
+      wild melody I had sometimes heard at midnight:&mdash;no, this was the
+      voice of Iris, and I could distinguish every word. I had seen the verses
+      in her book; the melody was new to me. Let me finish my page with them.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               HYMN OF TRUST.
+
+     O Love Divine, that stooped to share
+     Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,
+     On Thee we cast each earthborn care,
+     We smile at pain while Thou art near!
+
+     Though long the weary way we tread,
+     And sorrow crown each lingering year,
+     No path we shun, no darkness dread,
+     Our hearts still whispering, Thou art near!
+
+     When drooping pleasure turns to grief,
+     And trembling faith is changed to fear,
+     The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf
+     Shall softly tell us, Thou art near!
+
+     On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
+     O Love Divine, forever dear,
+     Content to suffer, while we know,
+     Living and dying, Thou art near!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A young fellow, born of good stock, in one of the more thoroughly
+      civilized portions of these United States of America, bred in good
+      principles, inheriting a social position which makes him at his ease
+      everywhere, means sufficient to educate him thoroughly without taking away
+      the stimulus to vigorous exertion, and with a good opening in some
+      honorable path of labor, is the finest sight our private satellite has had
+      the opportunity of inspecting on the planet to which she belongs. In some
+      respects it was better to be a young Greek. If we may trust the old
+      marbles, my friend with his arm stretched over my head, above there, (in
+      plaster of Paris,) or the discobolus, whom one may see at the principal
+      sculpture gallery of this metropolis,&mdash;those Greek young men were of
+      supreme beauty. Their close curls, their elegantly set heads, column-like
+      necks, straight noses, short, curled lips, firm chins, deep chests, light
+      flanks, large muscles, small joints, were finer than anything we ever see.
+      It may well be questioned whether the human shape will ever present itself
+      again in a race of such perfect symmetry. But the life of the youthful
+      Greek was local, not planetary, like that of the young American. He had a
+      string of legends, in place of our Gospels. He had no printed books, no
+      newspaper, no steam caravans, no forks, no soap, none of the thousand
+      cheap conveniences which have become matters of necessity to our modern
+      civilization. Above all things, if he aspired to know as well as to enjoy,
+      he found knowledge not diffused everywhere about him, so that a day's
+      labor would buy him more wisdom than a year could master, but held in
+      private hands, hoarded in precious manuscripts, to be sought for only as
+      gold is sought in narrow fissures, and in the beds of brawling streams.
+      Never, since man came into this atmosphere of oxygen and azote, was there
+      anything like the condition of the young American of the nineteenth
+      century. Having in possession or in prospect the best part of half a
+      world, with all its climates and soils to choose from; equipped with wings
+      of fire and smoke than fly with him day and night, so that he counts his
+      journey not in miles, but in degrees, and sees the seasons change as the
+      wild fowl sees them in his annual flights; with huge leviathans always
+      ready to take him on their broad backs and push behind them with their
+      pectoral or caudal fins the waters that seam the continent or separate the
+      hemispheres; heir of all old civilizations, founder of that new one which,
+      if all the prophecies of the human heart are not lies, is to be the
+      noblest, as it is the last; isolated in space from the races that are
+      governed by dynasties whose divine right grows out of human wrong, yet
+      knit into the most absolute solidarity with mankind of all times and
+      places by the one great thought he inherits as his national birthright;
+      free to form and express his opinions on almost every subject, and assured
+      that he will soon acquire the last franchise which men withhold from man,&mdash;that
+      of stating the laws of his spiritual being and the beliefs he accepts
+      without hindrance except from clearer views of truth,&mdash;he seems to
+      want nothing for a large, wholesome, noble, beneficent life. In fact, the
+      chief danger is that he will think the whole planet is made for him, and
+      forget that there are some possibilities left in the debris of the
+      old-world civilization which deserve a certain respectful consideration at
+      his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The combing and clipping of this shaggy wild continent are in some measure
+      done for him by those who have gone before. Society has subdivided itself
+      enough to have a place for every form of talent. Thus, if a man show the
+      least sign of ability as a sculptor or a painter, for instance, he finds
+      the means of education and a demand for his services. Even a man who knows
+      nothing but science will be provided for, if he does not think it
+      necessary to hang about his birthplace all his days,&mdash;which is a most
+      unAmerican weakness. The apron-strings of an American mother are made of
+      India-rubber. Her boy belongs where he is wanted; and that young
+      Marylander of ours spoke for all our young men, when he said that his home
+      was wherever the stars and stripes blew over his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that leads me to say a few words of this young gentleman, who made
+      that audacious movement lately which I chronicled in my last record,&mdash;jumping
+      over the seats of I don't know how many boarders to put himself in the
+      place which the Little Gentleman's absence had left vacant at the side of
+      Iris. When a young man is found habitually at the side of any one given
+      young lady,&mdash;when he lingers where she stays, and hastens when she
+      leaves,&mdash;when his eyes follow her as she moves and rest upon her when
+      she is still,&mdash;when he begins to grow a little timid, he who was so
+      bold, and a little pensive, he who was so gay, whenever accident finds
+      them alone,&mdash;when he thinks very often of the given young lady, and
+      names her very seldom,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What do you say about it, my charming young expert in that sweet science
+      in which, perhaps, a long experience is not the first of qualifications?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;But we don't know anything about this young man, except that he is
+      good-looking, and somewhat high-spirited, and strong-limbed, and has a
+      generous style of nature,&mdash;all very promising, but by no means
+      proving that he is a proper lover for Iris, whose heart we turned inside
+      out when we opened that sealed book of hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, my dear young friend! When your mamma then, if you will believe it, a
+      very slight young lady, with very pretty hair and figure&mdash;came and
+      told her mamma that your papa had&mdash;had&mdash;asked No, no, no! she
+      could n't say it; but her mother&mdash;oh the depth of maternal sagacity!&mdash;guessed
+      it all without another word!&mdash;When your mother, I say, came and told
+      her mother she was engaged, and your grandmother told your grandfather,
+      how much did they know of the intimate nature of the young gentleman to
+      whom she had pledged her existence? I will not be so hard as to ask how
+      much your respected mamma knew at that time of the intimate nature of your
+      respected papa, though, if we should compare a young girl's
+      man-as-she-thinks-him with a forty-summered matron's man-as-she-finds-him,
+      I have my doubts as to whether the second would be a facsimile of the
+      first in most cases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea that in this world each young person is to wait until he or she
+      finds that precise counterpart who alone of all creation was meant for him
+      or her, and then fall instantly in love with it, is pretty enough, only it
+      is not Nature's way. It is not at all essential that all pairs of human
+      beings should be, as we sometimes say of particular couples, &ldquo;born for
+      each other.&rdquo; Sometimes a man or a woman is made a great deal better and
+      happier in the end for having had to conquer the faults of the one
+      beloved, and make the fitness not found at first, by gradual assimilation.
+      There is a class of good women who have no right to marry perfectly good
+      men, because they have the power of saving those who would go to ruin but
+      for the guiding providence of a good wife. I have known many such cases.
+      It is the most momentous question a woman is ever called upon to decide,
+      whether the faults of the man she loves are beyond remedy and will drag
+      her down, or whether she is competent to be his earthly redeemer and lift
+      him to her own level.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A person of genius should marry a person of character. Genius does not
+      herd with genius. The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never found in
+      company. They don't care for strange scents,&mdash;they like plain animals
+      better than perfumed ones. Nay, if you will have the kindness to notice,
+      Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the personal peculiarity by
+      which her lord is so widely known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now when genius allies itself with character, the world is very apt to
+      think character has the best of the bargain. A brilliant woman marries a
+      plain, manly fellow, with a simple intellectual mechanism;&mdash;we have
+      all seen such cases. The world often stares a good deal and wonders. She
+      should have taken that other, with a far more complex mental machinery.
+      She might have had a watch with the philosophical compensation-balance,
+      with the metaphysical index which can split a second into tenths, with the
+      musical chime which can turn every quarter of an hour into melody. She has
+      chosen a plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let her alone! She knows what she is about. Genius has an infinitely
+      deeper reverence for character than character can have for genius. To be
+      sure, genius gets the world's praise, because its work is a tangible
+      product, to be bought, or had for nothing. It bribes the common voice to
+      praise it by presents of speeches, poems, statues, pictures, or whatever
+      it can please with. Character evolves its best products for home
+      consumption; but, mind you, it takes a deal more to feed a family for
+      thirty years than to make a holiday feast for our neighbors once or twice
+      in our lives. You talk of the fire of genius. Many a blessed woman, who
+      dies unsung and unremembered, has given out more of the real vital heat
+      that keeps the life in human souls, without a spark flitting through her
+      humble chimney to tell the world about it, than would set a dozen theories
+      smoking, or a hundred odes simmering, in the brains of so many men of
+      genius. It is in latent caloric, if I may borrow a philosophical
+      expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out the life that warms
+      them. Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse hardly warms her thin
+      fingers,&mdash;but she has melted all the ice out of the hearts of those
+      young Gracchi, and her lost heat is in the blood of her youthful heroes.
+      We are always valuing the soul's temperature by the thermometer of public
+      deed or word. Yet the great sun himself, when he pours his noonday beams
+      upon some vast hyaline boulder, rent from the eternal ice-quarries, and
+      floating toward the tropics, never warms it a fraction above the
+      thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit that marked the moment when the first
+      drop trickled down its side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the law
+      that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong, to get as
+      low as the earth will let it! That is genius. But what is this transient
+      upward movement, which gives us the glitter and the rainbow, to that
+      unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the same yesterday, to-day, and
+      forever, (if the universe be eternal,)&mdash;the great outspread hand of
+      God himself, forcing all things down into their places, and keeping them
+      there? Such, in smaller proportion, is the force of character to the
+      fitful movements of genius, as they are or have been linked to each other
+      in many a household, where one name was historic, and the other, let me
+      say the nobler, unknown, save by some faint reflected ray, borrowed from
+      its lustrous companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oftentimes, as I have lain swinging on the water, in the swell of the
+      Chelsea ferry-boats, in that long, sharp-pointed, black cradle in which I
+      love to let the great mother rock me, I have seen a tall ship glide by
+      against the tide, as if drawn by some invisible towline, with a hundred
+      strong arms pulling it. Her sails hung unfilled, her streamers were
+      drooping, she had neither side-wheel nor stern-wheel; still she moved on,
+      stately, in serene triumph, as if with her own life. But I knew that on
+      the other side of the ship, hidden beneath the great hulk that swam so
+      majestically, there was a little toiling steam-tug, with heart of fire and
+      arms of iron, that was hugging it close and dragging it bravely on; and I
+      knew, that, if the little steam-tug untwined her arms and left the tall
+      ship, it would wallow and roll about, and drift hither and thither, and go
+      off with the refluent tide, no man knows whither. And so I have known more
+      than one genius, high-decked, full-freighted, wide-sailed, gay-pennoned,
+      that, but for the bare toiling arms, and brave, warm, beating heart of the
+      faithful little wife, that nestled close in his shadow, and clung to him,
+      so that no wind or wave could part them, and dragged him on against all
+      the tide of circumstance, would soon have gone down the stream and been
+      heard of no more.&mdash;No, I am too much a lover of genius, I sometimes
+      think, and too often get impatient with dull people, so that, in their
+      weak talk, where nothing is taken for granted, I look forward to some
+      future possible state of development, when a gesture passing between a
+      beatified human soul and an archangel shall signify as much as the
+      complete history of a planet, from the time when it curdled to the time
+      when its sun was burned out. And yet, when a strong brain is weighed with
+      a true heart, it seems to me like balancing a bubble against a wedge of
+      gold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;It takes a very true man to be a fitting companion for a woman of
+      genius, but not a very great one. I am not sure that she will not
+      embroider her ideal better on a plain ground than on one with a brilliant
+      pattern already worked in its texture. But as the very essence of genius
+      is truthfulness, contact with realities, (which are always ideas behind
+      shows of form or language,) nothing is so contemptible as falsehood and
+      pretence in its eyes. Now it is not easy to find a perfectly true woman,
+      and it is very hard to find a perfectly true man. And a woman of genius,
+      who has the sagacity to choose such a one as her companion, shows more of
+      the divine gift in so doing than in her finest talk or her most brilliant
+      work of letters or of art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have been a good while coming at a secret, for which I wished to prepare
+      you before telling it. I think there is a kindly feeling growing up
+      between Iris and our young Marylander. Not that I suppose there is any
+      distinct understanding between them, but that the affinity which has drawn
+      him from the remote corner where he sat to the side of the young girl is
+      quietly bringing their two natures together. Just now she is all given up
+      to another; but when he no longer calls upon her daily thoughts and cares,
+      I warn you not to be surprised, if this bud of friendship open like the
+      evening primrose, with a sound as of a sudden stolen kiss, and lo! the
+      flower of full-blown love lies unfolded before you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now the days had come for our little friend, whose whims and
+      weaknesses had interested us, perhaps, as much as his better traits, to
+      make ready for that long journey which is easier to the cripple than to
+      the strong man, and on which none enters so willingly as he who has borne
+      the life-long load of infirmity during his earthly pilgrimage. At this
+      point, under most circumstances, I would close the doors and draw the veil
+      of privacy before the chamber where the birth which we call death, out of
+      life into the unknown world, is working its mystery. But this friend of
+      ours stood alone in the world, and, as the last act of his life was mainly
+      in harmony with the rest of its drama, I do not here feel the force of the
+      objection commonly lying against that death-bed literature which forms the
+      staple of a certain portion of the press. Let me explain what I mean, so
+      that my readers may think for themselves a little, before they accuse me
+      of hasty expressions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Roman Catholic Church has certain formulas for its dying children, to
+      which almost all of them attach the greatest importance. There is hardly a
+      criminal so abandoned that he is not anxious to receive the &ldquo;consolations
+      of religion&rdquo; in his last hours. Even if he be senseless, but still living,
+      I think that the form is gone through with, just as baptism is
+      administered to the unconscious new-born child. Now we do not quarrel with
+      these forms. We look with reverence and affection upon all symbols which
+      give peace and comfort to our fellow-creatures. But the value of the
+      new-born child's passive consent to the ceremony is null, as testimony to
+      the truth of a doctrine. The automatic closing of a dying man's lips on
+      the consecrated wafer proves nothing in favor of the Real Presence, or any
+      other dogma. And, speaking generally, the evidence of dying men in favor
+      of any belief is to be received with great caution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They commonly tell the truth about their present feelings, no doubt. A
+      dying man's deposition about anything he knows is good evidence. But it is
+      of much less consequence what a man thinks and says when he is changed by
+      pain, weakness, apprehension, than what he thinks when he is truly and
+      wholly himself. Most murderers die in a very pious frame of mind,
+      expecting to go to glory at once; yet no man believes he shall meet a
+      larger average of pirates and cut-throats in the streets of the New
+      Jerusalem than of honest folks that died in their beds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unfortunately, there has been a very great tendency to make capital of
+      various kinds out of dying men's speeches. The lies that have been put
+      into their mouths for this purpose are endless. The prime minister, whose
+      last breath was spent in scolding his nurse, dies with a magnificent
+      apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter. Addison gets up a
+      tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,&mdash;or somebody makes the
+      posthumous dying epigram for him. The incoherent babble of green fields is
+      translated into the language of stately sentiment. One would think, all
+      that dying men had to do was to say the prettiest thing they could,&mdash;to
+      make their rhetorical point,&mdash;and then bow themselves politely out of
+      the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Worse than this is the torturing of dying people to get their evidence in
+      favor of this or that favorite belief. The camp-followers of proselyting
+      sects have come in at the close of every life where they could get in, to
+      strip the languishing soul of its thoughts, and carry them off as spoils.
+      The Roman Catholic or other priest who insists on the reception of his
+      formula means kindly, we trust, and very commonly succeeds in getting the
+      acquiescence of the subject of his spiritual surgery, but do not let us
+      take the testimony of people who are in the worst condition to form
+      opinions as evidence of the truth or falsehood of that which they accept.
+      A lame man's opinion of dancing is not good for much. A poor fellow who
+      can neither eat nor drink, who is sleepless and full of pains, whose flesh
+      has wasted from him, whose blood is like water, who is gasping for breath,
+      is not in a condition to judge fairly of human life, which in all its main
+      adjustments is intended for men in a normal, healthy condition. It is a
+      remark I have heard from the wise Patriarch of the Medical Profession
+      among us, that the moral condition of patients with disease above the
+      great breathing-muscle, the diaphragm, is much more hopeful than that of
+      patients with disease below it, in the digestive organs. Many an honest
+      ignorant man has given us pathology when he thought he was giving us
+      psychology. With this preliminary caution I shall proceed to the story of
+      the Little Gentleman's leaving us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the divinity-student found that our fellow-boarder was not likely to
+      remain long with us, he, being a young man of tender conscience and kindly
+      nature, was not a little exercised on his behalf. It was undeniable that
+      on several occasions the Little Gentleman had expressed himself with a
+      good deal of freedom on a class of subjects which, according to the
+      divinity-student, he had no right to form an opinion upon. He therefore
+      considered his future welfare in jeopardy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Muggletonian sect have a very odd way of dealing with people. If I,
+      the Professor, will only give in to the Muggletonian doctrine, there shall
+      be no question through all that persuasion that I am competent to judge of
+      that doctrine; nay, I shall be quoted as evidence of its truth, while I
+      live, and cited, after I am dead, as testimony in its behalf. But if I
+      utter any ever so slight Anti-Muggletonian sentiment, then I become
+      incompetent to form any opinion on the matter. This, you cannot fail to
+      observe, is exactly the way the pseudo-sciences go to work, as explained
+      in my Lecture on Phrenology. Now I hold that he whose testimony would be
+      accepted in behalf of the Muggletonian doctrine has a right to be heard
+      against it. Whoso offers me any article of belief for my signature implies
+      that I am competent to form an opinion upon it; and if my positive
+      testimony in its favor is of any value, then my negative testimony against
+      it is also of value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought my young friend's attitude was a little too much like that of
+      the Muggletonians. I also remarked a singular timidity on his part lest
+      somebody should &ldquo;unsettle&rdquo; somebody's faith,&mdash;as if faith did not
+      require exercise as much as any other living thing, and were not all the
+      better for a shaking up now and then. I don't mean that it would be fair
+      to bother Bridget, the wild Irish girl, or Joice Heth, the centenarian, or
+      any other intellectual non-combatant; but all persons who proclaim a
+      belief which passes judgment on their neighbors must be ready to have it
+      &ldquo;unsettled,&rdquo; that is, questioned, at all times and by anybody,&mdash;just
+      as those who set up bars across a thoroughfare must expect to have them
+      taken down by every one who wants to pass, if he is strong enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides, to think of trying to water-proof the American mind against the
+      questions that Heaven rains down upon it shows a misapprehension of our
+      new conditions. If to question everything be unlawful and dangerous, we
+      had better undeclare our independence at once; for what the Declaration
+      means is the right to question everything, even the truth of its own
+      fundamental proposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old-world order of things is an arrangement of locks and canals, where
+      everything depends on keeping the gates shut, and so holding the upper
+      waters at their level; but the system under which the young republican
+      American is born trusts the whole unimpeded tide of life to the great
+      elemental influences, as the vast rivers of the continent settle their own
+      level in obedience to the laws that govern the planet and the spheres that
+      surround it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The divinity-student was not quite up to the idea of the commonwealth, as
+      our young friend the Marylander, for instance, understood it. He could not
+      get rid of that notion of private property in truth, with the right to
+      fence it in, and put up a sign-board, thus:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               ALL TRESPASSERS ARE WARNED OFF THESE
+                              GROUNDS!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      He took the young Marylander to task for going to the Church of the
+      Galileans, where he had several times accompanied Iris of late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am a Churchman,&mdash;the young man said,&mdash;by education and habit.
+      I love my old Church for many reasons, but most of all because I think it
+      has educated me out of its own forms into the spirit of its highest
+      teachings. I think I belong to the &ldquo;Broad Church,&rdquo; if any of you can tell
+      what that means.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had the rashness to attempt to answer the question myself.&mdash;Some
+      say the Broad Church means the collective mass of good people of all
+      denominations. Others say that such a definition is nonsense; that a
+      church is an organization, and the scattered good folks are no
+      organization at all. They think that men will eventually come together on
+      the basis of one or two or more common articles of belief, and form a
+      great unity. Do they see what this amounts to? It means an equal division
+      of intellect! It is mental agrarianism! a thing that never was and never
+      will be until national and individual idiosyncrasies have ceased to exist.
+      The man of thirty-nine beliefs holds the man of one belief a pauper; he is
+      not going to give up thirty-eight of them for the sake of fraternizing
+      with the other in the temple which bears on its front, &ldquo;Deo erexit
+      Voltaire.&rdquo; A church is a garden, I have heard it said, and the
+      illustration was neatly handled. Yes, and there is no such thing as a
+      broad garden. It must be fenced in, and whatever is fenced in is narrow.
+      You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing together in it, except
+      by the forcing system, which is a mighty narrow piece of business. You
+      can't make a village or a parish or a family think alike, yet you suppose
+      that you can make a world pinch its beliefs or pad them to a single
+      pattern! Why, the very life of an ecclesiastical organization is a life of
+      induction, a state of perpetually disturbed equilibrium kept up by another
+      charged body in the neighborhood. If the two bodies touch and share their
+      respective charges, down goes the index of the electrometer!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do you know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to himself?
+      Smith is always a Smithite. He takes in exactly Smith's-worth of
+      knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity. And Brown has
+      from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to excommunicate him, to
+      anonymous-article him, because he did not take in Brown's-worth of
+      knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity. He cannot do it, any more than a
+      pint-pot can hold a quart, or a quart-pot be filled by a pint. Iron is
+      essentially the same everywhere and always; but the sulphate of iron is
+      never the same as the carbonate of iron. Truth is invariable; but the
+      Smithate of truth must always differ from the Brownate of truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wider the intellect, the larger and simpler the expressions in which
+      its knowledge is embodied. The inferior race, the degraded and enslaved
+      people, the small-minded individual, live in the details which to larger
+      minds and more advanced tribes of men reduce themselves to axioms and
+      laws. As races and individual minds must always differ just as sulphates
+      and carbonates do, I cannot see ground for expecting the Broad Church to
+      be founded on any fusion of intellectual beliefs, which of course implies
+      that those who hold the larger number of doctrines as essential shall come
+      down to those who hold the smaller number. These doctrines are to the
+      negative aristocracy what the quarterings of their coats are to the
+      positive orders of nobility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Broad Church, I think, will never be based on anything that requires
+      the use of language. Freemasonry gives an idea of such a church, and a
+      brother is known and cared for in a strange land where no word of his can
+      be understood. The apostle of this church may be a deaf mute carrying a
+      cup of cold water to a thirsting fellow-creature. The cup of cold water
+      does not require to be translated for a foreigner to understand it. I am
+      afraid the only Broad Church possible is one that has its creed in the
+      heart, and not in the head,&mdash;that we shall know its members by their
+      fruits, and not by their words. If you say this communion of well-doers is
+      no church, I can only answer, that all organized bodies have their limits
+      of size, and that when we find a man a hundred feet high and thirty feet
+      broad across the shoulders, we will look out for an organization that
+      shall include all Christendom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of us do practically recognize a Broad Church and a Narrow Church,
+      however. The Narrow Church may be seen in the ship's boats of humanity, in
+      the long boat, in the jolly boat, in the captain's gig, lying off the poor
+      old vessel, thanking God that they are safe, and reckoning how soon the
+      hulk containing the mass of their fellow-creatures will go down. The Broad
+      Church is on board, working hard at the pumps, and very slow to believe
+      that the ship will be swallowed up with so many poor people in it,
+      fastened down under the hatches ever since it floated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;All this, of course, was nothing but my poor notion about these
+      matters. I am simply an &ldquo;outsider,&rdquo; you know; only it doesn't do very well
+      for a nest of Hingham boxes to talk too much about outsiders and insiders!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After this talk of ours, I think these two young people went pretty
+      regularly to the Church of the Galileans. Still they could not keep away
+      from the sweet harmonies and rhythmic litanies of Saint Polycarp on the
+      great Church festival-days; so that, between the two, they were so much
+      together, that the boarders began to make remarks, and our landlady said
+      to me, one day, that, though it was noon of her business, them that had
+      eyes couldn't help seein' that there was somethin' goin', on between them
+      two young people; she thought the young man was a very likely young man,
+      though jest what his prospecs was was unbeknown to her; but she thought he
+      must be doing well, and rather guessed he would be able to take care of a
+      femily, if he didn't go to takin' a house; for a gentleman and his wife
+      could board a great deal cheaper than they could keep house;&mdash;but
+      then that girl was nothin' but a child, and wouldn't think of bein'
+      married this five year. They was good boarders, both of 'em, paid regular,
+      and was as pooty a couple as she ever laid eyes on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;To come back to what I began to speak of before,&mdash;the
+      divinity-student was exercised in his mind about the Little Gentleman,
+      and, in the kindness of his heart,&mdash;for he was a good young man,&mdash;and
+      in the strength of his convictions,&mdash;for he took it for granted that
+      he and his crowd were right, and other folks and their crowd were wrong,&mdash;he
+      determined to bring the Little Gentleman round to his faith before he
+      died, if he could. So he sent word to the sick man, that he should be
+      pleased to visit him and have some conversation with him; and received for
+      answer that he would be welcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The divinity-student made him a visit, therefore and had a somewhat
+      remarkable interview with him, which I shall briefly relate, without
+      attempting to justify the positions taken by the Little Gentleman. He
+      found him weak, but calm. Iris sat silent by his pillow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the usual preliminaries, the divinity-student said; in a kind way,
+      that he was sorry to find him in failing health, that he felt concerned
+      for his soul, and was anxious to assist him in making preparations for the
+      great change awaiting him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thank you, Sir,&mdash;said the Little Gentleman, permit me to ask you,
+      what makes you think I am not ready for it, Sir, and that you can do
+      anything to help me, Sir?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I address you only as a fellow-man,&mdash;said the divinity-student,&mdash;and
+      therefore a fellow-sinner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am not a man, Sir!&mdash;said the Little Gentleman.&mdash;I was born
+      into this world the wreck of a man, and I shall not be judged with a race
+      to which I do not belong. Look at this!&mdash;he said, and held up his
+      withered arm.&mdash;See there!&mdash;and he pointed to his misshapen
+      extremities.&mdash;Lay your hand here!&mdash;and he laid his own on the
+      region of his misplaced heart.&mdash;I have known nothing of the life of
+      your race. When I first came to my consciousness, I found myself an object
+      of pity, or a sight to show. The first strange child I ever remember hid
+      its face and would not come near me. I was a broken-hearted as well as
+      broken-bodied boy. I grew into the emotions of ripening youth, and all
+      that I could have loved shrank from my presence. I became a man in years,
+      and had nothing in common with manhood but its longings. My life is the
+      dying pang of a worn-out race, and I shall go down alone into the dust,
+      out of this world of men and women, without ever knowing the fellowship of
+      the one or the love of the other. I will not die with a lie rattling in my
+      throat. If another state of being has anything worse in store for me, I
+      have had a long apprenticeship to give me strength that I may bear it. I
+      don't believe it, Sir! I have too much faith for that. God has not left me
+      wholly without comfort, even here. I love this old place where I was born;&mdash;the
+      heart of the world beats under the three hills of Boston, Sir! I love this
+      great land, with so many tall men in it, and so many good, noble women.&mdash;His
+      eyes turned to the silent figure by his pillow.&mdash;I have learned to
+      accept meekly what has been allotted to me, but I cannot honestly say that
+      I think my sin has been greater than my suffering. I bear the ignorance
+      and the evil-doing of whole generations in my single person. I never drew
+      a breath of air nor took a step that was not a punishment for another's
+      fault. I may have had many wrong thoughts, but I cannot have done many
+      wrong deeds,&mdash;for my cage has been a narrow one, and I have paced it
+      alone. I have looked through the bars and seen the great world of men busy
+      and happy, but I had no part in their doings. I have known what it was to
+      dream of the great passions; but since my mother kissed me before she
+      died, no woman's lips have pressed my cheek,&mdash;nor ever will.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;The young girl's eyes glittered with a sudden film, and almost
+      without a thought, but with a warm human instinct that rushed up into her
+      face with her heart's blood, she bent over and kissed him. It was the
+      sacrament that washed out the memory of long years of bitterness, and I
+      should hold it an unworthy thought to defend her. The Little Gentleman
+      repaid her with the only tear any of us ever saw him shed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The divinity-student rose from his place, and, turning away from the sick
+      man, walked to the other side of the room, where he bowed his head and was
+      still. All the questions he had meant to ask had faded from his memory.
+      The tests he had prepared by which to judge of his fellow-creature's
+      fitness for heaven seemed to have lost their virtue. He could trust the
+      crippled child of sorrow to the Infinite Parent. The kiss of the
+      fair-haired girl had been like a sign from heaven, that angels watched
+      over him whom he was presuming but a moment before to summon before the
+      tribunal of his private judgment. Shall I pray with you?&mdash;he said,
+      after a pause. A little before he would have said, Shall I pray for you?&mdash;The
+      Christian religion, as taught by its Founder, is full of sentiment. So we
+      must not blame the divinity-student, if he was overcome by those yearnings
+      of human sympathy which predominate so much more in the sermons of the
+      Master than in the writings of his successors, and which have made the
+      parable of the Prodigal Son the consolation of mankind, as it has been the
+      stumbling-block of all exclusive doctrines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pray!&mdash;said the Little Gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The divinity-student prayed, in low, tender tones,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Iris and the Little Gentleman that God would look on his servant lying
+      helpless at the feet of his mercy; that He would remember his long years
+      of bondage in the flesh; that He would deal gently with the bruised reed.
+      Thou hast visited the sins of the fathers upon this their child. Oh, turn
+      away from him the penalties of his own transgressions! Thou hast laid upon
+      him, from infancy, the cross which thy stronger children are called upon
+      to take up; and now that he is fainting under it, be Thou his stay, and do
+      Thou succor him that is tempted! Let his manifold infirmities come between
+      him and Thy judgment; in wrath remember mercy! If his eyes are not opened
+      to all Thy truth, let Thy compassion lighten the darkness that rests upon
+      him, even as it came through the word of thy Son to blind Bartimeus, who
+      sat by the wayside, begging!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many more petitions he uttered, but all in the same subdued tone of
+      tenderness. In the presence of helpless suffering, and in the
+      fast-darkening shadow of the Destroyer, he forgot all but his Christian
+      humanity, and cared more about consoling his fellow-man than making a
+      proselyte of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the last prayer to which the Little Gentleman ever listened. Some
+      change was rapidly coming over him during this last hour of which I have
+      been speaking. The excitement of pleading his cause before his
+      self-elected spiritual adviser,&mdash;the emotion which overcame him, when
+      the young girl obeyed the sudden impulse of her feelings and pressed her
+      lips to his cheek,&mdash;the thoughts that mastered him while the
+      divinity-student poured out his soul for him in prayer, might well hurry
+      on the inevitable moment. When the divinity-student had uttered his last
+      petition, commending him to the Father through his Son's intercession, he
+      turned to look upon him before leaving his chamber. His face was changed.&mdash;There
+      is a language of the human countenance which we all understand without an
+      interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that ever
+      stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect. By the stillness of the
+      sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by the
+      fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the
+      contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is soon to
+      leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its windows and
+      putting out its fires.&mdash;Such was the aspect of the face upon which
+      the divinity-student looked, after the brief silence which followed his
+      prayer. The change had been rapid, though not that abrupt one which is
+      liable to happen at any moment in these cases.&mdash;The sick man looked
+      towards him.&mdash;Farewell,&mdash;he said,&mdash;I thank you. Leave me
+      alone with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the divinity-student had gone, and the Little Gentleman found himself
+      alone with Iris, he lifted his hand to his neck, and took from it,
+      suspended by a slender chain, a quaint, antique-looking key,&mdash;the
+      same key I had once seen him holding. He gave this to her, and pointed to
+      a carved cabinet opposite his bed, one of those that had so attracted my
+      curious eyes and set me wondering as to what it might contain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Open it,&mdash;he said,&mdash;and light the lamp.&mdash;The young girl
+      walked to the cabinet and unlocked the door. A deep recess appeared, lined
+      with black velvet, against which stood in white relief an ivory crucifix.
+      A silver lamp hung over it. She lighted the lamp and came back to the
+      bedside. The dying man fixed his eyes upon the figure of the dying
+      Saviour.&mdash;Give me your hand, he said; and Iris placed her right hand
+      in his left. So they remained, until presently his eyes lost their
+      meaning, though they still remained vacantly fixed upon the white image.
+      Yet he held the young girl's hand firmly, as if it were leading him
+      through some deep-shadowed valley and it was all he could cling to. But
+      presently an involuntary muscular contraction stole over him, and his
+      terrible dying grasp held the poor girl as if she were wedged in an engine
+      of torture. She pressed her lips together and sat still. The inexorable
+      hand held her tighter and tighter, until she felt as if her own slender
+      fingers would be crushed in its gripe. It was one of the tortures of the
+      Inquisition she was suffering, and she could not stir from her place.
+      Then, in her great anguish, she, too, cast her eyes upon that dying
+      figure, and, looking upon its pierced hands and feet and side and
+      lacerated forehead, she felt that she also must suffer uncomplaining. In
+      the moment of her sharpest pain she did not forget the duties of her under
+      office, but dried the dying man's moist forehead with her handkerchief,
+      even while the dews of agony were glistening on her own. How long this
+      lasted she never could tell. Time and thirst are two things you and I talk
+      about; but the victims whom holy men and righteous judges used to stretch
+      on their engines knew better what they meant than you or I!&mdash;What is
+      that great bucket of water for? said the Marchioness de Brinvilliers,
+      before she was placed on the rack.&mdash;For you to drink,&mdash;said the
+      torturer to the little woman.&mdash;She could not think that it would take
+      such a flood to quench the fire in her and so keep her alive for her
+      confession. The torturer knew better than she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time not to be counted in minutes, as the clock measures, &mdash;without
+      any warning,&mdash;there came a swift change of his features; his face
+      turned white, as the waters whiten when a sudden breath passes over their
+      still surface; the muscles instantly relaxed, and Iris, released at once
+      from her care for the sufferer and from his unconscious grasp, fell
+      senseless, with a feeble cry,&mdash;the only utterance of her long agony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps you sometimes wander in through the iron gates of the Copp's Hill
+      burial-ground. You love to stroll round among the graves that crowd each
+      other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit. You love to lean
+      on the freestone slab which lies over the bones of the Mathers,&mdash;to
+      read the epitaph of stout William Clark, &ldquo;Despiser of Sorry Persons and
+      little Actions,&rdquo;&mdash;to stand by the stone grave of sturdy Daniel
+      Malcolm and look upon the splintered slab that tells the old rebel's
+      story,&mdash;to kneel by the triple stone that says how the three
+      Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died on the same day and
+      lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a moving ballad, by the late
+      BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen in his autobiography, which will explain
+      the secret of the triple gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a
+      mistake, unless the stone is wrong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not very far from that you will find a fair mound, of dimensions fit to
+      hold a well-grown man. I will not tell you the inscription upon the stone
+      which stands at its head; for I do not wish you to be sure of the
+      resting-place of one who could not bear to think that he should be known
+      as a cripple among the dead, after being pointed at so long among the
+      living. There is one sign, it is true, by which, if you have been a
+      sagacious reader of these papers, you will at once know it; but I fear you
+      read carelessly, and must study them more diligently before you will
+      detect the hint to which I allude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Little Gentleman lies where he longed to lie, among the old names and
+      the old bones of the old Boston people. At the foot of his resting-place
+      is the river, alive with the wings and antennae of its colossal
+      water-insects; over opposite are the great war-ships, and the heavy guns,
+      which, when they roar, shake the soil in which he lies; and in the steeple
+      of Christ Church, hard by, are the sweet chimes which are the Boston boy's
+      Ranz des Vaches, whose echoes follow him all the world over.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                         In Pace!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I, told you a good while ago that the Little Gentleman could not do a
+      better thing than to leave all his money, whatever it might be, to the
+      young girl who has since that established such a claim upon him. He did
+      not, however. A considerable bequest to one of our public institutions
+      keeps his name in grateful remembrance. The telescope through which he was
+      fond of watching the heavenly bodies, and the movements of which had been
+      the source of such odd fancies on my part, is now the property of a
+      Western College. You smile as you think of my taking it for a fleshless
+      human figure, when I saw its tube pointing to the sky, and thought it was
+      an arm, under the white drapery thrown over it for protection. So do I
+      smile now; I belong to the numerous class who are prophets after the fact,
+      and hold my nightmares very cheap by daylight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have received many letters of inquiry as to the sound resembling a
+      woman's voice, which occasioned me so many perplexities. Some thought
+      there was no question that he had a second apartment, in which he had made
+      an asylum for a deranged female relative. Others were of opinion that he
+      was, as I once suggested, a &ldquo;Bluebeard&rdquo; with patriarchal tendencies, and I
+      have even been censured for introducing so Oriental an element into my
+      record of boarding-house experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Come in and see me, the Professor, some evening when I have nothing else
+      to do, and ask me to play you Tartini's Devil's Sonata on that
+      extraordinary instrument in my possession, well known to amateurs as one
+      of the masterpieces of Joseph Guarnerius. The vox humana of the great
+      Haerlem organ is very lifelike, and the same stop in the organ of the
+      Cambridge chapel might be mistaken in some of its tones for a human voice;
+      but I think you never heard anything come so near the cry of a prima donna
+      as the A string and the E string of this instrument. A single fact will
+      illustrate the resemblance. I was executing some tours de force upon it
+      one evening, when the policeman of our district rang the bell sharply, and
+      asked what was the matter in the house. He had heard a woman's screams,&mdash;he
+      was sure of it. I had to make the instrument sing before his eyes before
+      he could be satisfied that he had not heard the cries of a woman. The
+      instrument was bequeathed to me by the Little Gentleman. Whether it had
+      anything to do with the sounds I heard coming from his chamber, you can
+      form your own opinion;&mdash;I have no other conjecture to offer. It is
+      not true that a second apartment with a secret entrance was found; and the
+      story of the veiled lady is the invention of one of the Reporters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bridget, the housemaid, always insisted that he died a Catholic. She had
+      seen the crucifix, and believed that he prayed on his knees before it. The
+      last circumstance is very probably true; indeed, there was a spot worn on
+      the carpet just before this cabinet which might be thus accounted for. Why
+      he, whose whole life was a crucifixion, should not love to look on that
+      divine image of blameless suffering, I cannot see; on the contrary, it
+      seems to me the most natural thing in the world that he should. But there
+      are those who want to make private property of everything, and can't make
+      up their minds that people who don't think as they do should claim any
+      interest in that infinite compassion expressed in the central figure of
+      the Christendom which includes us all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The divinity-student expressed a hope before the boarders that he should
+      meet him in heaven.&mdash;The question is, whether he'll meet you,&mdash;said
+      the young fellow John, rather smartly. The divinity-student had n't
+      thought of that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, he is a worthy young man, and I trust I have shown him in a
+      kindly and respectful light. He will get a parish by-and-by; and, as he is
+      about to marry the sister of an old friend,&mdash;the Schoolmistress, whom
+      some of us remember,&mdash;and as all sorts of expensive accidents happen
+      to young married ministers, he will be under bonds to the amount of his
+      salary, which means starvation, if they are forfeited, to think all his
+      days as he thought when he was settled,&mdash;unless the majority of his
+      people change with him or in advance of him. A hard ease, to which nothing
+      could reconcile a man, except that the faithful discharge of daily duties
+      in his personal relations with his parishioners will make him useful
+      enough in his way, though as a thinker he may cease to exist before he has
+      reached middle age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Iris went into mourning for the Little Gentleman. Although, as I
+      have said, he left the bulk of his property, by will, to a public
+      institution, he added a codicil, by which he disposed of various pieces of
+      property as tokens of kind remembrance. It was in this way I became the
+      possessor of the wonderful instrument I have spoken of, which had been
+      purchased for him out of an Italian convent. The landlady was comforted
+      with a small legacy. The following extract relates to Iris: &ldquo;in
+      consideration of her manifold acts of kindness, but only in token of
+      grateful remembrance, and by no means as a reward for services which
+      cannot be compensated, a certain messuage, with all the land thereto
+      appertaining, situated in ______ Street, at the North End, so called, of
+      Boston, aforesaid, the same being the house in which I was born, but now
+      inhabited by several families, and known as 'The Rookery.'&rdquo; Iris had also
+      the crucifix, the portrait, and the red-jewelled ring. The funeral or
+      death's-head ring was buried with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a good while, after the Little Gentleman was gone, before our
+      boarding-house recovered its wonted cheerfulness. There was a flavor in
+      his whims and local prejudices that we liked, even while we smiled at
+      them. It was hard to see the tall chair thrust away among useless lumber,
+      to dismantle his room, to take down the picture of Leah, the handsome
+      Witch of Essex, to move away the massive shelves that held the books he
+      loved, to pack up the tube through which he used to study the silent
+      stars, looking down at him like the eyes of dumb creatures, with a kind of
+      stupid half-consciousness that did not worry him as did the eyes of men
+      and women,&mdash;and hardest of all to displace that sacred figure to
+      which his heart had always turned and found refuge, in the feelings it
+      inspired, from all the perplexities of his busy brain. It was hard, but it
+      had to be done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And by-and-by we grew cheerful again, and the breakfast-table wore
+      something of its old look. The Koh-i-noor, as we named the gentleman with
+      the diamond, left us, however, soon after that &ldquo;little mill,&rdquo; as the young
+      fellow John called it, where he came off second best. His departure was no
+      doubt hastened by a note from the landlady's daughter, inclosing a lock of
+      purple hair which she &ldquo;had valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew
+      the hollowness of the vows he had breathed,&rdquo; speedily followed by another,
+      inclosing the landlady's bill. The next morning he was missing, as were
+      his limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it. Three empty bottles of
+      Mrs. Allen's celebrated preparation, each of them asserting, on its word
+      of honor as a bottle, that its former contents were &ldquo;not a dye,&rdquo; were all
+      that was left to us of the Koh-i-noor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this time forward, the landlady's daughter manifested a decided
+      improvement in her style of carrying herself before the boarders. She
+      abolished the odious little flat, gummy side-curl. She left off various
+      articles of &ldquo;jewelry.&rdquo; She began to help her mother in some of her
+      household duties. She became a regular attendant on the ministrations of a
+      very worthy clergyman, having been attracted to his meetin' by witnessing
+      a marriage ceremony in which he called a man and a woman a &ldquo;gentleman&rdquo; and
+      a &ldquo;lady,&rdquo;&mdash;a stroke of gentility which quite overcame her. She even
+      took a part in what she called a Sabbath school, though it was held on
+      Sunday, and by no means on Saturday, as the name she intended to utter
+      implied. All this, which was very sincere, as I believe, on her part, and
+      attended with a great improvement in her character, ended in her bringing
+      home a young man, with straight, sandy hair, brushed so as to stand up
+      steeply above his forehead, wearing a pair of green spectacles, and
+      dressed in black broadcloth. His personal aspect, and a certain solemnity
+      of countenance, led me to think he must be a clergyman; and as Master
+      Benjamin Franklin blurted out before several of us boarders, one day, that
+      &ldquo;Sis had got a beau,&rdquo; I was pleased at the prospect of her becoming a
+      minister's wife. On inquiry, however, I found that the somewhat solemn
+      look which I had noticed was indeed a professional one, but not clerical.
+      He was a young undertaker, who had just succeeded to a thriving business.
+      Things, I believe, are going on well at this time of writing, and I am
+      glad for the landlady's daughter and her mother. Sextons and undertakers
+      are the cheerfullest people in the world at home, as comedians and
+      circus-clowns are the most melancholy in their domestic circle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As our old boarding-house is still in existence, I do not feel at liberty
+      to give too minute a statement of the present condition of each and all of
+      its inmates. I am happy to say, however, that they are all alive and well,
+      up to this time. That amiable old gentleman who sat opposite to me is
+      growing older, as old men will, but still smiles benignantly on all the
+      boarders, and has come to be a kind of father to all of them,&mdash;so
+      that on his birthday there is always something like a family festival. The
+      Poor Relation, even, has warmed into a filial feeling towards him, and on
+      his last birthday made him a beautiful present, namely, a very handsomely
+      bound copy of Blair's celebrated poem, &ldquo;The Grave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man John is still, as he says, &ldquo;in fustrate fettle.&rdquo; I saw him
+      spar, not long since, at a private exhibition, and do himself great credit
+      in a set-to with Henry Finnegass, Esq., a professional gentleman of
+      celebrity. I am pleased to say that he has been promoted to an upper
+      clerkship, and, in consequence of his rise in office, has taken an
+      apartment somewhat lower down than number &ldquo;forty-'leven,&rdquo; as he
+      facetiously called his attic. Whether there is any truth, or not, in the
+      story of his attachment to, and favorable reception by, the daughter of
+      the head of an extensive wholesale grocer's establishment, I will not
+      venture an opinion; I may say, however, that I have met him repeatedly in
+      company with a very well-nourished and high-colored young lady, who, I
+      understand, is the daughter of the house in question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of the boarders were of opinion that Iris did not return the
+      undisguised attentions of the handsome young Marylander. Instead of fixing
+      her eyes steadily on him, as she used to look upon the Little Gentleman,
+      she would turn them away, as if to avoid his own. They often went to
+      church together, it is true; but nobody, of course, supposes there is any
+      relation between religious sympathy and those wretched &ldquo;sentimental&rdquo;
+       movements of the human heart upon which it is commonly agreed that nothing
+      better is based than society, civilization, friendship, the relation of
+      husband and wife, and of parent and child, and which many people must
+      think were singularly overrated by the Teacher of Nazareth, whose whole
+      life, as I said before, was full of sentiment, loving this or that young
+      man, pardoning this or that sinner, weeping over the dead, mourning for
+      the doomed city, blessing, and perhaps kissing, the little children, so
+      that the Gospels are still cried over almost as often as the last work of
+      fiction!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But one fine June morning there rumbled up to the door of our
+      boarding-house a hack containing a lady inside and a trunk on the outside.
+      It was our friend the lady-patroness of Miss Iris, the same who had been
+      called by her admiring pastor &ldquo;The Model of all the Virtues.&rdquo; Once a week
+      she had written a letter, in a rather formal hand, but full of good
+      advice, to her young charge. And now she had come to carry her away,
+      thinking that she had learned all she was likely to learn under her
+      present course of teaching. The Model, however, was to stay awhile,&mdash;a
+      week, or more,&mdash;before they should leave together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Iris was obedient, as she was bound to be. She was respectful, grateful,
+      as a child is with a just, but not tender parent. Yet something was wrong.
+      She had one of her trances, and became statue-like, as before, only the
+      day after the Model's arrival. She was wan and silent, tasted nothing at
+      table, smiled as if by a forced effort, and often looked vaguely away from
+      those who were looking at her, her eyes just glazed with the shining
+      moisture of a tear that must not be allowed to gather and fall. Was it
+      grief at parting from the place where her strange friendship had grown up
+      with the Little Gentleman? Yet she seemed to have become reconciled to his
+      loss, and rather to have a deep feeling of gratitude that she had been
+      permitted to care for him in his last weary days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Sunday after the Model's arrival, that lady had an attack of headache,
+      and was obliged to shut herself up in a darkened room alone. Our two young
+      friends took the opportunity to go together to the Church of the
+      Galileans. They said but little going,&mdash;&ldquo;collecting their thoughts&rdquo;
+       for the service, I devoutly hope. My kind good friend the pastor preached
+      that day one of his sermons that make us all feel like brothers and
+      sisters, and his text was that affectionate one from John, &ldquo;My little
+      children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in
+      truth.&rdquo; When Iris and her friend came out of church, they were both pale,
+      and walked a space without speaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the young man said,&mdash;You and I are not little children, Iris!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked in his face an instant, as if startled, for there was something
+      strange in the tone of his voice. She smiled faintly, but spoke never a
+      word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In deed and in truth, Iris,&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What shall a poor girl say or do, when a strong man falters in his speech
+      before her, and can do nothing better than hold out his hand to finish his
+      broken sentence?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poor girl said nothing, but quietly laid her ungloved hand in his,&mdash;the
+      little soft white hand which had ministered so tenderly and suffered so
+      patiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The blood came back to the young man's cheeks, as he lifted it to his
+      lips, even as they walked there in the street, touched it gently with
+      them, and said, &ldquo;It is mine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Iris did not contradict him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The seasons pass by so rapidly, that I am startled to think how much has
+      happened since these events I was describing. Those two young people would
+      insist on having their own way about their own affairs, notwithstanding
+      the good lady, so justly called the Model, insisted that the age of
+      twenty-five years was as early as any discreet young lady should think of
+      incurring the responsibilities, etc., etc. Long before Iris had reached
+      that age, she was the wife of a young Maryland engineer, directing some of
+      the vast constructions of his native State,&mdash;where he was growing
+      rich fast enough to be able to decline that famous Russian offer which
+      would have made him a kind of nabob in a few years. Iris does not write
+      verse often, nowadays, but she sometimes draws. The last sketch of hers I
+      have seen in my Southern visits was of two children, a boy and girl, the
+      youngest holding a silver goblet, like the one she held that evening when
+      I&mdash;I was so struck with her statue-like beauty. If in the later,
+      summer months you find the grass marked with footsteps around that grave
+      on Copp's Hill I told you of, and flowers scattered over it, you may be
+      sure that Iris is here on her annual visit to the home of her childhood
+      and that excellent lady whose only fault was, that Nature had written out
+      her list of virtues an ruled paper, and forgotten to rub out the lines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thing more I must mention. Being on the Common, last Sunday, I was
+      attracted by the cheerful spectacle of a well-dressed and somewhat
+      youthful papa wheeling a very elegant little carriage containing a stout
+      baby. A buxom young lady watched them from one of the stone seats, with an
+      interest which could be nothing less than maternal. I at once recognized
+      my old friend, the young fellow whom we called John. He was delighted to
+      see me, introduced me to &ldquo;Madam,&rdquo; and would have the lusty infant out of
+      the carriage, and hold him up for me to look at.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, then,&mdash;he said to the two-year-old,&mdash;show the gentleman how
+      you hit from the shoulder. Whereupon the little imp pushed his fat fist
+      straight into my eye, to his father's intense satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fust-rate little chap,&mdash;said the papa.&mdash;Chip of the old block.
+      Regl'r little Johnny, you know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was so much pleased to find the young fellow settled in life, and
+      pushing about one of &ldquo;them little articles&rdquo; he had seemed to want so much,
+      that I took my &ldquo;punishment&rdquo; at the hands of the infant pugilist with great
+      equanimity.&mdash;And how is the old boarding-house?&mdash;I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A 1,&mdash;he answered.&mdash;Painted and papered as good as new. Gabs in
+      all the rooms up to the skyparlors. Old woman's layin' up money, they say.
+      Means to send Ben Franklin to college. Just then the first bell rang for
+      church, and my friend, who, I understand, has become a most exemplary
+      member of society, said he must be off to get ready for meetin', and told
+      the young one to &ldquo;shake dada,&rdquo; which he did with his closed fist, in a
+      somewhat menacing manner. And so the young man John, as we used to call
+      him, took the pole of the miniature carriage, and pushed the small
+      pugilist before him homewards, followed, in a somewhat leisurely way, by
+      his pleasant-looking lady-companion, and I sent a sigh and a smile after
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening, as soon as it was dark, I could not help going round by the
+      old boarding-house. The &ldquo;gahs&rdquo; was lighted, but the curtains, or more
+      properly, the painted shades; were not down. And so I stood there and
+      looked in along the table where the boarders sat at the evening meal,&mdash;our
+      old breakfast-table, which some of us feel as if we knew so well. There
+      were new faces at it, but also old and familiar ones.&mdash;The landlady,
+      in a wonderfully smart cap, looking young, comparatively speaking, and as
+      if half the wrinkles had been ironed out of her forehead.&mdash;Her
+      daughter, in rather dressy half-mourning, with a vast brooch of jet, got
+      up, apparently, to match the gentleman next her, who was in black costume
+      and sandy hair,&mdash;the last rising straight from his forehead, like the
+      marble flame one sometimes sees at the top of a funeral urn.&mdash;The
+      Poor Relation, not in absolute black, but in a stuff with specks of white;
+      as much as to say, that, if there were any more Hirams left to sigh for
+      her, there were pin-holes in the night of her despair, through which a ray
+      of hope might find its way to an adorer. &mdash;Master Benjamin Franklin,
+      grown taller of late, was in the act of splitting his face open with a
+      wedge of pie, so that his features were seen to disadvantage for the
+      moment.&mdash;The good old gentleman was sitting still and thoughtful. All
+      at once he turned his face toward the window where I stood, and, just as
+      if he had seen me, smiled his benignant smile. It was a recollection of
+      some past pleasant moment; but it fell upon me like the blessing of a
+      father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I kissed my hand to them all, unseen as I stood in the outer darkness; and
+      as I turned and went my way, the table and all around it faded into the
+      realm of twilight shadows and of midnight dreams.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                  &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      And so my year's record is finished. The Professor has talked less than
+      his predecessor, but he has heard and seen more. Thanks to all those
+      friends who from time to time have sent their messages of kindly
+      recognition and fellow-feeling! Peace to all such as may have been vexed
+      in spirit by any utterance these pages have repeated! They will,
+      doubtless, forget for the moment the difference in the hues of truth we
+      look at through our human prisms, and join in singing (inwardly) this hymn
+      to the Source of the light we all need to lead us, and the warmth which
+      alone can make us all brothers.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               A SUN-DAY HYMN.
+
+     Lord of all being! throned afar,
+     Thy glory flames from sun and star,
+     Centre and soul of every sphere,
+     Yet to each loving heart how near!
+
+     Sun of our life, thy quickening ray
+     Sheds on our path the glow of day;
+     Star of our hope, thy softened light
+     Cheers the long watches of the night.
+
+     Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn;
+     Our noontide is thy gracious dawn;
+     Our rainbow arch thy mercy's sign;
+     All, save the clouds of sin, are thine!
+
+     Lord of all life, below, above,
+     Whose light is truth, whose warmth is love,
+     Before thy ever-blazing throne
+     We ask no lustre of our own.
+
+     Grant us thy truth to make us free,
+     And kindling hearts that burn for thee,
+     Till all thy living altars claim
+     One holy light, one heavenly flame.
+     One holy light, one heavenly flame.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
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+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+#2 in our series by Oliver Wendell Holmes
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+Title:  The Professor at the Breakfast Table
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+Author:  Oliver Wendell Holmes
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+June, 2001  [Etext #2665]
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+Etext prepared for Gutenberg by David Widger,  widger@cecomet.net
+
+
+
+
+
+The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.
+
+The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a
+quarter of a century since these papers were written.  Statements
+which were true then are not necessarily true now.  Thus, the speed
+of the trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of
+the year when the fastest time to that date was given must be very
+considerably altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page
+49 of the "Autocrat."  No doubt many other statements and opinions
+might be more or less modified if I were writing today instead of
+having written before the war, when the world and I were both more
+than a score of years younger.
+
+These papers followed close upon the track of the "Autocrat."  They
+had to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected,
+which is a formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest.
+Paradise Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are
+enough to warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his
+arrow of the danger of missing when he looses "his fellow of the
+selfsame flight."
+
+There is good reason why it should be so.  The first juice that runs
+of itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and
+tastes of the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press
+the flow betrays the flavor of the skin.  If there is any freshness
+in the original idea of the work, if there is any individuality in
+the method or style of a new author, or of an old author on a new
+track, it will have lost much of its first effect when repeated.
+Still, there have not been wanting readers who have preferred this
+second series of papers to the first.  The new papers were more
+aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that reason found a
+heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper antagonism
+in others.  It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks they
+called forth.  Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of
+temper at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as
+if they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary.  It required
+the exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.
+
+How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
+line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
+when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant!  One day, in the time
+when I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of "Tom
+Jones," and glance at the title-page.  There was one of those little
+engravings opposite, which bore the familiar name of "T. Uwins," as I
+remember it, and under it the words "Mr. Partridge bore all this
+patiently."  How many times, when, after rough usage from
+ill-mannered critics, my own vocabulary of vituperation was simmering
+in such a lively way that it threatened to boil and lift its lid and
+so boil over, those words have calmed the small internal
+effervescence!  There is very little in them and very little of them;
+and so there is not much in a linchpin considered by itself, but it
+often keeps a wheel from coming off and prevents what might be a
+catastrophe.  The chief trouble in offering such papers as these to
+the readers of to-day is that their heresies have become so familiar
+among intelligent people that they have too commonplace an aspect.
+All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear so differently from
+the way in which they presented themselves when these papers were
+written that it is hard to recognize that we and our fellow-
+passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same
+unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.
+
+But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in these
+papers to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index
+Expurgatorius; and if they are medicated with a few questionable
+dogmas or antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher
+treatments, that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne,
+and the reader may nod over pages which, when they were first
+written, would have waked him into a paroxysm of protest and
+denunciation.
+
+November, 1882.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
+
+This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades,
+and if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten
+years.  The first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps
+apologetic, in the expectation of attacks from various quarters.  If
+the book is in some points in advance of public opinion, it is
+natural that the writer should try to smooth the way to the reception
+of his more or less aggressive ideas.  He wishes to convince, not to
+offend,--to obtain a hearing for his thought, not to stir up angry
+opposition in those who do not accept it.  There is commonly an
+anxious look about a first Preface.  The author thinks he shall be
+misapprehended about this or that matter, that his well-meant
+expressions will probably be invidiously interpreted by those whom he
+looks upon as prejudiced critics, and if he deals with living
+questions that he will be attacked as a destructive by the
+conservatives and reproached for his timidity by the noisier
+radicals.  The first Preface, therefore, is likely to be the weakest
+part of a work containing the thoughts of an honest writer.
+
+After a time the writer has cooled down from his excitement,--has got
+over his apprehensions, is pleased to find that his book is still
+read, and that he must write a new Preface.  He comes smiling to his
+task.  How many things have explained themselves in the ten or twenty
+or thirty years since he came before his untried public in those
+almost plaintive paragraphs in which he introduced himself to his
+readers,--for the Preface writer, no matter how fierce a combatant he
+may prove, comes on to the stage with his shield on his right arm and
+his sword in his left hand.
+
+The Professor at the Breakfast-Table came out in the "Atlantic
+Monthly" and introduced itself without any formal Preface.  A quarter
+of a century later the Preface of 1882, which the reader has just had
+laid before him, was written.  There is no mark of worry, I think, in
+that.  Old opponents had come up and shaken hands with the author
+they had attacked or denounced.  Newspapers which had warned their
+subscribers against him were glad to get him as a contributor to
+their columns.  A great change had come over the community with
+reference to their beliefs.  Christian believers were united as never
+before in the feeling that, after all, their common object was to
+elevate the moral and religious standard of humanity.  But within the
+special compartments of the great Christian fold the marks of
+division have pronounced themselves in the most unmistakable manner.
+As an example we may take the lines of cleavage which have shown
+themselves in the two great churches, the Congregational and the
+Presbyterian, and the very distinct fissure which is manifest in the
+transplanted Anglican church of this country.  Recent circumstances
+have brought out the fact of the great change in the dogmatic
+communities which has been going on silently but surely.  The
+licensing of a missionary, the transfer of a Professor from one
+department to another, the election of a Bishop,--each of these
+movements furnishes evidence that there is no such thing as an air-
+tight reservoir of doctrinal finalities.
+
+The folding-doors are wide open to every Protestant to enter all the
+privileged precincts and private apartments of the various exclusive
+religious organizations.  We may demand the credentials of every
+creed and catechise all the catechisms.  So we may discuss the
+gravest questions unblamed over our morning coffee-cups or our
+evening tea-cups.  There is no rest for the Protestant until he gives
+up his legendary anthropology and all its dogmatic dependencies.
+
+It is only incidentally, however, that the Professor at the
+Breakfast-Table handles matters which are the subjects of religious
+controversy.  The reader who is sensitive about having his fixed
+beliefs dealt with as if they were open to question had better skip
+the pages which look as if they would disturb his complacency.
+"Faith" is the most precious of possessions, and it dislikes being
+meddled with.  It means, of course, self-trust,--that is, a belief in
+the value of our, own opinion of a doctrine, of a church, of a
+religion, of a Being, a belief quite independent of any evidence that
+we can bring to convince a jury of our fellow beings.  Its roots are
+thus inextricably entangled with those of self-love and bleed as
+mandrakes were said to, when pulled up as weeds.  Some persons may
+even at this late day take offence at a few opinions expressed in the
+following pages, but most of these passages will be read without loss
+of temper by those who disagree with them, and by-and-by they may be
+found too timid and conservative for intelligent readers, if they are
+still read by any.
+
+BEVERLY FARM, MASS., June 18, 1891.
+
+O.  W.  H.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                        THE PROFESSOR
+
+                           AT THE
+                       BREAKFAST-TABLE.
+
+
+          What he said, what he heard, and what he saw.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
+statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a
+universal formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table.
+It would have had a grand effect.  For this purpose I fixed my eyes
+on a certain divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few
+phrases, and then forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of
+being. --I will thank you for the sugar,--I said. --Man is a
+dependent creature.
+
+It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed
+the sugar to me.
+
+--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.
+
+The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram
+of the sugar question.
+
+You smile,--I said. --Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of
+great things?
+
+The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back
+with a pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches. --Life is a great
+bundle of great things,--he said.
+
+(NOW, THEN!)  The great end of being, after all, is....
+
+Hold on! --said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be
+John, and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold
+on! the Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.
+
+Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
+pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs
+about the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing
+the bait and hook intended for flounders.  On being drawn from the
+water, it exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a
+surface so full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the
+naturalists have not been able to count them without quarrelling
+about the number, and that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil,
+do not like to touch them, and especially to tread on them, unless
+they happen to have shoes on, to cover the thick white soles of their
+broad black feet.
+
+When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked
+round the table with curiosity to see what it meant.  At the further
+end of it I saw a head, and a--a small portion of a little deformed
+body, mounted on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a
+fair level enough for him to get at his food.  His whole appearance
+was so grotesque, I felt for a minute as if there was a showman
+behind him who would pull him down presently and put up Judy, or the
+hangman, or the Devil, or some other wooden personage of the famous
+spectacle.  I contrived to lose the first of his sentence, but what I
+heard began so:
+
+--by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to
+come down from the tents on section and Independence days with their
+pails to get water to make egg-pop with.  Born in Boston; went to
+school in Boston as long as the boys would let me. --The little man
+groaned, turned, as if to look around, and went on. --Ran away from
+school one day to see Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a
+logger-head.  That was in flip days, when there were always two three
+loggerheads in the fire.  I'm a Boston boy, I tell you,--born at
+North End, and mean to be buried on Copp's Hill, with the good old
+underground people,--the Worthylakes, and the rest of 'em.  Yes,--up
+on the old hill, where they buried Captain Daniel Malcolm in a stone
+grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from the red-coats, in those
+old times when the world was frozen up tight and there was n't but
+one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil all,--and black enough
+it looked, I tell you!  There 's where my bones shall lie, Sir, and
+rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy Yard opposite!  You
+can't make me ashamed of the old place!  Full crooked little
+streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em--
+
+--I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
+"John,"--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but
+thinking in a half-whisper, evidently. --I should think so; and got
+kinked up, turnin' so many corners. --The little man did not hear
+what was said, but went on,--
+
+--full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened,
+and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and
+free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead
+men,--I don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their
+steeples!
+
+--How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black
+whiskers and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too
+massive, and a diamond pin so very large that the most trusting
+nature might confess an inward suggestion,--of course, nothing
+amounting to a suspicion.  For this is a gentleman from a great city,
+and sits next to the landlady's daughter, who evidently believes in
+him, and is the object of his especial attention.
+
+How high?--said the little man. --As high as the first step of the
+stairs that lead to the New Jerusalem.  Is n't that high enough?
+
+It is,--I said. --The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
+order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may
+be so still.  But who shall tune the pitch-pipe?  Quis cus-(On the
+whole, as this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a
+foreign language, might not be familiar to all the boarders, I
+thought I would not finish it.)
+
+--Go to the Bible! --said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp-
+eyed, sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress,
+appearing as if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated
+itself as a bit of economy.
+
+You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
+commentary on what you say.  "He who would bring back the wealth of
+the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies."  What you bring
+away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.-
+Benjamin Franklin!  Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring
+me down the small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will
+find lying under the "Cruden's Concordance." [The boy took a large
+bite, which left a very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-
+butter he held, and departed on his errand, with the portable
+fraction of his breakfast to sustain him on the way.]
+
+--Here it is.  "Go to the Bible.  A Dissertation, ,etc., etc.  By J.
+J. Flournoy.  Athens, Georgia, 1858."
+
+Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have
+judiciously delivered.  You may be interested, Madam, to know what
+are the conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia,
+has arrived.  You shall hear, Madam.  He has gone to the Bible, and
+he has come back from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing
+social evils, which, if it is the real specific, as it professes to
+be, is of great interest to humanity, and to the female part of
+humanity in particular.  It is what he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the
+marrying of three wives, so that "good old men" may be solaced at
+once by the companionship of the wisdom of maturity, and of those
+less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities which are found at
+an earlier period of life.  He has followed your precept, Madam; I
+hope you accept his conclusions.
+
+The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact,
+"all abroad," after the delivery of this "counter" of mine, that I
+left her to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation,
+which I was beginning to get pretty well in hand.
+
+But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
+effect I had produced.  First, she was a little stunned at having her
+argument knocked over.  Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
+tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion.  Thirdly.
+--I don't like to say what I thought.  Something seemed to have
+pleased her fancy.  Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into
+fashion, there would be three times as many chances to enjoy the
+luxury of saying, "No!" is more than I, can tell you.  I may as well
+mention that B. F. came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet
+for "a lady,"--one of the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a
+secret he wished to be relieved of.
+
+--I continued. --If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in
+the faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the
+end of all reason.  If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for
+truth with its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no
+presumption in favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of
+our inheriting it.  Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair
+chance to become a convert to a better religion.
+
+The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in
+the mind by changing the word which stands for it.
+
+--I don't know what you mean by "depolarizing" an idea,--said the
+divinity-student.
+
+I will tell you,--I said. ---When a given symbol which represents a
+thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it
+undergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives
+to iron.  It becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by
+strange forces which did not belong to it.  The word, and
+consequently the idea it represents, is polarized.
+
+The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in
+print, consists entirely of polarized words.  Borrow one of these
+from another language and religion, and you will find it leaves all
+its magnetism behind it.  Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo
+mythology.  Even a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy
+Pundit would shut his ears and run away from you in horror, if you
+should say it aloud.  What do you care for O'm?  If you wanted to get
+the Pundit to look at his religion fairly, you must first depolarize
+this and all similar words for him.  The argument for and against new
+translations of the Bible really turns on this.  Skepticism is afraid
+to trust its truths in depolarized words, and so cries out against a
+new translation.  I think, myself, if every idea our Book contains
+could be shelled out of its old symbol and put into a new, clean,
+unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of reading it as
+philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it,--which we do not
+and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the "Gayatri" as a
+fair man and lover of truth should do.  When society has once fairly
+dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it will
+perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.
+
+I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
+young fellow near me.
+
+A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.
+--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
+observers from two very different points of view.  If you wish to get
+the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two
+observations from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer
+and midwinter, for instance.  To get the parallax of heavenly truths,
+you must take an observation from the position of the laity as well
+as of the clergy.  Teachers and students of theology get a certain
+look, certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a
+professional neckcloth, and habits of mind as professional as their
+externals.  They are scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well
+enough what the "idols of the tribe" are.  Of course they have their
+false gods, as all men that follow one exclusive calling are prone to
+do. --The clergy have played the part of the flywheel in our modern
+civilization.  They have never suffered it to stop.  They have often
+carried on its movement, when other moving powers failed, by the
+momentum stored in their vast body.  Sometimes, too, they have kept
+it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the
+bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that
+yields the bread of life.  But the mainspring of the world's onward
+religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men, let me
+tell you.  It is the people that makes the clergy, and not the clergy
+that makes the people.  Of course, the profession reacts on its
+source with variable energy. --But there never was a guild of dealers
+or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after.
+
+Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time
+since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in
+Harvard College yard.
+
+--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man. --The bonfire when Robert
+Calef's book was burned?
+
+The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
+burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
+President of the College and Minister of the Gospel.  You remember
+the old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef,
+trader of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what
+a set of fools and worse than fools they were-
+
+Remember it?--said the little man. --I don't think I shall forget it,
+as long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what
+it wears.  There was a ring on it.
+
+May I look at it?--I said.
+
+Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it
+falls off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.
+
+He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the
+table, and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being
+only a little above the level of the table, as he stood.  With pain
+and labor, lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his
+sticks, he took a few steps from his place,--his motions and the
+deadbeat of the misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and
+ear the malformation which is called in learned language talipes
+varus, or inverted club-foot.
+
+Stop!  stop! --I said,--let me come to you.
+
+The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with
+an ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair.
+I walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his
+right hand, with the ring upon it.  The ring had been put on long
+ago, and could not pass the misshapen joint.  It was one of those
+funeral rings which used to be given to relatives and friends after
+the decease of persons of any note or importance.  Beneath a round
+fit of glass was a death's head.  Engraved on one side of this, "L.
+B.  AEt.  22,"--on the other, "Ob. 1692
+
+My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man. --Hanged for a
+witch.  It does n't seem a great while ago.  I knew my grandmother,
+and loved her.  Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief
+Justice Sewall hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.-
+-That was Salem, though, and not Boston.  No, not Boston.  Robert
+Calef, the Boston merchant, it was that blew them all to-
+
+Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was
+getting red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.
+
+This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
+conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.
+
+--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
+its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of
+talking over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are
+plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above
+all, who has found out, by living into the pith and core of life,
+that all of the Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of
+any human book is to the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of
+the hot aortic flood of throbbing human life, of this infinite,
+instantaneous consciousness in which the soul's being consists,--an
+incandescent point in the filament connecting the negative pole of a
+past eternity with the positive pole of an eternity that is to come,-
+-that all of the Deity which any human book can hold is to this
+larger Deity of the working battery of the universe only as the films
+in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams and curdled lumps of
+ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin placers,--Oh!--I was saying
+that a man who lives out-of-doors, among live people, gets some
+things into his head he might not find in the index of his "Body of
+Divinity."
+
+I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
+their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the
+bottom of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street
+Church and look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch
+another such spire across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea,
+I say, is pretty nearly worn out.  Now when a civilization or a
+civilized custom falls into senile dementia, there is commonly a
+judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come, from a breath,--
+as fires come, from a spark.
+
+Here, look at medicine.  Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
+prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long,
+"curing" patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling,
+selling lies at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving
+unfortunate sick people a mess of things either too odious to swallow
+or too acrid to hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.
+
+--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
+country-practitioner?  Then you don't know the history of medicine,--
+and that is not my fault.  But don't expose yourself in any outbreak
+of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded!  I
+did not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the
+old folios in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the
+proprietor, of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin
+reprints by Philadelphia Editors.  Besides, many of the profession
+and I know a little something of each other, and you don't think I am
+such a simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the
+better heads among them would condemn as unfair and untrue?  Now mark
+how the great plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and
+in what form it fell.
+
+A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy
+and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow
+dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous
+fiction (founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy.  I am very
+fair, you see,---you can help yourself to either of these sets of
+phrases.
+
+All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general
+an effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug
+is a good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing,
+as was produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan
+(theorist).  Not that the wiser part of the profession needed him to
+teach them; but the routinists and their employers, the "general
+practitioners," who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their
+drug-consuming customers, had to recognize that people could get
+well, unpoisoned.  These dumb cattle would not learn it of
+themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell on them.
+
+--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
+theology?  I will tell you, then.  It is Spiritualism.  While some
+are crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are
+laughing at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with
+it as a mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism
+is quietly undermining the traditional ideas of the future state
+which have been and are still accepted,--not merely in those who
+believe in it, but in the general sentiment of the community, to a
+larger extent than most good people seem to be aware of.  It need n't
+be true, to do this, any more than Homoeopathy need, to do its work.
+The Spiritualists have some pretty strong instincts to pry over,
+which no doubt have been roughly handled by theologians at different
+times.  And the Nemesis of the pulpit comes, in a shape it little
+thought of, beginning with the snap of a toe-joint, and ending with
+such a crack of old beliefs that the roar of it is heard in all the
+ministers' studies of Christendom?  Sir, you cannot have people of
+cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in common things,
+large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men, men of
+science, professing to be in communication with the spiritual world
+and keeping up constant intercourse with it, without its gradually
+reacting on the whole conception of that other life.  It is the folly
+of the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom.  Not only out
+of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools
+and cheats, we may often get our truest lessons.  For the fool's
+judgment is a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the cheat
+watches the clouds and sets his weathercock by them,--so that one
+shall often see by their pointing which way the winds of heaven are
+blowing, when the slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call
+the Temples of Wisdom are turning to all points of the compass.
+
+--Amen! --said the young fellow called John-- Ten minutes by the
+watch.  Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up
+their left foot!
+
+I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty
+seconds.  His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant.
+I think it was simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a
+youthful playfulness, that led him to this outbreak.  I have often
+noticed that even quiet horses, on a sharp November morning, when
+their coats are beginning to get the winter roughness, will give
+little sportive demi-kicks, with slight sudden elevation of the
+subsequent region of the body, and a sharp short whinny,--by no means
+intending to put their heels through the dasher, or to address the
+driver rudely, but feeling, to use a familiar word, frisky.  This, I
+think, is the physiological condition of the young person, John.  I
+noticed, however, what I should call a palpebral spasm, affecting the
+eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if it were intended for the
+facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to suspect a disposition
+to be satirical on his part.
+
+--Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, ex officio, as a
+Professor, a conservative.  For I don't know any fruit that clings to
+its tree so faithfully, not even a "froze-'n'-thaw" winter-apple, as
+a Professor to the bough of which his chair is made.  You can't shake
+him off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off.  Hence, by
+a chain of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism
+generally.
+
+But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once
+find yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop
+your Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher
+than in the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of
+facts and swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you
+are in it.
+
+You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight
+in a profession.  Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in,
+through India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and
+general knowledge will leak in, though a profession were covered with
+twenty thicknesses of sheepskin diplomas.
+
+By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and
+common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the
+people, Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with trip-
+hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with
+a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on
+the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of
+them--like Aaron's calf
+
+[See Holmes poem: "When doctor's take what they would give and
+lawyers give what they would take and strawberries grow larger down
+through the box."   D.W.]
+
+If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up
+and keep all the soul's windows down,--to shut out the sun from the
+east and the wind from the west,--to let the rats run free in the
+cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the
+spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus
+is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or rave
+in its delirium,--I, Sir, am a bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the
+barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative.
+
+--Were you born in Boston, Sir?--said the little man,--looking eager
+and excited.
+
+I was not,--I replied.
+
+It's a pity,--it's a pity,--said the little man;--it 's the place to
+be born in.  But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you can
+come and live here.  Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science
+and the American Union, was n't ashamed to be born here.  Jim Otis,
+the father of American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod
+marshes awhile, but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough.
+Joe Warren, the first bloody ruffed-shirt of the Revolution, was as
+good as born here.  Parson Charming strolled along this way from
+Newport, and stayed here.  Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;--
+we'd have made a man of him,--poor, dear, good old Christian heathen!
+There he lies, as peaceful as a young baby, in the old burying-
+ground!  I've stood on the slab many a time.  Meant well,--meant
+well.  Juggernaut.  Parson Charming put a little oil on one linchpin,
+and slipped it out so softly, the first thing they knew about it was
+the wheel of that side was down.  T' other fellow's at work now, but
+he makes more noise about it.  When the linchpin comes out on his
+side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the
+old cart, and they pretend to say that there are valuable things in
+it which may get hurt.  Hope not,--hope not.  But this is the great
+Macadamizing place,--always cracking up something.
+
+Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the diamond-pin,
+whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.
+
+The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's
+Turk used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if
+it went by cogwheels. --Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and
+foreign vermin included,--said the little man.
+
+This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
+application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if
+the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed.  The little man uttered it with
+the distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to
+exclaim, E-chec! so that it must have been heard.  The party supposed
+to be interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-
+bladeful of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt,
+interfered with the reply he would have made.
+
+--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
+pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
+suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders.  I think
+our small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I
+undertake to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too
+magisterially.  I won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when
+I have been in company with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have
+been guilty of the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly
+justified.  But I maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good
+listener.  If a man can tell me a fact which subtends an appreciable
+angle in the horizon of thought, I am as receptive as the
+contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren.  If, when I
+am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good story,
+I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the
+fifth "says he," and listen like a three-years' child, as the author
+of the "Old Sailor" says.  I had rather hear one of those grand
+elemental laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious names,
+Sir or Madam,) glisten to one of those old playbills of our College
+days, in which "Tom and Jerry" ("Thomas and Jeremiah," as the old
+Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be brought on
+the stage with whole force of the Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no
+such person, of course,) than say the best things I might by any
+chance find myself capable of saying.  Of course, if I come across a
+real thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I
+enjoy the luxury of sitting still for a while as much as another.
+
+Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,--things he did not
+mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
+sometimes.  Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
+thought.  I can't answer for what will turn up.  If I could, it would
+n't be talking, but "speaking my piece."  Better, I think, the hearty
+abandonment of one's self to the suggestions of the moment at the
+risk of an occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it
+escapes, but just one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of
+never saying a foolish thing.
+
+--What shall I do with this little man?--There is only one thing to
+do,--and that is to let him talk when he will.  The day of the
+"Autocrat's" monologues is over.
+
+--My friend,--said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said, the
+boarders call "John,"--My friend,--I said, one morning, after
+breakfast,--can you give me any information respecting the deformed
+person who sits at the other end of the table?
+
+What! the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,--I said,-
+-and double talipes varus,--I beg your pardon,--with two club-feet.
+
+Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?--said the
+young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you
+may have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge,
+when they show how they would punish an adversary, themselves
+protected by this rotating guard,--the middle knuckle, meantime,
+thumb-supported, fiercely prominent, death-threatening.
+
+It is,--said I. --But would you have the kindness to tell me if you
+know anything about this deformed person?
+
+About the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+My good friend,--said I,--I am sure, by your countenance, you would
+not hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by
+Nature to be spared by his fellows.  Even in speaking of him to
+others, I could wish that you might not employ a term which implies
+contempt for what should inspire only pity.
+
+A fellah 's no business to be so crooked,--said the young man called
+John.
+
+Yes, yes,--I said, thoughtfully,--the strong hate the weak.  It's all
+right.  The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to the
+individual.  Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down.
+Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail! --I
+understand the instinct, my friend,--it is cosmic,--it is planetary,-
+-it is a conservative principle in creation.
+
+The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was
+speaking, until it became as blank of vivid significance as the
+countenance of a gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of
+eyes.  He had not taken my meaning.
+
+Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink,
+as he answered,--Jest so.  All right.  A 1.  Put her through.  That's
+the way to talk.  Did you speak to me, Sir?--Here the young man
+struck up that well-known song which I think they used to sing at
+Masonic festivals, beginning, "Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left
+you Chrononhotonthologos? "
+
+I beg your pardon,--I said;--all I meant was, that men, as temporary
+occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved
+or injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a
+natural dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as
+well as of the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon
+the abode spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future
+generations.  This is the final cause of the underlying brute
+instinct which we have in common with the herds.
+
+--The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I
+thought I must try again. --It's a pity that families are kept up,
+where there are such hereditary infirmities.  Still, let us treat
+this poor man fairly, and not call him names.  Do you know what his
+name is?
+
+I know what the rest of 'em call him,--said the young fellow. --They
+call him Little Boston.  There's no harm in that, is there?
+
+It is an honorable term,--I replied. --But why Little Boston, in a
+place where most are Bostonians?
+
+Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,--said the
+young fellow.
+
+"L. B.  Ob. 1692."--Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him.
+The ring he wears labels him well enough.  There is stuff in the
+little man, or he would n't stick so manfully by this crooked,
+crotchety old town.  Give him a chance. --You will drop the Sculpin,
+won't you?--I said to the young fellow.
+
+Drop him?--he answered,--I ha'n't took him up yet.
+
+No, no,--the term,--I said,--the term.  Don't call him so any more,
+if you please.  Call him Little Boston, if you like.
+
+All right,--said the young fellow. --I would n't be hard on the poor
+little-
+
+The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
+grammar.  It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among
+the Romans,--as of those designating a person following the sea, or
+given to rural pursuits.  It is classed by custom among the profane
+words; why, it is hard to say,--but it is largely used in the street
+by those who speak of their fellows in pity or in wrath.
+
+I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended
+fish to the little man from that day forward.
+
+--Here we are, then, at our boarding--house.  First, myself, the
+Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right,
+looking down, where the "Autocrat" used to sit.  At the further end
+sits the Landlady.  At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-
+noor, or the gentleman with the diamond.  Opposite me is a Venerable
+Gentleman with a bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little.
+The Divinity Student is my neighbor on the right,--and further down,
+that Young Fellow of whom I have repeatedly spoken.  The Landlady's
+Daughter sits near the Koh-i-noor, as I said.  The Poor Relation near
+the Landlady.  At the right upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of
+whose name and history I have as yet learned nothing.  Next the
+further left-hand corner, near the lower end of the table, sits the
+deformed person.  The chair at his side, occupying that corner, is
+empty.  I need not specially mention the other boarders, with the
+exception of Benjamin Franklin, the landlady's son, who sits near his
+mother.  We are a tolerably assorted set,--difference enough and
+likeness enough; but still it seems to me there is something wanting.
+The Landlady's Daughter is the prima donna in the way of feminine
+attractions.  I am not quite satisfied with this young lady.  She
+wears more "jewelry," as certain young ladies call their trinkets,
+than I care to see on a person in her position.  Her voice is
+strident, her laugh too much like a giggle, and she has that foolish
+way of dancing and bobbing like a quill-float with a "minnum" biting
+the hook below it, which one sees and weeps over sometimes in persons
+of more pretensions.  I can't help hoping we shall put something into
+that empty chair yet which will add the missing string to our social
+harp.  I hear talk of a rare Miss who is expected.  Something in the
+schoolgirl way, I believe.  We shall see.
+
+--My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution
+which I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit
+of all concerned.
+
+Professor,--said he, one day,--don't you think your brain will run
+dry before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow?
+Let me tell you what happened to me once.  I put a little money into
+a bank, and bought a check-book, so that I might draw it as I wanted,
+in sums to suit.  Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a
+pen was as easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book
+seemed to be a dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all
+the synonymes of happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot.
+A check came back to me at last with these two words on it,--NO
+FUNDS.  My check-book was a volume of waste-paper.
+
+Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank,
+you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's
+currency without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NO
+FUNDS,--and then where will you be, my boy?  These little bits of
+paper mean your gold and your silver and your copper, Professor; and
+you will certainly break up and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to
+your metallic basis.
+
+There is something in that,--said I. --Only I rather think life can
+coin thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words.  What
+if one shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that
+falls of a June evening on the leaves of his garden?  Shall there be
+no more dew on those leaves thereafter?  Marry, yea,--many drops,
+large and round and full of moonlight as those thou shalt have
+absterged!
+
+Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
+plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
+always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April,
+or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against
+books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to
+decrepitude; with a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they
+are, as a limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particuly
+awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps,
+not as yet tanned or ossified, to finger-touch of all outward
+agencies; knowing nothing of the filmy threads of this web of life in
+which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come
+along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his
+finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding
+with the fox oftener than with the stork,--loving better the breadth
+of a fertilizing inundation than the depth of narrow artesian well;
+finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of
+the grammatophora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the movement
+of the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation
+Hercules;--and the question is, whether there is anything left for
+me, the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend
+has had his straw in the bung-hole of the Universe!
+
+A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on,
+whether he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes.
+As to catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,-
+-the gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,--the excretion of mental
+respiration,--that will depend on many things, as, on having a
+favorable intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting
+receptacle. --I sow more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel
+over the desert-sand along which my lonely consciousness paces day
+and night, than I shall throw into soil where it will germinate, in a
+year.  All sorts of bodily and mental perturbations come between us
+and the due projection of our thought.  The pulse-like "fits of easy
+and difficult transmission" seem to reach even the transparent medium
+through which our souls are seen.  We know our humanity by its often
+intercepted rays, as we tell a revolving light from a star or meteor
+by its constantly recurring obscuration.
+
+An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he
+ever delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if
+he had told all he knew.  Braham came forward once to sing one of his
+most famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the
+first line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they
+screamed it at him in a chorus of a thousand voices.  Milton could
+not write to suit himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal
+equinox.  One in the clothing-business, who, there is reason to
+suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great poet's impressible
+temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers one day without
+fitting him with a new garment.  "Ah!" said he to a friend of mine,
+who was standing by, "if it hadn't been for that confounded headache
+of mine this morning, I'd have had a coat on that man, in spite of
+himself, before he left-the store."  A passing throb, only,--but it
+deranged the nice mechanism required to persuade the accidental human
+being, X, into a given piece of broadcloth, A.
+
+We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
+transmission of our ideas with want of ideas.  I suppose that a man's
+mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the
+universe for which it has special elective affinities.  In fact, I
+look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's shop filled with
+the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of
+individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.
+
+When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there
+is an end of his genius as a real solvent.  No more effervescence and
+hissing tumult--as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting
+alkaline unbeliefs!  No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets
+covered with lies!  No more taking up of dull earths, and turning
+them, first into clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!
+
+I, the Professor, am very much like other men: I shall not find out
+when I have used up my affinities.  What a blessed thing it is, that
+Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors,
+contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!  Painful
+as the task is, they never fail to warn the author, in the most
+impressive manner, of the probabilities of failure in what he has
+undertaken.  Sad as the necessity is to their delicate sensibilities,
+they never hesitate to advertise him of the decline of his powers,
+and to press upon him the propriety of retiring before he sinks into
+imbecility.  Trusting to their kind offices, I shall endeavor to
+fulfil-
+
+--Bridget enters and begins clearing the table.
+
+--The following poem is my (The Professor's) only contribution to the
+great department of Ocean-Cable literature.  As all the poets of this
+country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the
+premium offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Burns
+Centenary, (so called, according to our Benjamin Franklin, because
+there will be nary a cent for any of us,) poetry will be very scarce
+and dear.  Consumers may, consequently, be glad to take the present
+article, which, by the aid of a Latin tutor--and a Professor of
+Chemistry, will be found intelligible to the educated classes.
+
+
+
+
+                  DE SAUTY
+
+         AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.
+
+         Professor.       Blue-Nose.
+
+
+PROFESSOR.
+
+Tell me, O Provincial!  speak, Ceruleo-Nasal!
+Lives there one De Sauty extant now among yon,
+Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
+Holding talk with nations ?
+
+Is there a De Sauty, ambulant on Tellus,
+Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in night-cap,
+Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
+Three times daily patent ?
+
+Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
+Or is he a mythus,--ancient word for "humbug,"--
+Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed
+Romulus and Remus?
+
+Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
+Or a living product of galvanic action,
+Like the status bred in Crosses flint-solution?
+Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!
+
+
+
+BLUE-NOSE.
+
+Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger,
+Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster!
+Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me,
+Thou shalt hear them answered.
+
+When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
+At the polar focus of the wire electric
+Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us
+Called himself "DE SAUTY."
+
+As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
+Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia,
+So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
+Sucking in the current.
+
+When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,
+Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,
+And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
+Said, "All right!  DE SAUTY."
+
+>From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading
+Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples
+Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
+Of "All right! DE SAUTY."
+
+When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger,
+Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,
+Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
+Of disintegration.
+
+Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
+Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
+Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
+There was no De Sauty.
+
+Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
+C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor.  Flu.  Sil.  Potassa,
+Calc.  Sod.  Phosph.  Mag.  Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum,(?)
+Such as man is made of.
+
+Born of stream galvanic, with it be had perished!
+There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
+Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
+Cry, "All right!  DE SAUTY."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Back again! --A turtle--which means a tortoise--is fond of his shell;
+but if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out of it.  So the
+boys say.
+
+It is a libel on the turtle.  He grows to his shell, and his shell is
+in his body as much as his body is in his shell. --I don't think
+there is one of our boarders quite so testudineous as I am.  Nothing
+but a combination of motives, more peremptory than the coal on the
+turtle's back, could have got me to leave the shelter of my carapace;
+and after memorable interviews, and kindest hospitalities, and grand
+sights, and huge influx of patriotic pride,--for every American owns
+all America,--
+
+          "Creation's heir,--the world, the world is"
+
+his, if anybody's,--I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey
+might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he were allowed to
+resume his skeleton.
+
+Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent Cleopatra, and Dying
+Warrior, whose classic outlines (reproduced in the calcined mineral
+of Lutetia) crown my loaded shelves!  Welcome, ye triumphs of
+pictorial art (repeated by the magic graver) that look down upon me
+from the walls of my sacred cell!  Vesalius, as Titian drew him,
+high-fronted, still-eyed, thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems
+a gentleman, with book and carelessly-held eyeglass, marking him a
+scholar; thou, too, Jan Kuyper, commonly called Jan Praktiseer, old
+man of a century and seven years besides, father of twenty sons and
+two daughters, cut in copper by Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on
+one of the Paris quais; and ye Three Trees of Rembrandt, black in
+shadow against the blaze of light; and thou Rosy Cottager of Sir
+Joshua, roses hinted by the peppery burin of Bartolozzi; ye, too, of
+lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely for unrenowned, Young Bull
+of Paulus Potter, and sleeping Cat of Cornelius Visscher; welcome
+once more to my eyes!  The old books look out from the shelves, and I
+seem to read on their backs something asides their titles,--a kind of
+solemn greeting.  The crimson carpet flushes warm under my feet.  The
+arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair spins round with me, as if it
+were giddy with pleasure; the vast recumbent fauteuil stretches
+itself out under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine
+stretches in after-dinner laughter.
+
+The boarders were pleased to say that they were glad to get me back.
+One of them ventured a compliment, namely,--that I talked as if I
+believed what I said. --This was apparently considered something
+unusual, by its being mentioned.
+
+One who means to talk with entire sincerity,--I said,--always feels
+himself in danger of two things, namely,--an affectation of
+bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and
+actual rudeness.  What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger,
+is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that
+belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him.  Life is short,
+and conversation apt to run to mere words.  Mr. Hue I think it is,
+who tells us some very good stories about the way in which two
+Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up a long talk without saying a
+word which has any meaning in it.  Something like this is
+occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall.  The best Chinese
+talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time to time.
+Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery
+glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de
+Dantzic; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,--never a wave,
+and never a calm ; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or
+a highly-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so
+gracefully, that we find meaning for the music they make as we find
+faces in the coals and fairy palaces in the clouds.  There is
+something very odd, though, about this mechanical talk.
+
+You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine
+was detached a long way from the station you were approaching?  Well,
+you have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if
+the locomotive were drawing them?  Indeed, you would not have
+suspected that you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if
+you had not seen the engine running away from you on a side-track.
+Upon my conscience, I believe some of these pretty women detach their
+minds entirely, sometimes, from their talk,--and, what is more, that
+we never know the difference.  Their lips let off the fluty syllables
+just as their fingers would sprinkle the music-drops from their
+pianos; unconscious habit turns the phrase of thought into words just
+as it does that of music into notes. --Well, they govern the world
+for all that, these sweet-lipped women,--because beauty is the index
+of a larger fact than wisdom.
+
+--The Bombazine wanted an explanation.
+
+Madam,--said I,--wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is
+the promise of the future.
+
+--All this, however, is not what I was going to say.  Here am I,
+suppose, seated--we will say at a dinner-table--alongside of an
+intelligent Englishman.  We look in each other's faces,--we exchange
+a dozen words.  One thing is settled: we mean not to offend each
+other,--to be perfectly courteous,--more than courteous; for we are
+the entertainer and the entertained, and cherish particularly amiable
+feelings, to each other.  The claret is good; and if our blood
+reddens a little with its warm crimson, we are none the less kind for
+it.
+
+I don't think people that talk over their victuals are like to say
+anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with
+strong drink before they begin jabberin'.
+
+The Bombazine uttered this with a sugary sourness, as if the words
+had been steeped in a solution of acetate of lead. --The boys of my
+time used to call a hit like this a "side-winder."
+
+--I must finish this woman.--
+
+Madam,--I said,--the Great Teacher seems to have been fond of talking
+as he sat at meat.  Because this was a good while ago, in a far-off
+place, you forget what the true fact of it was,--that those were real
+dinners, where people were hungry and thirsty, and where you met a
+very miscellaneous company.  Probably there was a great deal of loose
+talk among the guests; at any rate, there was always wine, we may
+believe.
+
+Whatever may be the hygienic advantages or disadvantages of wine,--
+and I for one, except for certain particular ends, believe in water,
+and, I blush to say it, in black tea,--there is no doubt about its
+being the grand specific against dull dinners.  A score of people
+come together in all moods of mind and body.  The problem is, in the
+space of one hour, more or less, to bring them all into the same
+condition of slightly exalted life.  Food alone is enough for one
+person, perhaps,--talk, alone, for another; but the grand equalizer
+and fraternizer, which works up the radiators to their maximum
+radiation, and the absorbents to their maximum receptivity, is now
+just where it was when
+
+          The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed,
+
+--when six great vessels containing water, the whole amounting to
+more than a hogshead-full, were changed into the best of wine.  I
+once wrote a song about wine, in which I spoke so warmly of it, that
+I was afraid some would think it was written inter pocula; whereas it
+was composed in the bosom of my family, under the most tranquillizing
+domestic influences.
+
+--The divinity-student turned towards me, looking mischievous. --Can
+you tell me,--he said,--who wrote a song for a temperance celebration
+once, of which the following is a verse?
+
+     Alas for the loved one, too gentle and fair
+     The joys of the banquet to chasten and share!
+     Her eye lost its light that his goblet might shine,
+     And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his wine!
+
+I did,--I answered. --What are you going to do about it?--I will tell
+you another line I wrote long ago:--
+
+     Don't be "consistent,"--but be simply true.
+
+The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that
+the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with
+many facets answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about
+them; secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to
+grind us down to a single flat surface.  It is hard work to resist
+this grinding-down action. --Now give me a chance.  Better eternal
+and universal abstinence than the brutalities of those days that made
+wives and mothers and daughters and sisters blush for those whom they
+should have honored, as they came reeling home from their debauches!
+Yet better even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon
+all our tables, let us praise it for its color and fragrance and
+social tendency, so far as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the
+closet and pretend not to know the use of a wine-glass at a public
+dinner!  I think you will find that people who honestly mean to be
+true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try
+to be "consistent."  But a great many things we say can be made to
+appear contradictory, simply because they are partial views of a
+truth, and may often look unlike at first, as a front view of a face
+and its profile often do.
+
+Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I
+owe him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he
+has often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend
+the "Autocrat,"--which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by
+omitting the very word which gives it its significance,--the word
+fluid, intended to typify the mobility of the restricted will,--holds
+it up, I say, as if it attacked the reality of the self-determining
+principle, instead of illustrating its limitations by an image.  Now
+I will not explain any farther, still less defend, and least of all
+attack, but simply quote a few lines from one of my friend's poems,
+printed more than ten years ago, and ask the distinguished gentleman
+where he has ever asserted more strongly or absolutely the
+independent will of the "subcreative centre," as my heretical friend
+has elsewhere called man.
+
+     --Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own
+     He rent a pillar from the eternal throne!
+     --Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
+     The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
+     --Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
+     Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!
+
+If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and
+the full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly
+consistent!
+
+Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation
+with the intelligent Englishman.  We begin skirmishing with a few
+light ideas,--testing for thoughts,--as our electro-chemical friend,
+De Sauty, if there were such a person, would test for his current;
+trying a little litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-
+paper for alkalies, as chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging
+the lead, and looking at the shells and sands it brings up to find
+out whether we are like to keep in shallow water, or shall have to
+drop the deep-sea line;--in short, seeing what we have to deal with.
+If the Englishman gets his H's pretty well placed, he comes from one
+of the higher grades of the British social order, and we shall find
+him a good companion.
+
+But, after all, here is a great fact between us.  We belong to two
+different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us,
+we are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall
+to talk through.  Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior
+fellow, incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I
+would let out the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World
+folks.  They are children to us in certain points of view.  They are
+playing with toys we have done with for whole-generations.
+
+--------
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+The more I have observed and reflected, the more limited seems to me
+the field of action of the human will. Every act of choice involves a
+special relation between the ego and the conditions before it.  But
+no man knows what forces are at work in the determination of his ego.
+The bias which decides his choice between two or more motives may
+come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he knows
+nothing at all.  He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of
+reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is self-
+determining.  The Story of Elsie Yenner, written-soon after this book
+was published, illustrates the direction in which my thought was
+moving.  'The imaginary subject of the story obeyed her will, but her
+will Obeyed the mysterious antenatal poisoning influence.
+--------
+
+That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet
+and the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with,
+we have not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and
+constantly than they do.  Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and
+masks, and lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases,
+which we laugh at honestly, without affectation, that are still used
+in the Old-World puppet-shows.  I don't think we on our part ever
+understand the Englishman's concentrated loyalty and specialized
+reverence.  But then we do think more of a man, as such, (barring
+some little difficulties about race and complexion which the
+Englishman will touch us on presently,) than any people that ever
+lived did think of him.  Our reverence is a great deal wider, if it
+is less intense.  We have caste among us, to some extent; it is true;
+but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog such as you
+often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his robust, hearty
+individuality.
+
+This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to
+me; it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans
+swim into each other's laps.  The trouble is, it is so difficult to
+let out the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming
+to take a personal character.  But I never enjoy the Englishman so
+much as when he talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the
+Peruvians.  Then you get the real British flavor, which the
+cosmopolite Englishman loses.
+
+How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren
+interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each
+man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his
+opponent as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!
+
+---My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep.  I
+follow a slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current
+of my own beneath it.  Under both runs obscurely a consciousness
+belonging to a third train of reflections, independent of the two
+others.  I will try to write out a Mental movement in three parts.
+
+A. ---First voice, or Mental Soprano,--thought follows a woman
+talking.
+
+B. --Second voice, or Mental Barytone,--my running accompaniment.
+
+C. --Third voice, or Mental Basso,--low grumble of importunate self-
+repeating idea.
+
+A. --White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of apple-
+blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most
+delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers-
+
+B. --Deuse take her!  What a fool she is!  Hear her chatter!  (Look
+out of window just here. --Two pages and a half of description, if it
+were all written out, in one tenth of a second.)--Go ahead, old lady!
+(Eye catches picture over fireplace.) There's that infernal family
+nose!  Came over in the "Mayflower" on the first old fool's face.
+Why don't they wear a ring in it?
+
+C. --You 'll be late at lecture,--late at lecture,--late,--late-
+
+I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt
+through the superincumbent strata, thus:--The usual single or double
+currents shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with
+them, disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,--
+Oh, there!  I knew there was something troubling me,--and the thought
+which had been working through comes up to the surface clear,
+definite, and articulates itself,--a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or
+an unpleasant recollection.
+
+The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in
+this, that they are both brimful.  There is no space between
+consecutive thoughts, or between the never-ending series of actions.
+All pack tight, and mould their surfaces against each other, so that
+in the long run there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms
+of both thoughts and actions, just as you find that cylinders crowded
+all become hexagonal prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed
+into regular polyhedra.
+
+Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and
+no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by
+him.  So, to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the
+layers of thought, we may consider the mind as it moves among
+thoughts or events, like a circus-rider whirling round with a great
+troop of horses.  He can mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more
+or less completely, but he cannot stop it.  So, as I said in another
+way at the beginning, he can stride two or three thoughts at once,
+but not break their steady walk, trot, or gallop.  He can only take
+his foot from the saddle of one thought and put it on that of
+another.
+
+--What is the saddle of a thought?  Why, a word, of course. --Twenty
+years after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to
+you through the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and
+round all that time without a rider.
+
+The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no
+such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving
+thought upon that of another.
+
+--I should like to ask,--said the divinity-student,--since we are
+getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are
+in contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always now to
+something?
+
+--I thought it best not to hear this question.
+
+--I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or
+elsewhere.  One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an
+unfortunate truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,--
+as helpless, apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an
+Egyptian mummy.  He then proceeds, with the air and method of a
+master, to take off the bandages.  Nothing can be neater than the way
+in which he does it.  But as he takes off layer after layer, the
+truth seems to grow smaller and smaller, and some of its outlines
+begin to look like something we have seen before.  At last, when he
+has got them all off, and the truth struts out naked, we recognize it
+as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance whom we have known in the
+streets all our lives.  The fact is, the philosopher has coaxed the
+truth into his study and put all those bandages on; or course it is
+not very hard for him to take them off.  Still, a great many people
+like to watch the process,--he does it so neatly!
+
+Dear!  dear!  I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see
+how those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade
+are abused by my fellow-vertebrates,--perhaps by myself.  How they
+spar for wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!
+
+--The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat
+fighting attitude. --Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!
+--he said,--and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the
+concave palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball. --You
+small boy there, hurry up that "Webster's Unabridged!"
+
+The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked
+the propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three
+words, of which the two last were "Webster's Unabridged," and the
+first was an emphatic monosyllable. --Beg pardon,--he added,--forgot
+myself.  But let us have an English dictionary, if we are to have
+any.  I don't believe in clipping the coin of the realm, Sir!  If I
+put a weathercock on my house, Sir, I want it to tell which way the
+wind blows up aloft,--off from the prairies to the ocean, or off from
+the ocean to the prairies, or any way it wants to blow!  I don't want
+a weathercock with a winch in an old gentleman's study that he can
+take hold of and turn, so that the vane shall point west when the
+great wind overhead is blowing east with all its might, Sir!  Wait
+till we give you a dictionary; Sir!  It takes Boston to do that
+thing, Sir!
+
+--Some folks think water can't run down-hill anywhere out of Boston,
+--remarked the Koh-i-noor.
+
+I don't know what some folks think so well as I know what some fools
+say,--rejoined the Little Gentleman. --If importing most dry goods
+made the best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for
+'em. --Mr. Webster could n't spell, Sir, or would n't spell, Sir,--at
+any rate, he did n't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the
+owners of some copyrights and the dignity of this noble language
+which we have inherited from our English fathers.  Language! --the
+blood of the soul, Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which
+they grow!  We know what a word is worth here in Boston.  Young Sam
+Adams got up on the stage at Commencement, out at Cambridge there,
+with his gown on, the Governor and Council looking on in the name of
+his Majesty, King George the Second, and the girls looking down out
+of the galleries, and taught people how to spell a word that was n't
+in the Colonial dictionaries !  R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e,
+tance, Resistance!  That was in '43, and it was a good many years
+before the Boston boys began spelling it with their muskets;--but
+when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old bedridden
+women in the English almshouses heard every syllable!  Yes, yes,
+yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the
+class so far along that it could spell those two hard words,
+Independence and Union!  I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand
+lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language
+that is worth speaking.  We know what language means too well here in
+Boston to play tricks with it.  We never make a new word til we have
+made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould
+of this continent, we had to make a few.  When, by God's permission,
+we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or
+two.  The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,--
+this thirty-wasted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,--must throw a little
+spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new
+world's destiny!
+
+He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair
+human proportions.  His feet must have been on the upper round of his
+high chair; that was the only way I could account for it.
+
+Puts her through fast-rate,--said the young fellow whom the boarders
+call John.
+
+The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said
+he remembered Sam Adams as Governor.  An old man in a brown coat.
+Saw him take the Chair on Boston Common.  Was a boy then, and
+remembers sitting on the fence in front of the old Hancock house.
+Recollects he had a glazed 'lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking
+down on to the Common.  Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a
+great bunch off from the bushes in the Hancock front-yard.
+
+Them 'lection-buns are no go,--said the young man John, so called.
+--I know the trick.  Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an'
+he downs the whole of it.  In about an hour it swells up in his
+stomach as big as a football, and his feedin' 's spilt for that day.
+That's the way to stop off a young one from eatin' up all the
+'lection dinner.
+
+Salem!  Salem! not Boston,--shouted the little man.
+
+But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy
+Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the
+bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.
+
+The Little Gentleman was holding a fork in his left hand.  He stabbed
+a boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it
+as if it ought to shriek.  It did not,--but he sat as if watching it.
+
+--Language is a solemn thing,--I said. --It grows out of life,--out
+of its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness.  Every
+language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is
+enshrined.  Because time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp
+angles of its cornices, shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time?
+Let me tell you what comes of meddling with things that can take care
+of themselves. --A friend of mine had a watch given him, when he was
+a boy,--a "bull's eye," with a loose silver case that came off like
+an oyster-shell from its contents; you know them,--the cases that you
+hang on your thumb, while the core, or the real watch, lies in your
+hand as naked as a peeled apple.  Well, he began with taking off the
+case, and so on from one liberty to another, until he got it fairly
+open, and there were the works, as good as if they were alive,--
+crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and all the rest.  All right except one
+thing,--there was a confounded little hair had got tangled round the
+balance-wheel.  So my young Solomon got a pair of tweezers, and
+caught hold of the hair very nicely, and pulled it right out, without
+touching any of the wheels,--when,--buzzzZZZ!  and the watch had done
+up twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph time! --The English
+language was wound up to run some thousands of years, I trust; but if
+everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is a hair, our
+grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a hair-
+spring, and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down, as
+so many other dialects have done before it.  I can't stand this
+meddling any better than you, Sir.  But we have a great deal to be
+proud of in the lifelong labors of that old lexicographer, and we
+must n't be ungrateful.  Besides, don't let us deceive ourselves,--
+the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities,
+colleges, and especially of publishers.  After all, it is likely that
+the language will shape itself by larger forces than phonography and
+dictionary-making.  You may spade up the ocean as much as you like,
+and harrow it afterwards, if you can,--but the moon will still lead
+the tides, and the winds will form their surface.
+
+--Do you know Richardson's Dictionary?--I said to my neighbor the
+divinity-student.
+
+Haow?--said the divinity-student. --He colored, as he noticed on my
+face a twitch in one of the muscles which tuck up the corner of the
+mouth, (zygomaticus major,) and which I could not hold back from
+making a little movement on its own account.
+
+It was too late. --A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown
+colt.  Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps,
+better,--but caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his
+earlier ways of life.  Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue
+half their lives, return to the language of their childhood in their
+dying hours.  Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large
+libraries, taken by surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes
+let slip a word they knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken
+since that time,--but it lay there under all their culture.  That is
+one way you may know the country-boys after they have grown rich or
+celebrated; another is by the odd old family names, particularly
+those of the Hebrew prophets, which the good old people have saddled
+them with.
+
+--Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English
+dictionary,--said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as
+sitting at the right upper corner of the table.
+
+I turned and looked him full in the face,--for the pure, manly
+intonations arrested me.  The voice was youthful, but full of
+character. --I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in
+the matter of voice. --Hear this.
+
+Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in
+her father's chaise in a street of this town of Boston.  She
+overheard a little girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken
+with the tones of her voice.  Nothing would satisfy her but she must
+have that little girl come and live in her father's house.  So the
+child came, being then nine years old.  Until her marriage she
+remained under the same roof with the young lady.  Her children
+became successively inmates of the lady's dwelling; and now, seventy
+years, or thereabouts, since the young lady heard the child singing,
+one of that child's children and one of her grandchildren are with
+her in that home, where she, no longer young, except in heart, passes
+her peaceful days. --Three generations linked together by so light a
+breath of accident!
+
+I liked--the sound of this youth's voice, I said, and his look when I
+came to observe him a little more closely.  His complexion had
+something better than ,the bloom and freshness which had first
+attracted me;--it had that diffused tone which is a sure index of
+wholesome, lusty life.  A fine liberal style of nature seemed to be:
+hair crisped, moustache springing thick and dark, head firmly
+planted, lips finished, as is commonly sees them in gentlemen's
+families, a pupil well contracted, and a mouth that opened frankly
+with a white flash of teeth that looked as if they could serve him as
+they say Ethan Allen's used to serve their owner,--to draw nails
+with.  This is the kind of fellow to walk a frigate's deck and bowl
+his broadsides into the "Gadlant Thudnder-bomb," or any forty-port-
+holed adventurer who would like to exchange a few tons of iron
+compliments. --I don't know what put this into my head, for it was
+not till some time afterward I learned the young fellow had been in
+the naval school at Annapolis.  Something had happened to change his
+plan of life, and he was now studying engineering and architecture in
+Boston.
+
+When the youth made the short remark which drew my attention to him,
+the little deformed gentleman turned round and took a long look at
+him.
+
+Good for the Boston boy! --he said.
+
+I am not a Boston boy,--said the youth, smiling,--I am a Marylander.
+
+I don't care where you come from,--we'll make a Boston man of you,--
+said the little gentleman.  Pray, what part of Maryland did you come
+from, and how shall I call you?
+
+The poor youth had to speak pretty loud, as he was at the right upper
+corner of the table, and the little gentleman next the lower left-
+hand corner.  His face flushed a little, but he answered pleasantly,
+telling who he was, as if the little man's infirmity gave him a right
+to ask any questions he wanted to.
+
+Here is the place for you to sit,--said the little gentleman,
+pointing to the vacant chair next his own, at the corner.
+
+You're go'n' to have a young lady next you, if you wait till to-
+morrow,--said the landlady to him.
+
+He did not reply, but I had a fancy that he changed color.  It can't
+be that he has susceptibilities with reference to a contingent young
+lady!  It can't be that he has had experiences which make him
+sensitive!  Nature could not be quite so cruel as to set a heart
+throbbing in that poor little cage of ribs!  There is no use in
+wasting notes of admiration.  I must ask the landlady about him.
+
+These are some of the facts she furnished. --Has not been long with
+her.  Brought a sight of furniture,--could n't hardly get some of it
+upstairs.  Has n't seemed particularly attentive to the ladies.  The
+Bombazine (whom she calls Cousin something or other) has tried to
+enter into conversation with him, but retired with the impression
+that he was indifferent to ladies' society.  Paid his bill the other
+day without saying a word about it.  Paid it in gold,--had a great
+heap of twenty-dollar pieces.  Hires her best room.  Thinks he is a
+very nice little man, but lives dreadful lonely up in his chamber.
+Wants the care of some capable nuss.  Never pitied anybody more in
+her life--never see a more interestin' person.
+
+--My intention was, when I began making these notes, to let them
+consist principally of conversations between myself and the other
+boarders.  So they will, very probably; but my curiosity is excited
+about this little boarder of ours, and my reader must not be
+disappointed, if I sometimes interrupt a discussion to give an
+account of whatever fact or traits I may discover about him.  It so
+happens that his room is next to mine, and I have the opportunity of
+observing many of his ways without any active movements of curiosity.
+That his room contains heavy furniture, that he is a restless little
+body and is apt to be up late, that he talks to himself, and keeps
+mainly to himself, is nearly all I have yet found out.
+
+One curious circumstance happened lately which I mention without
+drawing an absolute inference.  Being at the studio of a sculptor
+with whom I am acquainted, the other day, I saw a remarkable cast of
+a left arm.  On my asking where the model came from, he said it was
+taken direct from the arm of a deformed person, who had employed one
+of the Italian moulders to make the cast.  It was a curious case, it
+should seem, of one beautiful limb upon a frame otherwise singularly
+imperfect--I have repeatedly noticed this little gentleman's use of
+his left arm.  Can he have furnished the model I saw at the
+sculptor's?
+
+--So we are to have a new boarder to-morrow.  I hope there will be
+something pretty and pleasing about her.  A woman with a creamy
+voice, and finished in alto rilievo, would be a variety in the
+boarding-house,--a little more marrow and a little less sinew than
+our landlady and her daughter and the bombazine-clad female, all of
+whom are of the turkey-drumstick style of organization.  I don't mean
+that these are our only female companions; but the rest being
+conversational non-combatants, mostly still, sad feeders, who take in
+their food as locomotives take in wood and water, and then wither
+away from the table like blossoms that never came to fruit, I have
+not yet referred to them as individuals.
+
+I wonder what kind of young person we shall see in that empty chair
+to-morrow!
+
+--I read this song to the boarders after breakfast the other morning.
+It was written for our fellows;--you know who they are, of course.
+
+
+
+                    THE BOYS.
+
+Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
+If there has, take him out, without making a noise!
+Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
+Old Time is a liar!  We're twenty to-night!
+
+We're twenty!  We're twenty!  Who says we are more?
+He's tipsy,--young jackanapes!--show him the door!--
+"Gray temples at twenty?"--Yes!  white, if we please;
+Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there's nothing can freeze!
+
+Was it snowing I spoke of?  Excuse the mistake!
+Look close,--you will see not a sign of a flake;
+We want some new garlands for those we have shed,
+And these are white roses in place of the red!
+
+We've a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told.
+Of talking (in public) as if we were old;
+That boy we call Doctor," (1) and this we call Judge (2)--
+It's a neat little fiction,--of course it's all fudge.
+
+That fellow's the Speaker,"(3)--the one on the right;
+Mr. Mayor,"(4) my young one, how are you to-night?
+That's our "Member of Congress,"(5) we say when we chaff;
+There's the "Reverend"(6) What's his name?--don't make me laugh!
+
+That boy with the grave mathematical look(7)
+Made believe he had written a wonderful book,
+And the ROYAL SOCIETY thought it was true!
+So they chose him right in; a good joke it was, too.
+
+There's a boy,--we pretend,--with a three-decker-brain
+That could harness a team with a logical chain:
+When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire,
+We called him "The Justice,"--but now he's "The Squire."(1)
+
+And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith,(2)
+Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith,
+But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,
+--Just read on his medal,--My country,--of thee! "
+
+You hear that boy laughing?--you think he's all fun,
+But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
+The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
+And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all!(3)
+
+Yes, we're boys,--always playing with tongue or with pen,--
+And I sometimes have asked,--Shall we ever be men?
+Shall we always be youthful and laughing and gay,
+Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?
+
+Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its gray!
+The stars of its Winter, the dews of its May!
+And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
+Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys!
+
+
+1 Francis Thomas.
+2 George Tyler Bigelow.
+3 Francis Boardman Crowninshield.
+4 G. W. Richardson.
+5 George Thomas Davis.
+6 James Freeman Clarke.
+7 Benjamin Peirce.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+[The Professor talks with the Reader.  He tells a
+Young Girl's Story.]
+
+When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of
+mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the
+balance of creation was disturbed.  The materials that go to the
+making of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate
+nature of one man's-worth of masculine constituents.  These combined
+to make our first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the
+previous creation of our common father.  All this, mythically,
+illustratively, and by no means doctrinally or polemically.
+
+The man implies the woman, you will understand.  The excellent
+gentleman whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling
+matter a few weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of
+miracles at the present day.  So do I.  I believe, if you could find
+an uninhabited coral-reef island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
+with plenty of cocoa-palms and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome
+young fellow, like our Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched
+there a year afterwards, you would find him walking under the palm-
+trees arm in arm with a pretty woman.
+
+Where would she come from?
+
+Oh, that 's the miracle!
+
+--I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at
+the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear
+some fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a
+clairvoyant, seeing it all beforehand.
+
+--I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to
+the sun to ripen well. --How some of us fellows remember Joe and
+Harry, Baltimoreans, both!  Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples,
+and his eyes like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the
+whiteness of the flesh of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the
+chandelier-drops rattling overhead, as we sat at our sparkling
+banquets in those gay ,times!  Harry, champion, by acclamation, of
+the college heavy-weights, broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-
+jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots of pluck, good-
+natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed bison in the
+crack of hand-to-hand battle!  Who forgets the great muster-day, and
+the collision of the classic with the democratic forces?  The huge
+butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten pounds,--good weight,--
+steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant.  No words from Harry, the
+Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first; and do the
+talking, if there is any, afterwards.  No words, but, in the place
+thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a spank
+like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of beeves
+down a sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth, so
+that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of
+those inglorious and inevitable Yankee clinches, followed by a
+general melee, which make our native fistic encounters so different
+from such admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an
+English fair, where everything was done decently and in order; and
+the fight began and ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting
+parson need hardly have hesitated to open it with a devout petition,
+and, after it was over, dismiss the ring with a benediction.
+
+I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day,
+though it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression.  But all of
+us have a little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to
+men, just a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--
+so that we should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first
+heavy-heeled aggressor that came along.  You can tell a portrait from
+an ideal head, I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the
+writer's invention.  See whether this sounds true or not.
+
+Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and
+Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am
+talking of.  With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little
+fellow, in velvet breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise,
+traditionary in English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-
+skinned racers, in great perfection.  After the soldiers had come
+from the muster-field, and some of the companies were on the village-
+common, there was still some skirmishing between a few individuals
+who had not had the fight taken out of them.  The little Yorkshire
+groom thought he must serve out somebody.  So he threw himself into
+an approved scientific attitude, and, in brief, emphatic language,
+expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate any classical young
+gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate for his
+attentions.  I don't suppose there were many of the college boys that
+would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know so
+much more of than Americans, for the most part.  However, one of the
+Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the
+crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there,
+sparring away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow,
+as if it had been with his fist, and knocked him heels over head and
+senseless, so that he had to be carried off from the field.  This
+ugly way of hitting is the great trick of the French gavate, which is
+not commonly thought able to stand its ground against English
+pugilistic science.  These are old recollections, with not much to
+recommend them, except, perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a
+little something.
+
+The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember.  He
+recalled to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you
+of.  Both have been long dead. How often we see these great red-
+flaring flambeaux of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,
+--and the little, single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some
+white-faced and attenuated invalid shades with trembling fingers,
+flickering on while they go out one after another, until its glimmer
+is all that is left to us of the generation to which it belonged!
+
+I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some
+pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and
+match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.
+
+There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as
+accident could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she
+ought, of course, to be sitting.  One of the "positive" blondes, as
+my friend, you may remember, used to call them.  Tawny-haired,
+amber-eyed, full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond.  Looks
+dreamy to me, not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her
+neck sets it off as a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not
+do.  So in her dress, there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an
+artist had run his eye over her and given a hint or two like the
+finishing touch to a picture.  I can't help being struck with her,
+for she is at once rounded and fine in feature, looks calm, as
+blondes are apt to, and as if she might run wild, if she were trifled
+with.  It is just as I knew it would be,--and anybody can see that
+our young Marylander will be dead in love with her in a week.
+
+Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have
+the good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as
+nice as a three-volume novel.
+
+The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement
+of having such a charming neighbor next him.  I judge so mainly by
+his silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if
+he were thinking of something that had happened, or that might
+happen, or that ought to happen,--or how beautiful her young life
+looked, or how hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which
+struck him silent, at any rate.  I made several conversational
+openings for him, but he did not fire up as he often does.  I even
+went so far as to indulge in, a fling at the State House, which, as
+we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less
+ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect.  The little
+man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt.  He said to the young
+lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our
+Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he
+reddened a little,--so I thought.  I don't think it right to watch
+persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all do it.
+
+I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of the
+table, to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort.  A well-
+mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap,--
+pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,--
+features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye
+on the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her
+My record is a blank for some days after this.  In the mean time I
+have contrived to make out the person and the story of our young
+lady, who, according to appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine
+for a boarding-house romance before a year is out.  It is very
+curious that she should prove connected with a person many of us have
+heard of.  Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred times struck
+with the circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly
+striking each other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of
+miles apart pass close to each other in the naked breadth of the
+ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a crack of
+timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a cry
+mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester
+fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name
+of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely
+pillow,--a widow.
+
+Oh, these mysterious meetings!  Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
+spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack
+sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed
+for them in the waters from the beginning of creation!  Not only
+things and events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these
+surprises, that, if there were a reader in my parish who did not
+recognize the familiar occurrence of what I am now going to mention,
+I should think it a case for the missionaries of the Society for the
+Propagation of Intelligence among the Comfortable Classes.
+There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of
+children.  For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or
+come across some idea.  Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact
+or idea strikes you from another quarter.  It seems as if it had
+passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank
+wall that shuts in the world of thought.  Yet no possible connection
+exists between the two channels by which the thought or the fact
+arrived.  Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.
+
+One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
+pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table
+boarders, which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard
+of.  Young fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short,
+in order to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of
+the blank interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the
+cavity of a geode.
+
+               Aphorism by the Professor.
+
+In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food
+of different kinds at short intervals.  If young, it will eat
+anything at any hour of the day or night.  If old, it observes stated
+periods, and you might as well attempt to regulate the time of
+highwater to suit a fishing-party as to change these periods.
+The crucial experiment is this.  Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the
+suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner.  If this is
+eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established.  If
+the subject of the question starts back and expresses surprise and
+incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of
+maturity is no less clear.
+
+
+--Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table. --Young
+fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre
+fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to
+impale a slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the
+fork holding it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-
+time.  The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found
+out the trick at last, and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--
+they knew where to find one, if it was not in its place. --Now the
+odd thing was, that, after waiting so many years to hear of this
+college trick, I should hear it mentioned a second time within the
+same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the present generation.
+Strange, but true.  And so it has happened to me and to every person,
+often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts
+or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.
+
+I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it
+as an unexplained marvel.  I think, however, I will turn over a
+furrow of subsoil in it. --The explanation is, of course, that in a
+great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these
+instantly arrest our attention.  Now we shall probably never have the
+least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through
+our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic
+record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.
+There go more pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body
+than you think for.  Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of
+mine told you there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle.
+How many "swimming glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed,
+rounded disks taking an active part in all your vital processes, part
+and parcel, each one of them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose
+are whirled along, like pebbles in a stream, with the blood which
+warms your frame and colors your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist
+spread out a minute drop of blood, under the microscope, in narrow
+streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a calculation.  The
+counting by the micrometer took him a week. --You have, my full-grown
+friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery,
+running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live,
+sixty-five billions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions.
+Errors excepted. --Did I hear some gentleman say, "Doubted? "--I am
+the Professor.  I sit in my chair with a petard under it that will
+blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I do not know
+what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.
+
+Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads,
+and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you
+had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is
+it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of
+all that I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come?
+Listen, then.  The number of these living elements in our bodies
+illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of
+our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of;
+these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we
+constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the
+presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the
+daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the
+special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections,
+and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl's story,
+which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to
+learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the
+unconscious subject of my brief delineation.
+
+
+
+IRIS.
+
+You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd
+poem written by an old Latin tutor?  He brought up at the verb amo, I
+love, as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living
+dictionary for him at the word , filia, a daughter.  The poor man was
+greatly perplexed in choosing a name for her.  Lucretia and Virginia
+were the first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured
+stories of Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying,
+though he had read them a hundred times.
+
+--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one
+friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber.  To them her
+wrongs briefly.  Let them see to the wretch,--she will take care of
+herself.  Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart.
+She slides from her seat, and falls dying.  "Her husband and her
+father cry aloud."--No, not Lucretia.
+
+-Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl.  She engaged
+to a very promising young man.  Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy
+to her,--must have her at any rate.  Hires a lawyer to present the
+arguments in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter.
+There used to be lawyers in Rome that would do such things. --All
+right.   There are two sides to everything.  Audi alteram partem.
+The legal gentleman has no opinion,--he only states the evidence.
+--A doubtful case.  Let the young lady be under the protection of the
+Honorable Decemvir until it can be looked up thoroughly. --Father
+thinks it best, on the whole, to give in.  Will explain the matter,
+if the young lady and her maid will step this way.  That is the
+explanation,--a stab with a butcher's knife, snatched from a stall,
+meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia
+
+The old man thought over the story.  Then he must have one look at
+the original.  So he took down the first volume and read it over.
+When he came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she
+was engaged to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless
+shape and carried it through the street, and how all the women
+followed, wailing, and asking if that was what their daughters were
+coming to,--if that was what they were to get for being good girls,--
+he melted down into his accustomed tears of pity and grief, and,
+through them all, of delight at the charming Latin of the narrative.
+But it was impossible to call his child Virginia.  He could never
+look at her without thinking she had a knife sticking in her bosom.
+
+Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one.  She was a queen, and the
+founder of a great city.  Her story had been immortalized by the
+greatest of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to "Virgilius
+Maro," as he called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his
+memorable journey.  So he took down his Virgil, it was the smooth-
+leafed, open-lettered quarto of Baskerville,--and began reading the
+loves and mishaps of Dido.  It would n't do.  A lady who had not
+learned discretion by experience, and came to an evil end.  He shook
+his head, as he sadly repeated,
+
+    "---misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore;"
+
+but when he came to the lines,
+
+    "Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis
+     Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,"
+
+he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording
+angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone
+hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.
+
+"Iris shall be her name!"--he said.  So her name was Iris.
+
+--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation.  It is only
+a question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries.
+These all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in
+brick or stone and iron.  I don't mean that you will see in the
+registry of deaths that this or that particular tutor died of well-
+marked, uncomplicated starvation.  They may, even, in extreme cases,
+be carried off by a thin, watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very
+well in the returns, but means little to those who know that it is
+only debility settling on the head.  Generally, however, they fade
+and waste away under various pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia,
+consumption, and so on, to put a decent appearance upon the case and
+keep up the credit of the family and the institution where they have
+passed through the successive stages of inanition.
+
+In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the
+process in question.  You see they do get food and clothes and fuel,
+in appreciable quantities, such as they are.  You will even notice
+rows of books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look
+as if they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the water
+of crystallization to scholars, and you can never get them away till
+the poor fellows effloresce into dust.  Do not be deceived.  The
+tutor breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcorated with milk
+watered to the verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and
+elastic, up to the moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless;
+his coal is a sullen, sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes,
+rather than burns, in the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too
+thin for winter and too thick for summer.  The greedy lungs of fifty
+hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from the air he breathes in his
+recitation-room.  In short, he undergoes a process of gentle and
+gradual starvation.
+
+--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the
+old story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus.  Her blood-name,
+which she gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain
+old English one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as
+recalling the mother of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well
+from the initial letter forwards and from the terminal letter
+backwards.  The poor lady, seated with her companion at the
+chessboard of matrimony, had but just pushed forward her one little
+white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black Knight, that cares
+nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down upon her and
+swept her from the larger board of life.
+
+The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late
+companion, with her name and age and Eheu!  upon it,--a smaller one
+at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and
+snowed on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have
+cherished tenderly.
+
+About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of
+water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved
+into a slight cough.  Then he began to draw the buckle of his black
+trousers a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-
+ample waistcoat.  His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts
+of color in his cheeks more vivid than of old.  After a while his
+walks fatigued him, and he was tired, and breathed hard after going
+up a flight or two of stairs.  Then came on other marks of inward
+trouble and general waste, which he spoke of to his physician as
+peculiar, and doubtless owing to accidental causes; to all which the
+doctor listened with deference, as if it had not been the old story
+that one in five or six of mankind in temperate climates tells, or
+has told for him, as if it were something new.  As the doctor went
+out, he said to himself,--"On the rail at last.  Accommodation train.
+A good many stops, but will get to the station by and by."  So the
+doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of Jupiter before
+it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader, as you will
+see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed, saying he
+would look in occasionally.  After this, the Latin tutor began the
+usual course of "getting better," until he got so much better that
+his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines
+showed at each side of his lips, and when he spoke; it was in a
+muffled whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the
+purest porcelain,--so much better, that he hoped--by spring--he----
+might be able--to--attend------to his class again. --But he was
+recommended not to expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and
+occasionally, not having anything to do, his bed.  The unmarried
+sister with whom he lived took care of him; and the child, now old
+enough to be manageable and even useful in trifling offices, sat in
+the chamber, or played, about.
+
+Things could not go on so forever, of course.  One morning his face
+was sunken and his hands were very, very cold.  He was "better," he
+whispered, but sadly and faintly.  After a while he grew restless and
+seemed a little wandering.  His mind ran on his classics, and fell
+back on the Latin grammar.
+
+"Iris!  " he said,--",filiola mea!"--The child knew this meant my
+dear little daughter as well as if it had been English. --"Rainbow!
+"for he would translate her name at times,--"come to me,--veni"--and
+his lips went on automatically, and murmured," vel venito!" --The
+child came and sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could
+not warm, but which shot its rays of cold all through her slender
+frame.  But there she sat, looking steadily at him.  Presently he
+opened his lips feebly, and whispered, "Moribundus."  She did not
+know what that meant, but she saw that there was something new and
+sad.  So she began to cry; but presently remembering an old book that
+seemed to comfort him at times, got up and brought a Bible in the
+Latin version, called the Vulgate.  "Open it," he said,--"I will
+read, segnius irritant,--don't put the light out,--ah!  hoeret
+lateri,--I am going,--vale, vale, vale, goodbye, good-bye,--the Lord
+take care of my child!  Domine, audi-- vel audito!" His face whitened
+suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes and mouth.  He had taken
+his last degree.
+
+--Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very
+brilliant rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view.  A limited
+wardrobe of man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good
+books, principally classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of
+the Pantheon, with some pieces of furniture which had seen service,--
+these, and a child's heart full of tearful recollections and strange
+doubts and questions, alternating with the cheap pleasures which are
+the anodynes of childish grief; such were the treasures she
+inherited. --No,--I forgot.  With that kindly sentiment which all of
+us feel for old men's first children,--frost-flowers of the early
+winter season, the old tutor's students had remembered him at a time
+when he was laughing and crying with his new parental emotions, and
+running to the side of the plain crib in which his alter egg, as he
+used to say, was swinging, to hang over the little heap of stirring
+clothes, from which looked the minute, red, downy, still, round face,
+with unfixed eyes and working lips,--in that unearthly gravity which
+has never yet been broken by a smile, and which gives to the earliest
+moon-year or two of an infant's life the character of a first old
+age, to counterpoise that second childhood which there is one chance
+in a dozen it may reach by and by.  The boys had remembered the old
+man and young father at that tender period of his hard, dry life.
+There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with classical
+figures, and bearing on a shield the graver words, Ex dono
+pupillorum.  The handle on its side showed what use the boys had
+meant it for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of
+feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its
+destination.  Out of this silver vessel, after a long, desperate,
+strangling cry, which marked her first great lesson in the realities
+of life, the child took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and their
+children get, tempered with water, and sweetened a little, so as to
+bring it nearer the standard established by the touching indulgence
+and partiality of Nature,--who had mingled an extra allowance of
+sugar in the blameless food of the child at its mother's breast, as
+compared with that of its infant brothers and sisters of the bovine
+race.
+
+But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rainwater.  An air-
+plant will grow by feeding on the winds.  Nay, those huge forests
+that overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from
+the air-currents with which they are always battling.  The oak is but
+a foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that
+holds the future vegetable world in solution.  The storm that tears
+its leaves has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the
+tornado clad in the spoils of a hundred hurricanes.
+
+Poor little Iris!  What had she in common with the great oak in the
+shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like
+that,--this was all.  The blue milk ran into her veins and filled
+them with thin, pure blood.  Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge,
+such as the white rosebud shows before it opens.  The doctor who had
+attended her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to
+"raise " her,--"delicate child,"--hoped she was not consumptive,--
+thought there was a fair chance she would take after her father.
+
+A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white
+neckcloth, sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two
+years and eleven months, after having fully indorsed all the
+doctrines of the particular persuasion to which he not only belonged
+himself, but thought it very shameful that everybody else did not
+belong.  What with foreboding looks and dreary death-bed stories, it
+was a wonder the child made out to live through it.  It saddened her
+early years, of course,--it distressed her tender soul with thoughts
+which, as they cannot be fully taken in, should be sparingly used as
+instruments of torture to break down the natural cheerfulness of a
+healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse, to cheat a dying one out
+of the kind illusions with which the Father of All has strewed its
+downward path.
+
+The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might
+have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have
+been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with
+the best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the
+curious students of science.
+
+Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late
+Latin tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the
+future mother of his child.  The deceased tutoress was a tranquil,
+smooth woman, easily nourished, as such people are,--a quality which
+is inestimable in a tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the
+daughter inherited enough vitality from the mother to live through
+childhood and infancy and fight her way towards womanhood, in spite
+of the tendencies she derived from her other parent.
+
+--Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary
+descent of qualities.  Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five.
+It seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at
+another blended,--that occasionally, the force of two natures is
+represented in the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than
+either original line of living movement,--that sometimes there is a
+loss of vitality hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward
+impulse of variable intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.
+
+So it was with this child.  She had glanced off from her parental
+probabilities at an unexpected angle.  Instead of taking to classical
+learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties
+like her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the
+direction of Art.  As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to
+sketch outlines of objects round her with a certain air and spirit.
+Very extraordinary horses, but their legs looked as if they could
+move.  Birds unknown to Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush.
+Men with impossible legs, which did yet seem to have a vital
+connection with their most improbable bodies.  By-and-by the doctor,
+on his beast,--an old man with a face looking as if Time had kneaded
+it like dough with his knuckles, with a rhubarb tint and flavor
+pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all their appurtenances.
+A dreadful old man!  Be sure she did not forget those saddle-bags
+that held the detestable bottles out of which he used to shake those
+loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that find heaven
+in strawberries and peaches, are-- Well, I suppose I had better stop.
+Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him coming.
+On the next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat and
+white cravat, as he looked when he came and entertained her with
+stories concerning the death of various little children about her
+age, to encourage her, as that wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting
+Admiral Byng.   Then she would take her pencil, and with a few
+scratches there would be the outline of a child, in which you might
+notice how one sudden sweep gave the chubby cheek, and two dots
+darted at the paper looked like real eyes.
+
+By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on the
+leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her
+companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy,
+with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and
+children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and
+heads thrown back in ecstasy.  This was at about twelve years old, as
+the dates of these drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years
+before she came among us.  Soon after this time, the ideal figures
+began to take the place of portraits and caricatures, and a new
+feature appeared in her drawing-books in the form of fragments of
+verse and short poems.
+
+It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an
+old spinster and go to a village school.  Her books bore testimony to
+this; for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a
+sense of weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of
+blessedness or other, which began to be painful.  She might have gone
+through this flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided
+into a sober, human berry, but for the intervention of friendly
+assistance and counsel.
+
+In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition,
+somewhat past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of
+cultivated tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character,
+and of more than common accomplishments.  The gentleman in black
+broadcloth and white neckerchief only echoed the common voice about
+her, when he called her, after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof,
+an excellent cup of tea, with certain elegancies and luxuries he was.
+unaccustomed to, "The Model of all the Virtues."
+
+She deserved this title as well as almost any woman.  She did really
+bristle with moral excellences.  Mention any good thing she had not
+done; I should like to see you try!  There was no handle of weakness
+to take hold of her by; she was as unseizable, except in her
+totality, as a billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial
+table, where she had been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue
+of Fortune, she glanced from every human contact, and "caromed" from
+one relation to another, and rebounded from the stuffed cushion of
+temptation, with such exact and perfect angular movements, that the
+Enemy's corps of Reporters had long given up taking notes of her
+conduct, as there was no chance for their master.
+
+What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a
+slightly self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius
+running like a glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her
+virgin nature!  One of the lady-patroness's peculiar virtues was
+calmness.  She was resolute and strenuous, but still.  You could
+depend on her for every duty; she was as true as steel.  She was
+kind-hearted and serviceable in all the relations of life.  She had
+more sense, more knowledge, more conversation, as well as more
+goodness, than all the partners you have waltzed with this winter put
+together.
+
+Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered
+himself to her in marriage.  It was a great wonder.  I am very
+anxious to vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of
+Nature by accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.
+
+You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of
+presenting to the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand.  There
+are states of mind in which a contact of this kind has a depressing
+effect on the vital powers that makes us insensible to all the
+virtues and graces of the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing
+organs.  When they touch us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as
+if our electricity had been drained by a powerful negative battery,
+carried about by an overgrown human torpedo.
+
+"The Model of all the Virtues" had a pair of searching eyes as clear
+as Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry.
+Her features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-
+smile, but never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the
+riotous tumult of a laugh,--which, I take it, is the mob-law of the
+features;--and propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act.  She
+carried the brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious,
+steady hand, and an eye always on them, to see that they did not
+spill.  Then she was an admirable judge of character.  Her mind was a
+perfect laboratory of tests and reagents; every syllable you put into
+breath went into her intellectual eudiometer, and all your thoughts
+were recorded on litmus-paper.  I think there has rarely been a more
+admirable woman.  Of course, Miss Iris was immensely and passionately
+attached to her. --Well,--these are two highly oxygenated adverbs,--
+grateful,--suppose we say,--yes,--grateful, dutiful, obedient to her
+wishes for the most part,--perhaps not quite up to the concert pitch
+of such a perfect orchestra of the virtues.
+
+We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it
+much.  People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than
+is good for them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable
+subjects for biographies.  But we don't always care most for those
+flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium.
+
+This immaculate woman,--why could n't she have a fault or two?
+Is n't there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome
+aureole of saintly perfection?  Does n't she carry a lump of opium in
+her pocket?  Is n't her cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its
+legitimate use would require?  It would be such a comfort!
+
+Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such
+words escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind.  Whether at
+the bottom of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive
+presence, it is hard to say, until we know more about her.  Iris sits
+between the Little Gentleman and the "Model of all the Virtues," as
+the black-coated personage called her. --I will watch them all.
+
+--Here I stop for the present.  What the Professor said has had to
+make way this time for what he saw and heard.
+
+-And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle
+souls who love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with
+something like a smile upon the reader's lips, at a meeting where
+these musical friends had gathered.  Whether they were written with
+smiles or not, you can guess better after you have read them.
+
+
+               THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.
+
+In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen
+With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,
+At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right,
+Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night.
+
+Ah me! how I remember the evening when it came!
+What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame,
+When the wondrous boa was opened that had come from over seas,
+With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of ivory keys!
+
+Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy,
+For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy,
+Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal way,
+But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, "Now, Mary, play."
+
+For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm;
+She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm,
+In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills,
+Or caroling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.
+
+So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please,
+Sat down to the new "Clementi," and struck the glittering keys.
+Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye grew dim,
+As, floating from lip and finger, arose the "Vesper Hymn."
+
+--Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red,
+(Wedded since, and a widow,--something like ten years dead,)
+Hearing a gush of music such as none before,
+Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door.
+
+Just as the "Jubilate " in threaded whisper dies,
+--"Open it! open it, lady!" the little maiden cries,
+(For she thought't was a singing creature caged in a box she heard,)
+"Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the bird!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+I don't know whether our literary or professional people are more
+amiable than they are in other places, but certainly quarrelling is
+out of fashion among them.  This could never be, if they were in the
+habit of secret anonymous puffing of each other.  That is the kind of
+underground machinery which manufactures false reputations and
+genuine hatreds.  On the other hand, I should like to know if we are
+not at liberty to have a good time together, and say the pleasantest
+things we can think of to each other, when any of us reaches his
+thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth or eightieth birthday.
+
+We don't have "scenes," I warrant you, on these occasions.  No
+"surprise" parties!  You understand these, of course.  In the rural
+districts, where scenic tragedy and melodrama cannot be had, as in
+the city, at the expense of a quarter and a white pocket-
+handkerchief, emotional excitement has to be sought in the dramas of
+real life.  Christenings, weddings, and funerals, especially the
+latter, are the main dependence; but babies, brides, and deceased
+citizens cannot be had at a day's notice.  Now, then, for a surprise-
+party!
+
+A bag of flour, a barrel of potatoes, some strings of onions, a
+basket of apples, a big cake and many little cakes, a jug of
+lemonade, a purse stuffed with bills of the more modest
+denominations, may, perhaps, do well enough for the properties in one
+of these private theatrical exhibitions.  The minister of the parish,
+a tender-hearted, quiet, hard-working man, living on a small salary,
+with many children, sometimes pinched to feed and clothe them,
+praying fervently every day to be blest in his "basket and store,"
+but sometimes fearing he asks amiss, to judge by the small returns,
+has the first role,--not, however, by his own choice, but forced upon
+him.  The minister's wife, a sharp-eyed, unsentimental body, is first
+lady; the remaining parts by the rest of the family.  If they only
+had a playbill, it would run thus:
+
+
+                     ON TUESDAY NEXT
+                    WILL BE PRESENTED
+                   THE AFFECTING SCENE
+                         CALLED
+
+                   THE SURPRISE-PARTY
+
+                           OR
+
+                  THE OVERCOME FAMILY;
+
+
+WITH THE FOLLOWING STRONG CAST OF CHARACTERS.
+
+The Rev.  Mr. Overcome, by the Clergyman of this Parish.
+Mrs.  Overcome, by his estimable lady.
+Masters Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Overcome,
+Misses Dorcas, Tabitha, Rachel, and Hannah, Overcome, by their
+interesting children.
+Peggy, by the female help.
+
+The poor man is really grateful;--it is a most welcome and unexpected
+relief.  He tries to express his thanks,--his voice falters,--he
+chokes,--and bursts into tears.  That is the great effect of the
+evening.  The sharp-sighted lady cries a little with one eye, and
+counts the strings of onions, and the rest of the things, with the
+other.  The children stand ready for a spring at the apples.  The
+female help weeps after the noisy fashion of untutored handmaids.
+
+Now this is all very well as charity, but do let the kind visitors
+remember they get their money's worth.  If you pay a quarter for dry
+crying, done by a second-rate actor, how much ought you to pay for
+real hot, wet tears, out of the honest eyes of a gentleman who is not
+acting, but sobbing in earnest?
+
+All I meant to say, when I began, was, that this was not a surprise-
+party where I read these few lines that follow:
+
+We will not speak of years to-night;
+For what have years to bring,
+But larger floods of love and light
+And sweeter songs to sing?
+
+We will not drown in wordy praise
+The kindly thoughts that rise;
+If friendship owns one tender phrase,
+He reads it in our eyes.
+
+We need not waste our schoolboy art
+To gild this notch of time;
+Forgive me, if my wayward heart
+Has throbbed in artless rhyme.
+
+Enough for him the silent grasp
+That knits us hand in hand,
+And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
+That locks our circling band.
+
+Strength to his hours of manly toil!
+Peace to his starlit dreams!
+Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
+The music-haunted streams!
+
+Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
+The sunshine on his lips,
+And faith, that sees the ring of light
+Round Nature's last eclipse!
+
+
+--One of our boarders has been talking in such strong language that I
+am almost afraid to report it.  However, as he seems to be really
+honest and is so very sincere in his local prejudices, I don't
+believe anybody will be very angry with him.
+
+It is here, Sir!  right here!--said the little deformed gentleman,--
+in this old new city of Boston,--this remote provincial corner of a
+provincial nation, that the Battle of the Standard is fighting, and
+was fighting before we were born, and will be fighting when we are
+dead and gone,--please God!  The battle goes on everywhere throughout
+civilization; but here, here, here is the broad white flag flying
+which proclaims, first of all, peace and good-will to men, and, next
+to that, the absolute, unconditional spiritual liberty of each
+individual immortal soul!  The three-hilled city against the seven-
+hilled city!  That is it, Sir,--nothing less than that; and if you
+know what that means, I don't think you'll ask for anything more.  I
+swear to you, Sir, I believe that these two centres of civilization
+are just exactly the two points that close the circuit in the battery
+of our planetary intelligence!  And I believe there are spiritual
+eyes looking out from Uranus and unseen Neptune,--ay, Sir, from the
+systems of Sirius and Arcturus and Aldebaran, and as far as that
+faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent in the distance that we
+call the nebula of Orion,--looking on, Sir, with what organs I know
+not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery fusion, the
+accidents and hindrances of humanity or man himself, Sir,--the
+stupendous abortion, the illustrious failure that he is, if the
+three-hilled city does not ride down and trample out the seven-hilled
+city!
+
+--Steam 's up!--said the young man John, so called, in a low tone.
+--Three hundred and sixty-five tons to the square inch.  Let him blow
+her off, or he'll bu'st his b'iler.
+
+The divinity-student took it calmly, only whispering that he thought
+there was a little confusion of images between a galvanic battery and
+a charge of cavalry.
+
+But the Koh-i-noor--the gentleman, you remember, with a very large
+diamond in his shirt-front laughed his scornful laugh, and made as if
+to speak.
+
+Sail in, Metropolis!--said that same young man John, by name.  And
+then, in a lower lane, not meaning to be heard,--Now, then, Ma'am
+Allen!
+
+But he was heard,--and the Koh-i-noor's face turned so white with
+rage, that his blue-black moustache and beard looked fearful, seen
+against it.  He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he
+would have thrown it or its contents at the speaker.  The young
+Marylander fixed his clear, steady eye upon him, and laid his hand on
+his arm, carelessly almost, but the Jewel found it was held so that
+he could not move it.  It was of no use.  The youth was his master in
+muscle, and in that deadly Indian hug in which men wrestle with their
+eyes;--over in five seconds, but breaks one of their two backs, and
+is good for threescore years and ten;--one trial enough,--settles the
+whole matter,--just as when two feathered songsters of the barnyard,
+game and dunghill, come together,-after a jump or two at each other,
+and a few sharp kicks, there is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous,
+Monsieur, with the beaten party in all the social relations for all
+the rest of his days.
+
+I cannot philosophically account for the Koh-i-noor's wrath.  For
+though a cosmetic is sold, bearing the name of the lady to whom
+reference was made by the young person John, yet, as it is publicly
+asserted in respectable prints that this cosmetic is not a dye, I see
+no reason why he should have felt offended by any suggestion that he
+was indebted to it or its authoress.
+
+I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to
+which the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural.  Nature is
+fertile in variety.  I saw an albiness in London once, for sixpence,
+(including the inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked
+as if she had been boiled in milk.  A young Hottentot of my
+acquaintance had his hair all in little pellets of the size of
+marrow-fat peas.  One of my own classmates has undergone a singular
+change of late years,--his hair losing its original tint, and getting
+a remarkable discolored look; and another has ceased to cultivate any
+hair at all over the vertex or crown of the head.  So I am perfectly
+willing to believe that the purple-black of the Koh-i-noor's
+moustache and whiskers is constitutional and not pigmentary.  But I
+can't think why he got so angry.
+
+The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
+threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it
+was all over by the time the other end of the table found out there
+was a disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be
+seen resting on his axe at the instant you hear the last blow he
+struck.  So you will please to observe that the Little Gentleman was
+not, interrupted during the time implied by these ex-post-facto
+remarks of mine, but for some ten or fifteen seconds only.
+
+He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started
+again.  The "Sir" of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself
+more than anybody else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he
+were talking with some imaginary opponent.
+
+--America, Sir,--he exclaimed,--is the only place where man is full-
+grown!
+
+He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round of
+his high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his
+little figure to the view of the boarders.
+
+It was next to impossible to keep from laughing.  The commentary was
+so strange an illustration of the text!  I thought it was time to put
+in a word; for I have lived in foreign parts, and am more or less
+cosmopolitan.
+
+I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have
+in England,---I said. --An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion
+and politics.  Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr.
+Channing did, and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.
+
+Sir,--said he,--it is n't what a man thinks or says; but when and
+where and to whom he thinks and says it.  A man with a flint and
+steel striking sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking
+them over a tinder-box is another.  The free Englishman is born under
+protest; he lives and dies under protest,--a tolerated, but not a
+welcome fact.  Is not freethinker a term of reproach in England?  The
+same idea in the soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and
+still holds it antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to
+whom it is congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except
+as an element blended with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like
+the drawing of his breath or the beating of his heart, is a very
+different thing.  You may teach a quadruped to walk on his hind legs,
+but he is always wanting to be on all fours.  Nothing that can be
+taught a growing youth is like the atmospheric knowledge he breathes
+from his infancy upwards.  The American baby sucks in freedom with
+the milk of the breast at which he hangs.
+
+--That's a good joke,--said the young fellow John,--considerin' it
+commonly belongs to a female Paddy.
+
+I thought--I will not be certain--that the Little Gentleman winked,
+as if he had been hit somewhere--as I have no doubt Dr. Darwin did
+when the wooden-spoon suggestion upset his theory about why, etc.  If
+he winked, however, he did not dodge.
+
+A lively comment!--he said. --But Rome, in her great founder, sucked
+the blood of empire out of the dugs of a brute, Sir!  The Milesian
+wet-nurse is only a convenient vessel through which the American
+infant gets the life-blood of this virgin soil, Sir, that is making
+man over again, on the sunset pattern!  You don't think what we are
+doing and going to do here.  Why, Sir, while commentators are
+bothering themselves with interpretation of prophecies, we have got
+the new heavens and the new earth over us and under us!  Was there
+ever anything in Italy, I should like to know, like a Boston sunset?
+
+--This time there was a laugh, and the little man himself almost
+smiled.
+
+Yes,--Boston sunsets;--perhaps they're as good in some other places,
+but I know 'em best here.  Anyhow, the American skies are different
+from anything they see in the Old World.  Yes, and the rocks are
+different, and the soil is different, and everything that comes out
+of the soil, from grass up to Indians, is different.  And now that
+the provisional races are dying out-
+
+--What do you mean by the provisional races, Sir?--said the divinity-
+student, interrupting him.
+
+Why, the aboriginal bipeds, to be sure,--he answered,--the red-crayon
+sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colors for the real
+manhood were ready.
+
+I hope they will come to something yet,--said the divinity-student.
+
+Irreclaimable, Sir,--irreclaimable!--said the Little Gentleman.
+--Cheaper to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones.
+When you can get the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can
+make an enlightened commonwealth of Indians.  A provisional race,
+Sir,--nothing more.  Exhaled carbonic acid for the use of vegetation,
+kept down the bears and catamounts, enjoyed themselves in scalping
+and being scalped, and then passed away or are passing away,
+according to the programme.
+
+Well, Sir, these races dying out, the white man has to acclimate
+himself.  It takes him a good while; but he will come all right by-
+and-by, Sir,--as sound as a woodchuck,--as sound as a musquash!
+
+A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of
+'em for wash-basins!  A new race, and a whole new world for the new-
+born human soul to work in!  And Boston is the brain of it, and has
+been any time these hundred years!  That's all I claim for Boston,--
+that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the
+planet.
+
+--And the grand emporium of modesty,--said the divinity-student, a
+little mischievously.
+
+Oh, don't talk to me of modesty!--answered the Little Gentleman,--I
+'m past that!  There is n't a thing that was ever said or done in
+Boston, from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical
+lie it tore into tatters and flung into the dock, that was n't
+thought very indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the
+entrails of commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into
+colics as often as this revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of
+thinking come over it. --No, Sir,--show me any other place that is,
+or was since the megalosaurus has died out, where wealth and social
+influence are so fairly divided between the stationary and the
+progressive classes!  Show me any other place where every other
+drawing-room is not a chamber of the Inquisition, with papas and
+mammas for inquisitors,--and the cold shoulder, instead of the "dry
+pan and the gradual fire," the punishment of "heresy"!
+
+--We think Baltimore is a pretty civilized kind of a village,--said
+the young Marylander, good-naturedly. --But I suppose you can't
+forgive it for always keeping a little ahead of Boston in point of
+numbers,--tell the truth now.  Are we not the centre of something?
+
+Ah, indeed, to be sure you are.  You are the gastronomic metropolis
+of the Union.  Why don't you put a canvas-back-duck on the top of the
+Washington column?  Why don't you get that lady off from Battle
+Monument and plant a terrapin in her place?  Why will you ask for
+other glories when you have soft crabs?  No, Sir,--you live too well
+to think as hard as we do in Boston.  Logic comes to us with the
+salt-fish of Cape Ann; rhetoric is born of the beans of Beverly; but
+you--if you open your mouths to speak, Nature stops them with a fat
+oyster, or offers a slice of the breast of your divine bird, and
+silences all your aspirations.
+
+And what of Philadelphia?--said the Marylander.
+
+Oh, Philadelphia?--Waterworks,--killed by the Croton and Cochituate;-
+-Ben Franklin,--borrowed from Boston;--David Rittenhouse,--made an
+orrery;--Benjamin Rush,--made a medical system;--both interesting to
+antiquarians;--great Red-river raft of medical students,--spontaneous
+generation of professors to match;--more widely known through the
+Moyamensing hose-company, and the Wistar parties;-for geological
+section of social strata, go to The Club. --Good place to live in,
+--first-rate market,--tip-top peaches. --What do we know about
+Philadelphia, except that the engine-companies are always shooting
+each other?
+
+And what do you say to New York?--asked the Koh-i-noor.
+
+A great city, Sir,--replied the Little Gentleman,--a very opulent,
+splendid city.  A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and of
+permanence for much that is respectable.  A great money-centre.  San
+Francisco with the mines above-ground,--and some of 'em under the
+sidewalks.  I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York,
+in all our cities.  It makes 'em all look paltry and petty.  Has many
+elements of civilization.  May stop where Venice did, though, for
+aught we know. --The order of its development is just this:--Wealth;
+architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture.  Printing, as a
+mechanical art,--just as Nicholas Jepson and the Aldi, who were
+scholars too, made Venice renowned for it.  Journalism, which is the
+accident of business and crowded populations, in great perfection.
+Venice got as far as Titian and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto,--great
+colorists, mark you, magnificent on the flesh-and-blood side of Art,-
+-but look over to Florence and see who lie in Santa Crocea, and ask
+out of whose loins Dante sprung!
+
+Oh, yes, to be sure, Venice built her Ducal Palace, and her Church of
+St. Mark, and her Casa d' Or, and the rest of her golden houses; and
+Venice had great pictures and good music; and Venice had a Golden
+Book, in which all the large tax-payers had their names written;--but
+all that did not make Venice the brain of Italy.
+
+I tell you what, Sir,--with all these magnificent appliances of
+civilization, it is time we began to hear something from the djinnis
+donee whose names are on the Golden Book of our sumptuous, splendid,
+marble-placed Venice,--something in the higher walks of literature,--
+something in the councils of the nation.  Plenty of Art, I grant you,
+Sir; now, then, for vast libraries, and for mighty scholars and
+thinkers and statesmen,--five for every Boston one, as the population
+is to ours,--ten to one more properly, in virtue of centralizing
+attraction as the alleged metropolis, and not call our people
+provincials, and have to come begging to us to write the lives of
+Hendrik Hudson and Gouverneur Morris!
+
+--The Little Gentleman was on his hobby, exalting his own city at the
+expense of every other place.  I have my doubts if he had been in
+either of the cities he had been talking about.  I was just going to
+say something to sober him down, if I could, when the young
+Marylander spoke up.
+
+Come, now,--he said,--what's the use of these comparisons?  Did n't I
+hear this gentleman saying, the other day, that every American owns
+all America?  If you have really got more brains in Boston than other
+folks, as you seem to think, who hates you for it, except a pack of
+scribbling fools?  If I like Broadway better than Washington Street,
+what then?  I own them both, as much as anybody owns either. I am an
+American,--and wherever I look up and see the stars and stripes
+overhead, that is home to me!
+
+He spoke, and looked up as if he heard the emblazoned folds crackling
+over him in the breeze.  We all looked up involuntarily, as if we
+should see the national flag by so doing.  The sight of the dingy
+ceiling and the gas-fixture depending therefrom dispelled the
+illusion.
+
+Bravo!  bravo!--said the venerable gentleman on the other side of the
+table. --Those are the sentiments of Washington's Farewell Address.
+Nothing better than that since the last chapter in Revelations.
+Five-and-forty years ago there used to be Washington societies, and
+little boys used to walk in processions, each little boy having a
+copy of the Address, bound in red, hung round his neck by a ribbon.
+Why don't they now?  Why don't they now?  I saw enough of hating each
+other in the old Federal times; now let's love each other, I say,--
+let's love each other, and not try to make it out that there is n't
+any place fit to live in except the one we happen to be born in.
+
+It dwarfs the mind, I think,--said I,--to feed it on any localism.
+The full stature of manhood is shrivelled--
+
+The color burst up into my cheeks.  What was I saying,--I, who would
+not for the world have pained our unfortunate little boarder by an
+allusion?
+
+I will go,--he said,--and made a movement with his left arm to let
+himself down from his high chair.
+
+No,--no,--he does n't mean it,--you must not go,--said a kind voice
+next him; and a soft, white hand was laid upon his arm.
+
+Iris, my dear!--exclaimed another voice, as of a female, in accents
+that might be considered a strong atmospheric solution of duty with
+very little flavor of grace.
+
+She did not move for this address, and there was a tableau that
+lasted some seconds.  For the young girl, in the glory of half-blown
+womanhood, and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature
+covered with Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's
+eyes.
+
+Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his
+life.  Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that
+reached into her soul as these did.  It was not that they were in
+themselves supernaturally bright,--but there was the sad fire in them
+that flames up from the soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman
+without hope, but, alas! not without emotion.  To him it seemed as if
+those amber gates had been translucent as the brown water of a
+mountain brook, and through them he had seen dimly into a virgin
+wilderness, only waiting for the sunrise of a great passion for all
+its buds to blow and all its bowers to ring with melody.
+
+That is my image, of course,--not his.  It was not a simile that was
+in his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,--it was a pang of
+wordless passion, and then a silent, inward moan.
+
+A lady's wish,--he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,--makes
+slaves of us all. --And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and
+never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures
+without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor
+ragged pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his
+sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts
+that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common
+Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly
+well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common
+Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,--misty, fragmentary, vague,
+half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his
+inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:--John
+Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in England--saying, that with half-an-
+hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in
+any woman's good graces; Cadenus--old and savage--leading captive
+Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a
+winning tongue had he,"--as much as to say, it is n't looks, after
+all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over,--just as of old when
+it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to
+listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.
+
+Ah, dear me!  We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club,
+subjugating man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of
+it, and the second by our handling of it,--we rehearse it, I say, by
+our own hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the
+exercise is easy.  But when we come to real life, the poker is in the
+fore, and, ten to one, if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to
+hold;--lucky for us, if it is not white-hot, and we do not have to
+leave the skin of our hands sticking to it when we fling it down or
+drop it with a loud or silent cry!
+
+--I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human
+character and feeling I am winding.  I meant to tell my thoughts, and
+to throw in a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured
+themselves for me from day to day.  Chance has thrown together at the
+table with me a number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean
+not only to look on them, but, if I can, through them.  You can get
+any man's or woman's secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your
+own, if you will only look patiently on them long enough.  Nature is
+always applying her reagents to character, if you will take the pains
+to watch her.  Our studies of character, to change the image, are
+very much like the surveyor's triangulation of a geographical
+province.  We get a base-line in organization, always; then we get an
+angle by sighting some distant object to which the passions or
+aspirations of the subject of our observation are tending; then
+another;--and so we construct our first triangle.  Once fix a man's
+ideals, and for the most part the rest is easy.  A wants to die worth
+half a million.  Good.  B (female) wants to catch him,--and outlive
+him.  All right.  Minor details at our leisure.
+
+What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all
+your misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of
+acts of consciousness which make up your past life?  What should you
+most dislike to tell your nearest friend?--Be so good as to pause for
+a brief space, and shut the volume you hold with your finger between
+the pages. --Oh, that is it!
+
+What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my
+soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants
+came back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy
+bills!
+
+At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of
+those stately upright cabinet desks and cases of drawers which were
+not rare in prosperous families during the last century.  It had held
+the clothes and the books and the papers of generation after
+generation.  The hands that opened its drawers had grown withered,
+shrivelled, and at last been folded in death.  The children that
+played with the lower handles had got tall enough to open the desk,
+to reach the upper shelves behind the folding-doors,--grown bent
+after a while,--and then followed those who had gone before, and left
+the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new generation.
+
+A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being
+a quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for
+by the smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk.
+Prying about with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a
+spring, on pressing which, a secret drawer flew from its hiding-
+place.  It had never been opened but by the maker.  The mahogany
+shavings and dust were lying in it as when the artisan closed it,--
+and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if that day finished.
+
+Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which
+no hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you
+seem to have suspected?  What does it hold?--A sin?--I hope not.
+What a strange thing an old dead sin laid away in a secret drawer of
+the soul is!  Must it some time or other be moistened with tears,
+until it comes to life again and begins to stir in our
+consciousness,--as the dry wheel-animalcule, looking like a grain of
+dust, becomes alive, if it is wet with a drop of water?
+
+Or is it a passion?  There are plenty of withered men and women
+walking about the streets who have the secret drawer in their hearts,
+which, if it were opened, would show as fresh as it was when they
+were in the flush of youth and its first trembling emotions.
+
+What it held will, perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and
+gone, and same curious eye lights on an old yellow letter with the
+fossil footprints of the extinct passion trodden thick all over it.
+
+There is not a boarder at our table, I firmly believe, excepting the
+young girl, who has not a story of the heart to tell, if one could
+only get the secret drawer open.  Even this arid female, whose armor
+of black bombazine looks stronger against the shafts of love than any
+cuirass of triple brass, has had her sentimental history, if I am not
+mistaken.  I will tell you my reason for suspecting it.
+
+Like many other old women, she shows a great nervousness and
+restlessness whenever I venture to express any opinion upon a class
+of subjects which can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of
+men as their strictly private property,--not even to the clergy, or
+the newspapers commonly called "religious."  Now, although it would
+be a great luxury to me to obtain my opinions by contract, ready-
+made, from a professional man, and although I have a constitutional
+kindly feeling to all sorts of good people which would make me happy
+to agree with all their beliefs, if that were possible, still I must
+have an idea, now and then, as to the meaning of life; and though the
+only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at
+least, not to express them, with reference to such subjects, I can't
+afford to pay quite so much as that even for peace.
+
+I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on
+the shores of Sir Isaac Newton's Ocean of Truth, that salt, fish,
+which have been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and
+dried, are the only proper and allowable food for reasonable people.
+I maintain, on the other hand, that there are a number of live fish
+still swimming in it, and that every one of us has a right to see if
+he cannot catch some of them.  Sometimes I please myself with the
+idea that I have landed an actual living fish, small, perhaps, but
+with rosy gills and silvery scales.  Then I find the consumers of
+nothing but the salted and dried article insist that it is poisonous,
+simply because it is alive, and cry out to people not to touch it.  I
+have not found, however, that people mind them much.
+
+The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer.  I try every
+questionable proposition on her.  If she winces, I must be prepared
+for an outcry from the other old women.  I frightened her, the other
+day, by saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-
+reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is
+not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first.  So she sent me a
+book to read which was to cure me of that error.  It was an old book,
+and looked as if it had not been opened for a long time.  What should
+drop out of it, one day, but a small heart-shaped paper, containing a
+lock of that straight, coarse, brown hair which sets off the sharp
+faces of so many thin-flanked, large-handed bumpkins!  I read upon
+the paper the name "Hiram." --Love! love! love!--everywhere!
+everywhere!--under diamonds and housemaids' "jewelry,"--lifting the
+marrowy camel's-hair, and rustling even the black bombazine! --No,
+no,--I think she never was pretty, but she was young once, and wore
+bright ginghams, and, perhaps, gay merinos.  We shall find that the
+poor little crooked man has been in love, or is in love, or will be
+in love before we have done with him, for aught that I know!
+
+Romance!  Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the
+seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background,
+where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some
+upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-
+out passions?  You look on the black bombazine and high-necked
+decorum of your neighbor, and no more think of the real life that
+underlies this despoiled and dismantled womanhood than you think of a
+stone trilobite as having once been full of the juices and the
+nervous thrills of throbbing and self-conscious being.  There is a
+wild creature under that long yellow pin which serves as brooch for
+the bombazine cuirass,--a wild creature, which I venture to say would
+leap in his cage, if I should stir him, quiet as you think him.  A
+heart which has been domesticated by matrimony and maternity is as
+tranquil as a tame bullfinch; but a wild heart which has never been
+fairly broken in flutters fiercely long after you think time has
+tamed it down,--like that purple finch I had the other day, which
+could not be approached without such palpitations and frantic flings
+against the bars of his cage, that I had to send him back and get a
+little orthodox canary which had learned to be quiet and never mind
+the wires or his keeper's handling.  I will tell you my wicked, but
+half involuntary experiment on the wild heart under the faded
+bombazine.
+
+Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special
+weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not
+touch the infirm spot?  I confess the most frightful tendency to do
+just this thing.  If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself
+imitating it.  If another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that,
+go before him, limping.
+
+I could never meet an Irish gentleman--if it had been the Duke of
+Wellington himself--without stumbling upon the word "Paddy,"--which I
+use rarely in my common talk.
+
+I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate
+depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing
+instinct, which, under different circumstances, might have made a
+Fijian anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I
+was not answerable.  It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact
+like endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted.  A thin film
+of politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of
+thought from the stream of conversation.  After a time one begins to
+soak through and mingle with the other.
+
+We were talking about names, one day. --Was there ever anything,--I
+said,--like the Yankee for inventing the most uncouth, pretentious,
+detestable appellations,--inventing or finding them,--since the time
+of Praise-God Barebones?  I heard a country-boy once talking of
+another whom he called Elpit, as I understood him.  Elbridge is
+common enough, but this sounded oddly.  It seems the boy was
+christened Lord Pitt,--and called for convenience, as above.  I have
+heard a charming little girl, belonging to an intelligent family in
+the country, called Anges invariably; doubtless intended for Agnes.
+Names are cheap.  How can a man name an innocent new-born child, that
+never did him any harm, Hiram?--The poor relation, or whatever she
+is, in bombazine, turned toward me, but I was stupid, and went on. --
+To think of a man going through life saddled with such an abominable
+name as that! --The poor relation grew very uneasy. --I continued;
+for I never thought of all this till afterwards. --I knew one young
+fellow, a good many years ago, by the name of Hiram--  What's got
+into you, Cousin,--said our landlady,--to look so?--There! you 've
+upset your teacup!
+
+It suddenly occurred to me what I had been doing, and I saw the poor
+woman had her hand at her throat; she was half-choking with the
+"hysteric ball,"--a very odd symptom, as you know, which nervous
+women often complain of.  What business had I to be trying
+experiments on this forlorn old soul?  I had a great deal better be
+watching that young girl.
+
+Ah, the young girl!  I am sure that she can hide nothing from me.
+Her skin is so transparent that one can almost count her heart-beats
+by the flushes they send into her cheeks.  She does not seem to be
+shy, either.  I think she does not know enough of danger to be timid.
+She seems to me like one of those birds that travellers tell of,
+found in remote, uninhabited islands, who, having never received any
+wrong at the hand of man, show no alarm at and hardly any particular
+consciousness of his presence.
+
+The first thing will be to see how she and our little deformed
+gentleman get along together; for, as I have told you, they sit side
+by side.  The next thing will be to keep an eye on the duenna,--the
+"Model" and so forth, as the white-neck-cloth called her.  The
+intention of that estimable lady is, I understand, to launch her and
+leave her.  I suppose there is no help for it, and I don't doubt this
+young lady knows how to take care of herself, but I do not like to
+see young girls turned loose in boarding-houses.  Look here now!
+There is that jewel of his race, whom I have called for convenience
+the Koh-i-noor, (you understand it is quite out of the question for
+me to use the family names of our boarders, unless I want to get into
+trouble,)--I say, the gentleman with the diamond is looking very
+often and very intently, it seems to me, down toward the farther
+corner of the table, where sits our amber-eyed blonde.  The
+landlady's daughter does not look pleased, it seems to me, at this,
+nor at those other attentions which the gentleman referred to has, as
+I have learned, pressed upon the newly-arrived young person.  The
+landlady made a communication to me, within a few days after the
+arrival of Miss Iris, which I will repeat to the best of my
+remembrance.
+
+He, (the person I have been speaking of,)--she said,--seemed to be
+kinder hankerin' round after that young woman.  It had hurt her
+daughter's feelin's a good deal, that the gentleman she was a-keepin'
+company with should be offerin' tickets and tryin' to send presents
+to them that he'd never know'd till jest a little spell ago,--and he
+as good as merried, so fur as solemn promises went, to as respectable
+a young lady, if she did say so, as any there was round, whosomever
+they might be.
+
+Tickets!  presents!--said I. --What tickets, what presents has he had
+the impertinence to be offering to that young lady?
+
+Tickets to the Museum,--said the landlady.  There is them that's glad
+enough to go to the Museum, when tickets is given 'em; but some of
+'em ha'n't had a ticket sence Cenderilla was played,--and now he must
+be offerin' 'em to this ridiculous young paintress, or whatever she
+is, that's come to make more mischief than her board's worth.  But it
+a'n't her fault,--said the landlady, relenting;--and that aunt of
+hers, or whatever she is, served him right enough.
+
+Why, what did she do?
+
+Do?  Why, she took it up in the tongs and dropped it out o' winder.
+
+Dropped?  dropped what?--I said.
+
+Why, the soap,--said the landlady.
+
+It appeared that the Koh-i-noor, to ingratiate himself, had sent an
+elegant package of perfumed soap, directed to Miss Iris, as a
+delicate expression of a lively sentiment of admiration, and that,
+after having met with the unfortunate treatment referred to, it was
+picked up by Master Benjamin Franklin, who appropriated it,
+rejoicing, and indulged in most unheard-of and inordinate ablutions
+in consequence, so that his hands were a frequent subject of maternal
+congratulation, and he smelt like a civet-cat for weeks after his
+great acquisition.
+
+After watching daily for a time, I think I can see clearly into the
+relation which is growing up between the little gentleman and the
+young lady.  She shows a tenderness to him that I can't help being
+interested in.  If he was her crippled child, instead of being more
+than old enough to be her father, she could not treat him more
+kindly.  The landlady's daughter said, the other day, she believed
+that girl was settin' her cap for the Little Gentleman.
+
+Some of them young folks is very artful,--said her mother,--and there
+is them that would merry Lazarus, if he'd only picked up crumbs
+enough.  I don't think, though, this is one of that sort; she's
+kinder childlike,--said the landlady,--and maybe never had any dolls
+to play with; for they say her folks was poor before Ma'am undertook
+to see to her teachin' and board her and clothe her.
+
+I could not help overhearing this conversation.  "Board her and
+clothe her!"--speaking of such a young creature!  Oh, dear!--Yes,--
+she must be fed,--just like Bridget, maid-of-all-work at this
+establishment.  Somebody must pay for it.  Somebody has a right to
+watch her and see how much it takes to "keep" her, and growl at her,
+if she has too good an appetite.  Somebody has a right to keep an eye
+on her and take care that she does not dress too prettily.  No mother
+to see her own youth over again in these fresh features and rising
+reliefs of half-sculptured womanhood, and, seeing its loveliness,
+forget her lessons of neutral-tinted propriety, and open the cases
+that hold her own ornaments to find for her a necklace or a bracelet
+or a pair of ear-rings,--those golden lamps that light up the deep,
+shadowy dimples on the cheeks of young beauties,--swinging in a semi-
+barbaric splendor that carries the wild fancy to Abyssinian queens
+and musky Odalisques!  I don't believe any woman has utterly given up
+the great firm of Mundus & Co., so long as she wears ear-rings.
+
+I think Iris loves to hear the Little Gentleman talk.  She smiles
+sometimes at his vehement statements, but never laughs at him.  When
+he speaks to her, she keeps her eye always steadily upon him.  This
+may be only natural good-breeding, so to speak, but it is worth
+noticing.  I have often observed that vulgar persons, and public
+audiences of inferior collective intelligence, have this in common:
+the least thing draws off their minds, when you are speaking to them.
+I love this young creature's rapt attention to her diminutive
+neighbor while he is speaking.
+
+He is evidently pleased with it.  For a day or two after she came, he
+was silent and seemed nervous and excited.  Now he is fond of getting
+the talk into his own hands, and is obviously conscious that he has
+at least one interested listener.  Once or twice I have seen marks of
+special attention to personal adornment, a ruffled shirt-bosom, one
+day, and a diamond pin in it,--not so very large as the Koh-i-noor's,
+but more lustrous.  I mentioned the death's-head ring he wears on his
+right hand.  I was attracted by a very handsome red stone, a ruby or
+carbuncle or something of the sort, to notice his left hand, the
+other day.  It is a handsome hand, and confirms my suspicion that the
+cast mentioned was taken from his arm.  After all, this is just what
+I should expect.  It is not very uncommon to see the upper limbs, or
+one of them, running away with the whole strength, and, therefore,
+with the whole beauty, which we should never have noticed, if it had
+been divided equally between all four extremities.  If it is so, of
+course he is proud of his one strong and beautiful arm; that is human
+nature.  I am afraid he can hardly help betraying his favoritism, as
+people who have any one showy point are apt to do,--especially
+dentists with handsome teeth, who always smile back to their last
+molars.
+
+Sitting, as he does, next to the young girl, and next but one to the
+calm lady who has her in charge, he cannot help seeing their
+relations to each other.
+
+That is an admirable woman, Sir,--he said to me one day, as we sat
+alone at the table after breakfast,--an admirable woman, Sir,--and I
+hate her.
+
+Of course, I begged an explanation.
+
+An admirable woman, Sir, because she does good things, and even kind
+things,--takes care of this--this--young lady--we have here, talks
+like a sensible person, and always looks as if she was doing her duty
+with all her might.  I hate her because her voice sounds as if it
+never trembled and her eyes look as if she never knew what it was to
+cry.  Besides, she looks at me, Sir, stares at me, as if she wanted
+to get an image of me for some gallery in her brain,--and we don't
+love to be looked at in this way, we that have--I hate her,--I hate
+her,--her eyes kill me,--it is like being stabbed with icicles to be
+looked at so,--the sooner she goes home, the better.  I don't want a
+woman to weigh me in a balance; there are men enough for that sort of
+work.  The judicial character is n't captivating in females, Sir.  A
+woman fascinates a man quite as often by what she overlooks as by
+what she sees.  Love prefers twilight to daylight; and a man doesn't
+think much of, nor care much for, a woman outside of his household,
+unless he can couple the idea of love, past, present, or future, with
+her.  I don't believe the Devil would give half as much for the
+services of a sinner as he would for those of one of these folks that
+are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make them unpleasing.
+--That young girl wants a tender nature to cherish her and give her a
+chance to put out her leaves,--sunshine, and not east winds.
+
+He was silent,--and sat looking at his handsome left hand with the
+red stone ring upon it. --Is he going to fall in love with Iris?
+
+Here are some lines I read to the boarders the other day:--
+
+      THE CROOKED FOOTPATH
+
+Ah, here it is! the sliding rail
+That marks the old remembered spot,--
+The gap that struck our schoolboy trail,--
+The crooked path across the lot.
+
+It left the road by school and church,
+A pencilled shadow, nothing more,
+That parted from the silver birch
+And ended at the farmhouse door.
+
+No line or compass traced its plan;
+With frequent bends to left or right,
+In aimless, wayward curves it ran,
+But always kept the door in sight.
+
+The gabled porch, with woodbine green,--
+The broken millstone at the sill,--
+Though many a rood might stretch between,
+The truant child could see them still.
+
+No rocks, across the pathway lie,--
+No fallen trunk is o'er it thrown,--
+And yet it winds, we know not why,
+And turns as if for tree or stone.
+
+Perhaps some lover trod the way
+With shaking knees and leaping heart,--
+And so it often runs astray
+With sinuous sweep or sudden start.
+
+Or one, perchance, with clouded brain
+>From some unholy banquet reeled,--
+And since, our devious steps maintain
+His track across the trodden field.
+
+Nay, deem not thus,--no earthborn will
+Could ever trace a faultless line;
+Our truest steps are human still,--
+To walk unswerving were divine!
+
+Truants from love, we dream of wrath;--
+Oh, rather let us trust the more!
+Through all the wanderings of the path,
+We still can see our Father's door!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Professor finds a Fly in his Teacup.
+
+I have a long theological talk to relate, which must be dull reading
+to some of my young and vivacious friends.  I don't know, however,
+that any of them have entered into a contract to read all that I
+write, or that I have promised always to write to please them.  What
+if I should sometimes write to please myself?
+
+Now you must know that there are a great many things which interest
+me, to some of which this or that particular class of readers may be
+totally indifferent.  I love Nature, and human nature, its thoughts,
+affections, dreams, aspirations, delusions,--Art in all its forms,--
+virtu in all its eccentricities,--old stories from black-letter
+volumes and yellow manuscripts, and new projects out of hot brains
+not yet imbedded in the snows of age.  I love the generous impulses
+of the reformer; but not less does my imagination feed itself upon
+the old litanies, so often warmed by the human breath upon which they
+were wafted to Heaven that they glow through our frames like our own
+heart's blood.  I hope I love good men and women; I know that they
+never speak a word to me, even if it be of question or blame, that I
+do not take pleasantly, if it is expressed with a reasonable amount
+of human kindness.
+
+I have before me at this time a beautiful and affecting letter, which
+I have hesitated to answer, though the postmark upon it gave its
+direction, and the name is one which is known to all, in some of its
+representatives.  It contains no reproach, only a delicately-hinted
+fear.  Speak gently, as this dear lady has spoken, and there is no
+heart so insensible that it does not answer to the appeal, no
+intellect so virile that it does not own a certain deference to the
+claims of age, of childhood, of sensitive and timid natures, when
+they plead with it not to look at those sacred things by the broad
+daylight which they see in mystic shadow.  How grateful would it be
+to make perpetual peace with these pleading saints and their
+confessors, by the simple act that silences all complainings!  Sleep,
+sleep, sleep!  says the Arch-Enchantress of them all,--and pours her
+dark and potent anodyne, distilled over the fires that consumed her
+foes,--its large, round drops changing, as we look, into the beads of
+her convert's rosary!  Silence! the pride of reason! cries another,
+whose whole life is spent in reasoning down reason.
+
+I hope I love good people, not for their sake, but for my own.  And
+most assuredly, if any deed of wrong or word of bitterness led me
+into an act of disrespect towards that enlightened and excellent
+class of men who make it their calling to teach goodness and their
+duty to practise it, I should feel that I had done myself an injury
+rather than them.  Go and talk with any professional man holding any
+of the medieval creeds, choosing one who wears upon his features the
+mark of inward and outward health, who looks cheerful, intelligent,
+and kindly, and see how all your prejudices melt away in his
+presence!  It is impossible to come into intimate relations with a
+large, sweet nature, such as you may often find in this class,
+without longing to be at one with it in all its modes of being and
+believing.  But does it not occur to you that one may love truth as
+he sees it, and his race as he views it, better than even the
+sympathy and approbation of many good men whom he honors,--better
+than sleeping to the sound of the Miserere or listening to the
+repetition of an effete Confession of Faith?
+
+The three learned professions have but recently emerged from a state
+of quasi-barbarism.  None of them like too well to be told of it, but
+it must be sounded in their ears whenever they put on airs.  When a
+man has taken an overdose of laudanum, the doctors tell us to place
+him between two persons who shall make him walk up and down
+incessantly; and if he still cannot be kept from going to sleep, they
+say that a lash or two over his back is of great assistance.
+
+So we must keep the doctors awake by telling them that they have not
+yet shaken off astrology and the doctrine of signatures, as is shown
+by the form of their prescriptions, and their use of nitrate of
+silver, which turns epileptics into Ethiopians.  If that is not
+enough, they must be given over to the scourgers, who like their task
+and get good fees for it.  A few score years ago, sick people were
+made to swallow burnt toads and powdered earthworms and the expressed
+juice of wood-lice.  The physician of Charles I. and II. prescribed
+abominations not to be named.  Barbarism, as bad as that of Congo or
+Ashantee.  Traces of this barbarism linger even in the greatly
+improved medical science of our century.  So while the solemn farce
+of over-drugging is going on, the world over, the harlequin pseudo-
+science jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with half-a-dozen
+somersets, and begins laying about him.
+
+In 1817, perhaps you remember, the law of wager by battle was
+unrepealed, and the rascally murderous, and worse than murderous,
+clown, Abraham Thornton, put on his gauntlet in open court and defied
+the appellant to lift the other which he threw down.  It was not
+until the reign of George II. that the statutes against witchcraft
+were repealed.  As for the English Court of Chancery, we know that
+its antiquated abuses form one of the staples of common proverbs and
+popular literature.  So the laws and the lawyers have to be watched
+perpetually by public opinion as much as the doctors do.
+
+I don't think the other profession is an exception.  When the
+Reverend Mr. Cauvin and his associates burned my distinguished
+scientific brother,--he was burned with green fagots, which made it
+rather slow and painful,--it appears to me they were in a state of
+religious barbarism.  The dogmas of such people about the Father of
+Mankind and his creatures are of no more account in my opinion than
+those of a council of Aztecs.  If a man picks your pocket, do you not
+consider him thereby disqualified to pronounce any authoritative
+opinion on matters of ethics?  If a man hangs my ancient female
+relatives for sorcery, as they did in this neighborhood a little
+while ago, or burns my instructor for not believing as he does, I
+care no more for his religious edicts than I should for those of any
+other barbarian.
+
+Of course, a barbarian may hold many true opinions; but when the
+ideas of the healing art, of the administration of justice, of
+Christian love, could not exclude systematic poisoning, judicial
+duelling, and murder for opinion's sake, I do not see how we can
+trust the verdict of that time relating to any subject which involves
+the primal instincts violated in these abominations and absurdities.
+--What if we are even now in a state of semi-barbarism?
+
+
+[This physician believes we "are even now in a state of semi-
+barbarism": invasive procedures for the prolongation of death rather
+than prolongation of life; "faith",as slimly based as medieval faith
+in minute differences between control and treated groups; statistical
+manipulation to prove a prejudice.  Medicine has a good deal to
+answer for!  D.W.]
+
+
+Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table about such things.
+--I am not so sure of that.  Religion and government appear to me the
+two subjects which of all others should belong to the common talk of
+people who enjoy the blessings of freedom.  Think, one moment.  The
+earth is a great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its
+axis, receives fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same
+number worked up more or less completely.  There must be somewhere a
+population of two hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred
+times as many, earth-born intelligences.  Life, as we call it, is
+nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where it
+comes on soundings.  In this view, I do not see anything so fit to
+talk about, or half so interesting, as that which relates to the
+innumerable majority of our fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who
+are hundreds of thousands to one of the live-living, and with whom we
+all potentially belong, though we have got tangled for the present in
+some parcels of fibrine, albumen, and phosphates, that keep us on the
+minority side of the house.  In point of fact, it is one of the many
+results of Spiritualism to make the permanent destiny of the race a
+matter of common reflection and discourse, and a vehicle for the
+prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age doctrines on the subject.  I
+cannot help thinking, when I remember how many conversations my
+friend and myself have sported, that it would be very extraordinary,
+if there were no mention of that class of subjects which involves all
+that we have and all that we hope, not merely for ourselves, but for
+the dear people whom we love best,--noble men, pure and lovely women,
+ingenuous children, about the destiny of nine tenths of whom you know
+the opinions that would have been taught by those old man-roasting,
+woman-strangling dogmatists. --However, I fought this matter with one
+of our boarders the other day, and I am going to report the
+conversation.
+
+The divinity-student came down, one morning, looking rather more
+serious than usual.  He said little at breakfast-time, but lingered
+after the others, so that I, who am apt to be long at the table,
+found myself alone with him.
+
+When the rest were all gone, he turned his chair round towards mine,
+and began.
+
+I am afraid,--he said,--you express yourself a little too freely on a
+most important class of subjects.  Is there not danger in introducing
+discussions or allusions relating to matters of religion into common
+discourse?
+
+Danger to what?--I asked.
+
+Danger to truth,--he replied, after a slight pause.
+
+I didn't know Truth was such an invalid,' I said. --How long is it
+since she could only take the air in a close carriage, with a
+gentleman in a black coat on the box?  Let me tell you a story,
+adapted to young persons, but which won't hurt older ones.
+
+--There was a very little boy who had one of those balloons you may
+have seen, which are filled with light gas, and are held by a string
+to keep them from running off in aeronautic voyages on their own
+account.  This little boy had a naughty brother, who said to him, one
+day,--Brother, pull down your balloon, so that I can look at it and
+take hold of it.  Then the little boy pulled it down.  Now the
+naughty brother had a sharp pin in his hand, and he thrust it into
+the balloon, and all the gas oozed out, so that there was nothing
+left but a shrivelled skin.
+
+One evening, the little boy's father called him to the window to see
+the moon, which pleased him very much; but presently he said,--
+Father, do not pull the string and bring down the moon, for my
+naughty brother will prick it, and then it will all shrivel up and we
+shall not see it any more.
+
+Then his father laughed, and told him how the moon had been shining a
+good while, and would shine a good while longer, and that all we
+could do was to keep our windows clean, never letting the dust get
+too thick on them, and especially to keep our eyes open, but that we
+could not pull the moon down with a string, nor prick it with a pin.
+--Mind you this, too, the moon is no man's private property, but is
+seen from a good many parlor-windows.
+
+--Truth is tough.  It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay,
+you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round
+and full at evening.  Does not Mr. Bryant say, that Truth gets well
+if she is run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if
+she scratches her finger?  [Would that this was so:--error,
+superstition, mysticism, authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a
+tenacity that survives inexplicably.  D.W.]  I never heard that a
+mathematician was alarmed for the safety of a demonstrated
+proposition.  I think, generally, that fear of open discussion
+implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great sensitiveness to
+the expression of individual opinion is a mark of weakness.
+
+--I am not so much afraid for truth,--said the divinity-student,--as
+for the conceptions of truth in the minds of persons not accustomed
+to judge wisely the opinions uttered before them.
+
+Would you, then, banish all allusions to matters of this nature from
+the society of people who come together habitually?
+
+I would be very careful in introducing them,--said the divinity-
+student.
+
+Yes, but friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be
+picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of
+doctrines these people do not approve.  Some of your friends stop
+little children in the street, and give them books, which their
+parents, who have had them baptized into the Christian fold and give
+them what they consider proper religious instruction, do not think
+fit for them.  One would say it was fair enough to talk about matters
+thus forced upon people's attention.
+
+The divinity-student could not deny that this was what might be
+called opening the subject to the discussion of intelligent people.
+
+But,--he said,--the greatest objection is this, that persons who have
+not made a professional study of theology are not competent to speak
+on such subjects.  Suppose a minister were to undertake to express
+opinions on medical subjects, for instance, would you not think he
+was going beyond his province?
+
+I laughed,--for I remembered John Wesley's "sulphur and
+supplication," and so many other cases where ministers had meddled
+with medicine,--sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general
+rule, with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose
+way of admitting evidence,--that I could not help being amused.
+
+I beg your pardon,--I said,--I do not wish to be impolite, but I was
+thinking of their certificates to patent medicines.  Let us look at
+this matter.
+
+If a minister had attended lectures on the theory and practice of
+medicine, delivered by those who had studied it most deeply, for
+thirty or forty years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a
+year,--if he had been constantly reading and hearing read the most
+approved text-books on the subject,--if he had seen medicine actually
+practised according to different methods, daily, for the same length
+of time,--I should think, that if a person of average understanding,
+he was entitled to express an opinion on the subject of medicine, or
+else that his instructors were a set of ignorant and incompetent
+charlatans.
+
+If, before a medical practitioner would allow me to enjoy the full
+privileges of the healing art, he expected me to affirm my belief in
+a considerable number of medical doctrines, drugs, and formulae, I
+should think that he thereby implied my right to discuss the same,
+and my ability to do so, if I knew how to express myself in English.
+
+Suppose, for instance, the Medical Society should refuse to give us
+an opiate, or to set a broken limb, until we had signed our belief in
+a certain number of propositions,--of which we will say this is the
+first:
+
+I.  All men's teeth are naturally in a state of total decay or
+caries, and, therefore, no man can bite until every one of them is
+extracted and a new set is inserted according to the principles of
+dentistry adopted by this Society.
+
+I, for one, should want to discuss that before signing my name to it,
+and I should say this:--Why, no, that is n't true.  There are a good
+many bad teeth, we all know, but a great many more good ones.  You
+must n't trust the dentists; they are all the time looking at the
+people who have bad teeth, and such as are suffering from toothache.
+The idea that you must pull out every one of every nice young man and
+young woman's natural teeth!  Poh, poh!  Nobody believes that.  This
+tooth must be straightened, that must be filled with gold, and this
+other perhaps extracted, but it must be a very rare case, if they are
+all so bad as to require extraction; and if they are, don't blame the
+poor soul for it!  Don't tell us, as some old dentists used to, that
+everybody not only always has every tooth in his head good for
+nothing, but that he ought to have his head cut off as a punishment
+for that misfortune!  No, I can't sign Number One.  Give us Number
+Two.
+
+II.  We hold that no man can be well who does not agree with our
+views of the efficacy of calomel, and who does not take the doses of
+it prescribed in our tables, as there directed.
+
+To which I demur, questioning why it should be so, and get for answer
+the two following:
+
+III.  Every man who does not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed
+by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of
+disease from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is
+simultaneously affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia,
+and Atrophy; with Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with
+Cachexia, Carcinoma, and Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet,
+to Xerophthahnia and Zona, with all possible and incompatible
+diseases which are necessary to make up a totally morbid state; and
+he will certainly die, if he does not take freely of our prepared
+calomel, to be obtained only of one of our authorized agents.
+
+IV.  No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does
+not give in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named
+and the following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his
+mouth to certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry,
+to examine whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set
+inserted according to our regulations.
+
+Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha'n't have any
+rhubarb, if we don't sign their articles, and that, if, after signing
+them, we express doubts (in public, about any of them, they will cut
+us off from our jalap and squills,--but then to ask a fellow not to
+discuss the propositions before he signs them is what I should call
+boiling it down a little too strong!
+
+If we understand them, why can't we discuss them?  If we can't
+understand them, because we have n't taken a medical degree, what the
+Father of Lies do they ask us to sign them for?
+
+Just so with the graver profession.  Every now and then some of its
+members seem to lose common sense and common humanity.  The laymen
+have to keep setting the divines right constantly.  Science, for
+instance,--in other words, knowledge,--is not the enemy of religion;
+for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance: But it is often the
+antagonist of school-divinity.
+
+Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines.
+Come down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant
+prelate, tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-
+third of October, four thousand and four years before the birth of
+Christ.  Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-
+eight years B. C.  Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the
+elephant on a tortoise.  One statement is as near the truth as the
+other.
+
+Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral
+surgery.  I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more
+picture to his four stages of Cruelty.  Those wretched fools,
+reverend divines and others, who were strangling men and women for
+imaginary crimes a little more than a century ago among us, were set
+right by a layman, and very angry it made them to have him meddle.
+
+The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their
+clergyman,--a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain
+mechanical processes as Babbage's calculating machine.  The
+commentary of the laymen on the preaching and practising of Jonathan
+Edwards was, that, after twenty-three years of endurance, they turned
+him out by a vote of twenty to one, and passed a resolve that he
+should never preach for them again.  A man's logical and analytical
+adjustments are of little consequence, compared to his primary
+relations with Nature and truth: and people have sense enough to find
+it out in the long ran; they know what "logic" is worth.
+
+In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and
+Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many
+men can do this.  But common sense and common humanity were
+unfortunately left out from their premises, and a layman had to
+supply them.  A hundred more years and many of the barbarisms still
+lingering among us will, of course, have disappeared like witch-
+hanging.  But people are sensitive now, as they were then.  You will
+see by this extract that the Rev. Cotton Mather did not like
+intermeddling with his business very well.
+
+"Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions," he
+says, "and God will smite thro' the loins of those that rise up
+against them.  I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds
+among us know to be true.  The Godly Minister of a certain Town in
+Connecticut, when he had occasion to be absent on a Lord's Day from
+his Flock, employ'd an honest Neighbour of some small Talents for a
+Mechanick, to read a Sermon out of some good Book unto 'em.  This
+Honest, whom they ever counted also a Pious Man, had so much conceit
+of his Talents, that instead of Reading a Sermon appointed, he to the
+Surprize of the People, fell to preaching one of his own.  For his
+Text he took these Words, 'Despise not Prophecyings'; and in his
+Preachment he betook himself to bewail the Envy of the Clergy in the
+Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord's People to be Prophets,
+and call forth Private Brethren publickly to prophesie.  While he was
+thus in the midst of his Exercise, God smote him with horrible
+Madness; he was taken ravingly distracted; the People were forc'd
+with violent Hands to carry him home.  I will not mention his Name:
+He was reputed a Pious Man."--This is one of Cotton Mather's
+"Remarkable Judgments of God, on Several Sorts of Offenders,"--and
+the next cases referred to are the Judgments on the " Abominable
+Sacrilege" of not paying the Ministers' Salaries.
+
+This sort of thing does n't do here and now, you see, my young
+friend!  We talk about our free institutions;--they are nothing but a
+coarse outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought.
+The President of the United States is only the engine driver of our
+broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a
+seat in the first-class cars behind him.
+
+--There is something in what you say,--replied the divinity-student;-
+-and yet it seems to me there are places and times where disputed
+doctrines of religion should not be introduced.  You would not attack
+a church dogma--say Total Depravity--in a lyceum-lecture, for
+instance?
+
+Certainly not; I should choose another place,--I answered. --But,
+mind you, at this table I think it is very different.  I shall
+express my ideas on any subject I like.  The laws of the lecture-
+room, to which my friends and myself are always amenable, do not hold
+here.  I shall not often give arguments, but frequently opinions,--I
+trust with courtesy and propriety, but, at any rate, with such
+natural forms of expression as it has pleased the Almighty to bestow
+upon me.
+
+A man's opinions, look you, are generally of much more value than his
+arguments.  These last are made by his brain, and perhaps he does not
+believe the proposition they tend to prove,--as is often the case
+with paid lawyers; but opinions are formed by our whole nature,--
+brain, heart, instinct, brute life, everything all our experience has
+shaped for us by contact with the whole circle of our being.
+
+--There is one thing more,--said the divinity-student,--that I wished
+to speak of; I mean that idea of yours, expressed some time since, of
+depolarizing the text of sacred books in order to judge them fairly.
+May I ask why you do not try the experiment yourself?
+
+Certainly,--I replied,--if it gives you any pleasure to ask foolish
+questions.  I think the ocean telegraph-wire ought to be laid and
+will be laid, but I don't know that you have any right to ask me to
+go and lay it.  But, for that matter, I have heard a good deal of
+Scripture depolarized in and out of the pulpit.  I heard the Rev.
+Mr. F. once depolarize the story of the Prodigal Son in Park-Street
+Church.  Many years afterwards, I heard him repeat the same or a
+similar depolarized version in Rome, New York.  I heard an admirable
+depolarization of the story of the young man who "had great
+possessions" from the Rev.  Mr. H.  in another pulpit, and felt that
+I had never half understood it before.  All paraphrases are more or
+less perfect depolarizations.  But I tell you this: the faith of our
+Christian community is not robust enough to bear the turning of our
+most sacred language into its depolarized equivalents.  You have only
+to look back to Dr. Channing's famous Baltimore discourse and
+remember the shrieks of blasphemy with which it was greeted, to
+satisfy yourself on this point.  Time, time only, can gradually wean
+us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas
+of the thing signified.  Man is an idolater or symbol-worshipper by
+nature, which, of course, is no fault of his; but sooner or later all
+his local and temporary symbols must be ground to powder, like the
+golden calf,--word-images as well as metal and wooden ones.  Rough
+work, iconoclasm,--but the only way to get at truth.  It is, indeed,
+as that quaint and rare old discourse, "A Summons for Sleepers," hath
+it, "no doubt a thankless office, and a verie unthriftie occupation;
+veritas odium parit, truth never goeth without a scratcht face; he
+that will be busie with voe vobis, let him looke shortly for coram
+nobas."
+
+The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may
+think what we like and say what we think.
+
+--Think what we like! --said the divinity-student;--think what we
+like!  What! against all human and divine authority?
+
+Against all human versions of its own or any other authority.  At our
+own peril always, if we do not like the right,--but not at the risk
+of being hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on
+green fagots for ecclesiastical treason!  Nay, we have got so far,
+that the very word heresy has fallen into comparative disuse among
+us.
+
+And now, my young friend, let-us shake hands and stop our discussion,
+which we will not make a quarrel.  I trust you know, or will learn, a
+great many things in your profession which we common scholars do not
+know; but mark this: when the common people of New England stop
+talking politics and theology, it will be because they have got an
+Emperor to teach them the one, and a Pope to teach them the other!
+
+That was the end of my long conference with the divinity-student.
+The next morning we got talking a little on the same subject, very
+good-naturedly, as people return to a matter they have talked out.
+
+You must look to yourself,--said the divinity-student,--if your
+democratic notions get into print.  You will be fired into from all
+quarters.
+
+If it were only a bullet, with the marksman's name on it! --I said.
+--I can't stop to pick out the peep-shot of the anonymous scribblers.
+
+Right, Sir!  right!--said the Little Gentleman.  The scamps!  I know
+the fellows.  They can't give fifty cents to one of the Antipodes,
+but they must have it jingled along through everybody's palms all the
+way, till it reaches him,--and forty cents of it gets spilt, like the
+water out of the fire-buckets passed along a "lane" at a fire;--but
+when it comes to anonymous defamation, putting lies into people's
+mouths, and then advertising those people through the country as the
+authors of them,--oh, then it is that they let not their left hand
+know what their right hand doeth!
+
+I don't like Ehud's style of doing business, Sir.  He comes along
+with a very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his "secret errand unto
+thee," and his "message from God unto thee," and then pulls out his
+hidden knife with that unsuspected hand of his,---(the Little
+Gentleman lifted his clenched left hand with the blood-red jewel on
+the ring-finger,)--and runs it, blade and haft, into a man's stomach!
+Don't meddle with these fellows, Sir.  They are read mostly by
+persons whom you would not reach, if you were to write ever so much.
+Let 'em alone.  A man whose opinions are not attacked is beneath
+contempt.
+
+I hope so,--I said. --I got three pamphlets and innumerable squibs
+flung at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in former
+years.  When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the
+professional public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance
+of poison from one young mother's chamber to another's,--for doing
+which humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though
+nothing else good should ever come of my life,--I had to bear the
+sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe,
+have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women
+stir among the ruins. --What would you do, if the folks without names
+kept at you, trying to get a San Benito on to your shoulders that
+would fit you?--Would you stand still in fly-time, or would you give
+a kick now and then?
+
+Let 'em bite! --said the Little Gentleman,--let 'em bite!  It makes
+'em hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as
+ever and twice as savage.  Do you know what meddling with the folks
+without names, as you call 'em, is like?--It is like riding at the
+quintaan.  You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a
+pivot, with a bag of sand on an arm that balances it.  The board
+gives way as soon as you touch it; and before you have got by, the
+bag of sand comes round whack on the back of your neck.  "Ananias,"
+for instance, pitches into your lecture, we will say, in some paper
+taken by the people in your kitchen.  Your servants get saucy and
+negligent.  If their newspaper calls you names, they need not be so
+particular about shutting doors softly or boiling potatoes.  So you
+lose your temper, and come out in an article which you think is going
+to finish "Ananias," proving him a booby who doesn't know enough to
+understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells lies.
+Now you think you 've got him!  Not so fast.  "Ananias " keeps still
+and winks to "Shimei," and "Shimei" comes out in the paper which they
+take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow.
+If you meddle with "Shimei," he steps out, and next week appears
+"Rab-shakeh," an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out
+what good sense there was in Hezekiah's "Answer him not."--No, no,--
+keep your temper. --So saying, the Little Gentleman doubled his left
+fist and looked at it as if he should like to hit something or
+somebody a most pernicious punch with it.
+
+Good!--said I. --Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at,
+after seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.
+
+--Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious
+sects, about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to
+deal and to live with.
+
+--There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among
+the men, in every denomination.
+
+--The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:
+
+1.  The comfortably rich.
+2.  The decently comfortable.
+3.  The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.
+4.  The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.
+
+--The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't
+clinch.
+
+--The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute
+were two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.
+
+--Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people.
+
+--Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a
+greater.  A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the
+belief of a large one.
+
+The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth
+while all this was going on.  She broke out in speech at this point.
+
+I hate to hear folks talk so.  I don't see that you are any better
+than a heathen.
+
+I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,--I said.
+--Dying for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than
+scolding for it; and the history of heathen races is full of
+instances where men have laid down their lives for the love of their
+kind, of their country, of truth, nay, even for simple manhood's
+sake, or to show their obedience or fidelity.  What would not such
+beings have done for the souls of men, for the Christian
+commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had lived in days of
+larger light?  Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates drinking
+his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's camp, or that old New
+England divine sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling over
+his conceit of certain poor women, who had been burned to death in
+his own town, going "roaring out of one fire into another"?
+
+I don't believe he said any such thing,--replied the Poor Relation.
+
+It is hard to believe,--said I,--but it is true for all that.  In
+another hundred years it will be as incredible that men talked as we
+sometimes hear them now.
+
+Pectus est quod facit theologum.  The heart makes the theologian.
+Every race, every civilization, either has a new revelation of its
+own or a new interpretation of an old one.  Democratic America, has a
+different humanity from feudal Europe, and so must have a new
+divinity.  See, for one moment, how intelligence reacts on our
+faiths.  The Bible was a divining-book to our ancestors, and is so
+still in the hands of some of the vulgar.  The Puritans went to the
+Old Testament for their laws; the Mormons go to it for their
+patriarchal institution.  Every generation dissolves something new
+and precipitates something once held in solution from that great
+storehouse of temporary and permanent truths.
+
+You may observe this: that the conversation of intelligent men of the
+stricter sects is strangely in advance of the formula that belong to
+their organizations.  So true is this, that I have doubts whether a
+large proportion of them would not have been rather pleased than
+offended, if they could have overheard our, talk.  For, look you, I
+think there is hardly a professional teacher who will not in private
+conversation allow a large part of what we have said, though it may
+frighten him in print; and I know well what an under-current of
+secret sympathy gives vitality to those poor words of mine which
+sometimes get a hearing.
+
+I don't mind the exclamation of any old stager who drinks Madeira
+worth from two to six Bibles a bottle, and burns, according to his
+own premises, a dozen souls a year in the cigars with which he
+muddles his brains.  But as for the good and true and intelligent men
+whom we see all around us, laborious, self-denying, hopeful,
+helpful,--men who know that the active mind of the century is tending
+more and more to the two poles, Rome and Reason, the sovereign church
+or the free soul, authority or personality, God in us or God in our
+masters, and that, though a man may by accident stand half-way
+between these two points, he must look one way or the other,--I don't
+believe they would take offence at anything I have reported of our
+late conversation.
+
+But supposing any one do take offence at first sight, let him look
+over these notes again, and see whether he is quite sure he does not
+agree with most of these things that were said amongst us.  If he
+agrees with most of them, let him be patient with an opinion he does
+not accept, or an expression or illustration a little too vivacious.
+I don't know that I shall report any more conversations on these
+topics; but I do insist on the right to express a civil opinion on
+this class of subjects without giving offence, just when and where I
+please,---unless, as in the lecture-room, there is an implied
+contract to keep clear of doubtful matters.  You did n't think a man
+could sit at a breakfast-table doing nothing but making puns every
+morning for a year or two, and never give a thought to the two
+thousand of his fellow-creatures who are passing into another state
+during every hour that he sits talking and laughing.  Of course, the
+one matter that a real human being cares for is what is going to
+become of them and of him.  And the plain truth is, that a good many
+people are saying one thing about it and believing another.
+
+--How do I know that?  Why, I have known and loved to talk with good
+people, all the way from Rome to Geneva in doctrine, as long as I can
+remember.  Besides, the real religion of the world comes from women
+much more than from men,--from mothers most of all, who carry the key
+of our souls in their bosoms.  It is in their hearts that the
+"sentimental" religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its
+source.  The sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the
+sentiment of the paramount obligation of the parent to the child as
+having called it into existence, enhanced just in proportion to the
+power and knowledge of the one and the weakness and ignorance of the
+other,--these are the "sentiments" that have kept our soulless
+systems from driving men off to die in holes like those that riddle
+the sides of the hill opposite the Monastery of St. Saba, where the
+miserable victims of a falsely-interpreted religion starved and
+withered in their delusion.
+
+I have looked on the face of a saintly woman this very day, whose
+creed many dread and hate, but whose life is lovely and noble beyond
+all praise.  When I remember the bitter words I have heard spoken
+against her faith, by men who have an Inquisition which
+excommunicates those who ask to leave their communion in peace, and
+an Index Expurgatorius on which this article may possibly have the
+honor of figuring,--and, far worse than these, the reluctant,
+pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps be possible that one
+who so believed should be accepted of the Creator,--and then recall
+the sweet peace and love that show through all her looks, the price
+of untold sacrifices and labors, and again recollect how thousands of
+women, filled with the same spirit, die, without a murmur, to earthly
+life, die to their own names even, that they may know nothing but
+their holy duties,--while men are torturing and denouncing their
+fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the
+hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus,"
+to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human
+nature,--I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new
+revelation, and the name of its Messiah is WOMAN!
+
+--I should be sorry,--I remarked, a day or two afterwards, to the
+divinity-student,--if anything I said tended in any way to foster any
+jealousy between the professions, or to throw disrespect upon that
+one on whose counsel and sympathies almost all of us lean in our
+moments of trial.  But we are false to our new conditions of life, if
+we do not resolutely maintain our religious as well as our political
+freedom, in the face of any and all supposed monopolies.  Certain men
+will, of course, say two things, if we do not take their views:
+first, that we don't know anything about these matters; and,
+secondly, that we are not so good as they are.  They have a polarized
+phraseology for saying these things, but it comes to precisely that.
+To which it may be answered, in the first place, that we have good
+authority for saying that even babes and sucklings know something;
+and, in the second, that, if there is a mote or so to be removed from
+our premises, the courts and councils of the last few years have
+found beams enough in some other quarters to build a church that
+would hold all the good people in Boston and have sticks enough left
+to make a bonfire for all the heretics.
+
+As to that terrible depolarizing process of mine, of which we were
+talking the other day, I will give you a specimen of one way of
+managing it, if you like.  I don't believe it will hurt you or
+anybody.  Besides, I had a great deal rather finish our talk with
+pleasant images and gentle words than with sharp sayings, which will
+only afford a text, if anybody repeats them, for endless relays of
+attacks from Messrs.  Ananias, Shimei, and Rabshakeh.
+
+[I must leave such gentry, if any of them show themselves, in the
+hands of my clerical friends, many of whom are ready to stand up for
+the rights of the laity,--and to those blessed souls, the good women,
+to whom this version of the story of a mother's hidden hopes and
+tender anxieties is dedicated by their peaceful and loving servant.]
+
+
+
+          A MOTHER'S SECRET.
+
+How sweet the sacred legend--if unblamed
+In my slight verse such holy things are named--
+Of Mary's secret hours of hidden joy,
+Silent, but pondering on her wondrous boy!
+Ave, Maria!  Pardon, if I wrong
+Those heavenly words that shame my earthly song!
+
+The choral host had closed the angel's strain
+Sung to the midnight watch on Bethlehem's plain;
+And now the shepherds, hastening on their way,
+Sought the still hamlet where the Infant lay.
+They passed the fields that gleaning Ruth toiled O'er,
+They saw afar the ruined threshing-floor
+Where Moab's daughter, homeless and forlorn,
+Found Boaz slumbering by his heaps of corn;
+And some remembered how the holy scribe,
+Skilled in the lore of every jealous tribe,
+Traced the warm blood of Jesse's royal son
+To that fair alien, bravely wooed and won.
+So fared they on to seek the promised sign
+That marked the anointed heir of David's line.
+
+At last, by forms of earthly semblance led,
+They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed.
+No pomp was there, no glory shone around
+On the coarse straw that strewed the reeking ground;
+One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed,
+In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid!
+
+The wondering shepherds told their breathless tale
+Of the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale;
+Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed;
+Told how the shining multitude proclaimed
+"Joy, joy to earth!  Behold the hallowed morn!
+In David's city Christ the Lord is born!
+'Glory to God!' let angels shout on high,
+'Good-will to men!' the listening Earth reply!"
+
+They spoke with hurried words and accents wild;
+Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child.
+No trembling word the mother's joy revealed,
+One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed;
+Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart,
+But kept their words to ponder in her heart.
+
+Twelve years had passed; the boy was fair and tall,
+Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all.
+The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fill
+Their balanced urns beside the mountain-rill,
+The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun,
+Spoke in soft words of Joseph's quiet son.
+No voice had reached the Galilean vale
+Of star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds' tale;
+In the meek, studious child they only saw
+The future Rabbi, learned in Israel's law.
+
+So grew the boy; and now the feast was near,
+When at the holy place the tribes appear.
+Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen
+Beyond the hills that girt the village-green,
+Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands,
+Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering bands,
+A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast,
+Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering West.
+
+Then Joseph spake : "Thy boy hath largely grown;
+Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown;
+Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest
+Goes he not with us to the holy feast?"
+
+And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white;
+Till eve she spun; she spun till morning light.
+The thread was twined; its parting meshes through
+>From hand to hand her restless shuttle flew,
+Till the full web was wound upon the beam,
+Love's curious toil,--a vest without a seam!
+
+They reach the holy place, fulfil the days
+To solemn feasting given, and grateful praise.
+At last they turn, and far Moriah's height
+Melts in the southern sky and fades from sight.
+All day the dusky caravan has flowed
+In devious trails along the winding road,
+(For many a step their homeward path attends,
+And all the sons of Abraham are as friends.)
+Evening has come,--the hour of rest and joy;
+Hush! hush!--that whisper,-"Where is Mary's boy?"
+
+O weary hour!  O aching days that passed
+Filled with strange fears, each wilder than the last:
+The soldier's lance,--the fierce centurion's sword,
+The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman lord,
+The midnight crypt that suck's the captive's breath,
+The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death!
+
+Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light,
+Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night,
+Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth,
+Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.
+
+At last, in desperate mood, they sought once more
+The Temple's porches, searched in vain before;
+They found him seated with the ancient men,
+The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen,
+Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near;
+Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear,
+Lost in half-envious wonder and surprise
+That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.
+
+And Mary said,--as one who, tried too long,
+Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong,
+What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast done?
+Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son!
+"Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone,
+Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown;
+Then turned with them and left the holy hill,
+To all their mild commands obedient still.
+
+The tale was told to Nazareth's sober men,
+And Nazareth's matrons told it oft again;
+The maids retold it at the fountain's side;
+The youthful shepherds doubted or denied;
+It passed around among the listening friends,
+With all that fancy adds and fiction fends,
+Till newer marvels dimmed the young renown
+Of Joseph's son, who talked the Rabbis down.
+
+But Mary, faithful to its lightest word,
+Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard,
+Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil,
+And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.
+
+Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall;
+A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back.
+Bloated some, I expect.
+
+This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which
+the Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.
+
+Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part
+to continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and
+particularly unpleasant world.  This is so much a matter of course,
+that I was surprised to see the divinity-student change color.  He
+took a look at a small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting
+forward over the chapped sideboard.  The image it returned to him had
+the color of a very young pea somewhat overboiled.  The scenery of a
+long tragic drama flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-
+train whishes by a station: the gradual dismantling process of
+disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over
+their own stomachs of iron and lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive,
+but calculating their crop, and thinking how soon it will be ripe, so
+that they can go to your neighbor, who is good for a year or so
+longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental shake, as
+they go out of your door, which throws off your particular grief as a
+duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but
+happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks
+for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who puts your name on
+the slab which has been waiting for you ever since the birds or
+beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and
+the dandelions and the buttercups,----Earth saying to the mortal
+body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom, but you
+are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness
+without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an
+upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size,
+so far as it could be said to have any size at all, wandering about
+and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned
+solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist,--in fact, having
+neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the sitting
+posture.
+
+And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen
+images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian
+were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the
+formless and position to the placeless.  Neither did his thoughts
+spread themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them.
+They came confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--
+sometimes a part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes
+connected fragments, and sometimes only single severed stones.
+
+They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance.
+On the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I
+have said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass
+turned him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to
+him as if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut
+not yet half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground
+archives.  He coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the
+direction in which his downward path was tending.  It was an honest
+little cough enough, so far as appearances went.  But coughs are
+ungrateful things.  You find one out in the cold, take it up and
+nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give it all
+sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in your
+bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog.  And by-and-by its little
+bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing! --you find it
+is a wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in the
+breast where he has been nestling so long. --The Poor Relation said
+that somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a
+bad way. --The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by cherry-
+pictorial.
+
+Whiskey's the fellah,--said the young man John. --Make it into punch,
+cold at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time.  I'll come up 'n' show you
+how to mix it.  Have n't any of you seen the wonderful fat man
+exhibitin' down in Hanover Street?
+
+Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy
+exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place
+where the fat man was exhibitin'.  Tried to get in at half-price, but
+the man at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten
+year old.
+
+It is n't two years,--said the young man John, since that fat fellah
+was exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton.  Whiskey--that's what did
+it,--real Burbon's the stuff.  Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little
+shavin' of lemon-skin in it,--skin, mind you, none o' your juice;
+take it off thin,--shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls
+wear on the sides of their foreheads.
+
+But I am a teetotaller,--said the divinity-student in a subdued
+tone;--not noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young
+fellow had just drawn.
+
+He took up his hat and went out.
+
+I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,--I said.
+--I don't believe he will jump off one of the bridges, for he has too
+much principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for
+he looks as if his mind were made up to something.
+
+I followed him at a reasonable distance.  He walked doggedly along,
+looking neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street,
+and made for a well-known Life-Insurance Office.  Luckily, the doctor
+was there and overhauled him on the spot.  There was nothing the
+matter with him, he said, and he could have his life insured as a
+sound one.  He came out in good spirits, and told me this soon after.
+
+This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of
+well-bred and ill-bred people.
+
+I began,--The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not
+like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable.
+Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.  Every look, movement, tone,
+expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is
+habitually excluded from conversational intercourse.  This is the
+reason why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than
+others.
+
+--I thought you were a great champion of equality,--said the discreet
+and severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin
+Tutor's daughter.
+
+I go politically for equality,--I said,--and socially for the
+quality.
+
+Who are the "quality,"--said the Model, etc., in a community like
+ours?
+
+I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,--I said.
+--Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which
+exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define.  The
+great gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters
+and mistresses; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a
+republic; mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex-
+presidents are nothing to them.  How well we know this, and how
+seldom it finds a distinct expression!  Now I tell you truly, I
+believe in man as man, and I disbelieve in all distinctions except
+such as follow the natural lines of cleavage in a society which has
+crystallized according to its own true laws.  But the essence of
+equality is to be able to say the truth; and there is nothing more
+curious than these truths relating to the stratification of society.
+
+Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality,
+there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this
+of social position,--as you see by the circumstances that the core of
+all the great social orders the world has seen has been, and is
+still, for the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies
+arranged in a regular scale of precedence among themselves, but
+superior as a body to all else.
+
+Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting
+farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can prevent
+this subdivision of society into classes from taking place
+everywhere,--in the great centres of our republic as much as in old
+European monarchies.  Only there position is more absolutely
+hereditary,--here it is more completely elective.
+
+--Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and
+who are the electors?--said the Model.
+
+Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken; there never is a formal
+vote.  The women settle it mostly; and they know wonderfully well
+what is presentable, and what can't stand the blaze of the
+chandeliers and the critical eye and ear of people trained to know a
+staring shade in a ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an ill-bred
+tone, an angular movement, everything that betrays a coarse fibre and
+cheap training.  As a general thing, you do not get elegance short of
+two or three removes from the soil, out of which our best blood
+doubtless comes,--quite as good, no doubt, as if it came from those
+old prize-fighters with iron pots on their heads, to whom some great
+people are so fond of tracing their descent through a line of small
+artisans and petty shopkeepers whose veins have held "base" fluid
+enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima!
+
+Does not money go everywhere?--said the Model.
+
+Almost.  And with good reason.  For though there are numerous
+exceptions, rich people are, as I said, commonly altogether the most
+agreeable companions.  The influence of a fine house, graceful
+furniture, good libraries, well-ordered tables, trim servants, and,
+above all, a position so secure that one becomes unconscious of it,
+gives a harmony and refinement to the character and manners which we
+feel, if we cannot explain their charm.  Yet we can get at the reason
+of it by thinking a little.
+
+All these appliances are to shield the sensibility from disagreeable
+contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial
+influences.  In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow
+delicate, just as the hands grow white and soft when saved from toil
+and incased in soft gloves.  The whole nature becomes subdued into
+suavity.  I confess I like the quality ladies better than the common
+kind even of literary ones.  They have n't read the last book,
+perhaps, but they attend better to you when you are talking to them.
+If they are never learned, they make up for it in tact and elegance.
+Besides, I think, on the whole, there is less self-assertion in
+diamonds than in dogmas.  I don't know where you will find a sweeter
+portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor play-girl of King
+Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when she went before
+her lord.  I have no doubt she was a more gracious and agreeable
+person than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story of
+Sisera.  The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something
+that you know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
+
+Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality.  The
+highest fashion is intensely alive,--not alive necessarily to the
+truest and best things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in
+all its extremities and to the farthest point of its surface, so
+that the feather in its bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a
+fighting-cock, and the rosette on its slipper as clean-cut and
+pimpant (pronounce it English fashion,--it is a good word) as a
+dahlia.  As a general rule, that society where flattery is acted is
+much more agreeable than that where it is spoken.  Don't you see
+why?  Attention and deference don't require you to make fine
+speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness (lies) and returning
+all the compliments paid you.  This is one reason.
+
+--A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,--said the
+Model.
+
+[My reflection.  Oh! oh! no wonder you did n't get married.  Served
+you right.]  My remark.  Surely, Madam,--if you mean by flattery
+telling people boldly to their faces that they are this or that,
+which they are not.  But a woman who does not carry about with her
+wherever she goes a halo of good feeling and desire to make
+everybody contented,--an atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of
+at least six feet radius, which wraps every human being upon whom
+she voluntarily bestows her presence, and so flatters him with the
+comfortable thought that she is rather glad he is alive than
+otherwise, isn't worth the trouble of talking to, as a woman; she
+may do well enough to hold discussions with.
+
+--I don't think the Model exactly liked this.  She said,--a little
+spitefully, I thought,--that a sensible man might stand a little
+praise, but would of course soon get sick of it, if he were in the
+habit of getting much.
+
+Oh, yes,--I replied,--just as men get sick of tobacco.  It is
+notorious how apt they are to get tired of that vegetable.
+
+--That 's so!--said the young fellow John,--I've got tired of my
+cigars and burnt 'em all up.
+
+I am heartily glad to hear it,--said the Model,--I wish they were
+all disposed of in the same way.
+
+So do I,--said the young fellow John.
+
+Can't you get your friends to unite with you in committing those
+odious instruments of debauchery to the flames in which you have
+consumed your own?
+
+I wish I could,--said the young fellow John.
+
+It would be a noble sacrifice,--said the Model, and every American
+woman would be grateful to you.  Let us burn them all in a heap out
+in the yard.
+
+That a'n't my way,--said the young fellow John;--I burn 'em one 't'
+time,--little end in my mouth and big end outside.
+
+--I watched for the effect of this sudden change of programme, when
+it should reach the calm stillness of the Model's interior
+apprehension, as a boy watches for the splash of a stone which he
+has dropped into a well.  But before it had fairly reached the
+water, poor Iris, who had followed the conversation with a certain
+interest until it turned this sharp corner, (for she seems rather to
+fancy the young fellow John,) laughed out such a clear, loud laugh,
+that it started us all off, as the locust-cry of some full-throated
+soprano drags a multitudinous chorus after it.  It was plain that
+some dam or other had broken in the soul of this young girl, and she
+was squaring up old scores of laughter, out of which she had been
+cheated, with a grand flood of merriment that swept all before it.
+So we had a great laugh all round, in which the Model--who, if she
+had as many virtues as there are spokes to a wheel, all compacted
+with a personality as round and complete as its tire, yet wanted
+that one little addition of grace, which seems so small, and is as
+important as the linchpin in trundling over the rough ways of life--
+had not the tact to join.  She seemed to be "stuffy" about it, as
+the young fellow John said.  In fact, I was afraid the joke would
+have cost us both our new lady-boarders.  It had no effect, however,
+except, perhaps, to hasten the departure of the elder of the two,
+who could, on the whole, be spared.
+
+--I had meant to make this note of our conversation a text for a few
+axioms on the matter of breeding.  But it so happened, that, exactly
+at this point of my record, a very distinguished philosopher, whom
+several of our boarders and myself go to hear, and whom no doubt
+many of my readers follow habitually, treated this matter of
+manners.  Up to this point, if I have been so fortunate as to
+coincide with him in opinion, and so unfortunate as to try to
+express what he has more felicitously said, nobody is to blame; for
+what has been given thus far was all written before the lecture was
+delivered.  But what shall I do now?  He told us it was childish to
+lay down rules for deportment,--but he could not help laying down a
+few.
+
+Thus,--Nothing so vulgar as to be in a hurry.  True, but hard of
+application.  People with short legs step quickly, because legs are
+pendulums, and swing more times in a minute the shorter they are.
+Generally a natural rhythm runs through the whole organization:
+quick pulse, fast breathing, hasty speech, rapid trains of thought,
+excitable temper.  Stillness of person and steadiness of features
+are signal marks of good-breeding.  Vulgar persons can't sit still,
+or, at least, they must work their limbs or features.
+
+Talking of one's own ails and grievances. --Bad enough, but not so
+bad as insulting the person you talk with by remarking on his ill-
+looks, or appealing to notice any of his personal peculiarities.
+
+Apologizing. --A very desperate habit,--one that is rarely cured.
+Apology is only egotism wrong side out.  Nine times out of ten, the
+first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his
+apology.  It is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your
+small failures of so much consequence that you must make a talk
+about them.
+
+Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait,
+and eyes that do not wander,--shyness of personalities, except in
+certain intimate communions,--to be light in hand in conversation,
+to have ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without
+them,--to belong to the company you are in, and not to yourself,--to
+have nothing in your dress or furniture so fine that you cannot
+afford to spoil it and get another like it, yet to preserve the
+harmonies, throughout your person and--dwelling: I should say that
+this was a fair capital of manners to begin with.
+
+Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an
+overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our
+generic humanity.  It is just here that the very highest society
+asserts its superior breeding.  Among truly elegant people of the
+highest ton, you will find more real equality in social intercourse
+than in a country village.  As nuns drop their birth-names and
+become Sister Margaret and Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop
+their personal distinctions and become brothers and sisters of
+conversational charity.  Nor are fashionable people without their
+heroism.  I believe there are men who have shown as much self-
+devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to the supper-table as
+ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized his name.  There
+are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing can hold
+back from their errands of mercy.  They find out the red-handed,
+gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his
+corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the
+green herb.  They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary
+apparition saddens the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-
+room.  I have known one of these angels ask, of her own accord, that
+a desolate middle-aged man, whom nobody seemed to know, should be
+presented to her by the hostess.  He wore no shirt-collar,--he had
+on black gloves,--and was flourishing a red bandanna handkerchief!
+Match me this, ye proud children of poverty, who boast of your
+paltry sacrifices for each other!  Virtue in humble life!  What is
+that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in pearls and
+diamonds?  As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before the
+social mendicant,--the white billows of her beauty heaving under the
+foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them,--I should have
+wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private
+demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness
+and vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.
+
+I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which
+political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of
+our fellow-citizens.  It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
+knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always
+been what might be called in general terms a gentleman.  But what if
+at some future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on
+whom that lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be
+bestowed?  This may happen,--how soon the future only knows.  Think
+of this miserable man of coming political possibilities,--an
+unpresentable boor sucked into office by one of those eddies in the
+flow of popular sentiment which carry straws and chips into the
+public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of the monarchs of the
+forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf of political
+oblivion!  Think of him, I say, and of the concentrated gaze of good
+society through its thousand eyes, all confluent, as it were, in one
+great burning-glass of ice that shrivels its wretched object in
+fiery torture, itself cold as the glacier of an unsunned cavern!
+No,--there will be angels of good-breeding then as now, to shield
+the victim of free institutions from himself and from his torturers.
+I can fancy a lovely woman playfully withdrawing the knife which he
+would abuse by making it an instrument for the conveyance of food,--
+or, failing in this kind artifice, sacrificing herself by imitating
+his use of that implement; how much harder than to plunge it into
+her bosom, like Lucretia!  I can see her studying in his provincial
+dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western
+or Southern barbarisms.  She has learned that haow means what; that
+think-in' is the same thing as thinking, or she has found out the
+meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no single-tongued
+phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson
+and at its embouchure, and elsewhere,--what they say when they think
+they say first, (fe-eest,--fe as in the French le),--or that cheer
+means chair,--or that urritation means irritation,--and so of other
+enormities.  Nothing surprises her.  The highest breeding, you know,
+comes round to the Indian standard,--to take everything coolly,--nil
+admirari,--if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for
+the same thing.
+
+If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to
+foot to see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not
+grown a little older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice,
+or if your complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then
+convey the fact to you, in the style in which the Poor Relation
+addressed the divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like.
+I hate the sight of the wretches.  Don't for mercy's sake think I
+hate them; the distinction is one my friend or I drew long ago.  No
+matter where you find such people; they are clowns.
+
+The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a
+lady as her Irish servant, whose pretty "saving your presence," when
+she has to say something which offends her natural sense of good
+manners, has a hint in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood
+of old Milesian kings, which very likely runs in her veins,--thinned
+by two hundred years of potato, which, being an underground fruit,
+tends to drag down the generations that are made of it to the earth
+from which it came, and, filling their veins with starch, turn them
+into a kind of human vegetable.
+
+I say, if you like such people, go with them.  But I am going to
+make a practical application of the example at the beginning of this
+particular record, which some young people who are going to choose
+professional advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for.  If
+you are making choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if
+possible, with a cheerful and serene countenance.  A physician is
+not--at least, ought not to be--an executioner; and a sentence of
+death on his face is as bad as a warrant for execution signed by the
+Governor.  As a general rule, no man has a right to tell another by
+word or look that he is going to die.  It may be necessary in some
+extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last extreme of impertinence
+which one human being can offer to another.  "You have killed me,"
+said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told him he was
+incurable.  He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead in
+six' weeks.  If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone,
+persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought
+to know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of
+hope of recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long
+as life is comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of
+heaven, or at least of rest, when life has become a burden which the
+bearer is ready to let fall.
+
+Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death.  The
+chance of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a
+certain time is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse
+people.  As you go down the social scale, you reach a point at
+length where the common talk in sick rooms is of churchyards and
+sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual vivisection is forever carried
+on, upon the person of the miserable sufferer.
+
+And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer
+the one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body.  If you
+can get along with people who carry a certificate in their faces
+that their goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your
+children cannot.  And whatever offends one of these little ones
+cannot be right in the eyes of Him who loved them so well.
+
+After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably
+select gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then
+all will be right.
+
+This repetition of the above words,--gentleman and lady,--which
+could not be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are
+made of them by those who ought to know what they mean.  Thus, at a
+marriage ceremony, once, of two very excellent persons who had been
+at service, instead of, Do you take this man, etc.?  and, Do you
+take this woman?  how do you think the officiating clergyman put the
+questions?  It was, Do you, Miss So and So, take this GENTLEMAN?
+and, Do you, Mr. This or That, take this LADY?!  What would any
+English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England herself, have thought,
+if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her and her bridegroom
+anything but plain woman and man at such a time?
+
+I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she
+happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered
+these monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the
+ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt,
+that seized upon many of the persons who were present,--had guessed
+what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the
+pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain
+social layers,--so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the
+holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,--the
+good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that
+superb and full-blown vulgarism.  Any persons whom it could please
+could have no better notion of what the words referred to signify
+than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.
+
+MAN!  Sir!  WOMAN!  Sir!  Gentility is a fine thing, not to be
+undervalued, as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes
+before that.
+
+         "When Adam delved and Eve span,
+          Who was then the gentleman?"
+
+The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from
+the finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat
+is below a certain level.  Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and
+all the graceful ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the
+surface, the elegances and suavities of life die out one by one as
+we sink through the social scale.  Fortunately, the virtues are more
+tenacious of life, and last pretty well until we get down to the mud
+of absolute pauperism, where they do not flourish greatly.
+
+--I had almost forgotten about our boarders.  As the Model of all
+the Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is
+the reason we are not all very sorry.  Surely we all like good
+persons.  She is a good person.  Therefore we like her. --Only we
+don't.
+
+This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the
+principle which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit
+and embodied in the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably
+immortal, this syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had
+occasion to construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as
+I have done for the Model.  "Pious and painefull."  Why has that
+excellent old phrase gone out of use?  Simply because these good
+painefull or painstaking persons proved to be such nuisances in the
+long run, that the word "painefull" came, before people thought of
+it, to mean pain-giving instead of painstaking.
+
+--So, the old fellah's off to-morrah,--said the young man John.
+
+Old fellow?--said I,--whom do you mean?
+
+Why, the one that came with our little beauty, the old fellah in
+petticoats.
+
+--Now that means something,--said I to myself. --These rough young
+rascals very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with
+their eyes shut.  A real woman does a great many things without
+knowing why she does them; but these pattern machines mix up their
+intellects with everything they do, just like men.  They can't help
+it, no doubt; but we can't help getting sick of them, either.
+Intellect is to a woman's nature what her watch-spring skirt is to
+her dress; it ought to underlie her silks and embroideries, but not
+to show itself too staringly on the outside. ---You don't know,
+perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the
+internal organs, and the heart the reddest.  Whatever comes from the
+brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes
+from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.
+
+The young man John did not hear my soliloquy, of course, but sent up
+one more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a
+statement, that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives
+no visits, as is commonly supposed, from virtuous people.
+
+Why, I ask again, (of my reader,) should a person who never did
+anybody any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and
+intelligent, nay, a particularly enlightened and exemplary member of
+society, fail to inspire interest, love, and devotion?  Because of
+the reversed current in the flow of thought and emotion.  The red
+heart sends all its instincts up to the white brain to be analyzed,
+chilled, blanched, and so become pure reason, which is just exactly
+what we do not want of woman as woman.  The current should run the
+other-way.  The nice, calm, cold thought, which in women shapes
+itself so rapidly that they hardly know it as thought, should always
+travel to the lips via the heart.  It does so in those women whom
+all love and admire.  It travels the wrong way in the Model.  That
+is the reason why the Little Gentleman said "I hate her, I hate
+her."  That is the reason why the young man John called her the "old
+fellah," and banished her to the company of the great Unpresentable.
+That is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her to pieces
+with scalpel and forceps.  That is the reason why the young girl
+whom she has befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and
+respect, rather than with the devotion and passionate fondness which
+lie sleeping beneath the calmness of her amber eyes.  I can see her,
+as she sits between this estimable and most correct of personages
+and the misshapen, crotchety, often violent and explosive little man
+on the other side of her, leaning and swaying towards him as she
+speaks, and looking into his sad eyes as if she found some fountain
+in them at which her soul could quiet its thirst.
+
+Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and
+high culture.  It is not
+
+    "The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
+     Zephyr with Aurora playing,"
+
+when the two meet
+
+    "---on beds of violets blue,
+     And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,"
+
+that claim such women as their offspring.  It is rather the east
+wind, as it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a
+clear-eyed wintry noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England
+ice-quarry. --Don't throw up your cap now, and hurrah as if this
+were giving up everything, and turning against the best growth of
+our latitudes,--the daughters of the soil.  The brain-women never
+interest us like the heart women; white roses please less than red.
+But our Northern seasons have a narrow green streak of spring, as
+well as a broad white zone of winter,--they have a glowing band of
+summer and a golden stripe of autumn in their many-colored wardrobe;
+and women are born to us that wear all these hues of earth and
+heaven in their souls.  Our ice-eyed brain-women are really
+admirable, if we only ask of them just what they can give, and no
+more.  Only compare them, talking or writing, with one of those
+babbling, chattering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know
+enough even to keep out of print, and who are interesting to us only
+as specimens of arrest of development for our psychological
+cabinets.
+
+Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues!  We can spare you now.  A little
+clear perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way.
+Go! be useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable,
+talk pure reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of
+an achromatic understanding.  Goodbye!  Where is my Beranger?  I
+must read a verse or two of "Fretillon."
+
+Fair play for all.  But don't claim incompatible qualities for
+anybody.  Justice is a very rare virtue in our community.
+Everything that public sentiment cares about is put into a Papin's
+digester, and boiled under high pressure till all is turned into one
+homogeneous pulp, and the very bones give up their jelly.  What are
+all the strongest epithets of our dictionary to us now?  The critics
+and politicians, and especially the philanthropists, have chewed
+them, till they are mere wads of syllable-fibre, without a
+suggestion of their old pungency and power.
+
+Justice!  A good man respects the rights even of brute matter and
+arbitrary symbols.  If he writes the same word twice in succession,
+by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not
+the first-comer the prior right?  This act of abstract justice,
+which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed,
+is a curious anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute
+wickedness of human dispositions.  Why doesn't a man always strike
+out the first of the two words, to gratify his diabolical love of
+injustice?
+
+So, I say, we owe a genuine, substantial tribute of respect to these
+filtered intellects which have left their womanhood on the strainer.
+They are so clear that it is a pleasure at times to look at the
+world of thought through them.  But the rose and purple tints of
+richer natures they cannot give us, and it is not just to them to
+ask it.
+
+Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way
+one would hardly at first think of.  It loves vitality above all
+things, sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept
+under by the laws of good-breeding,--but still it loves abundant
+life, opulent and showy organizations,--the spherical rather than
+the plane trigonometry of female architecture,--plenty of red blood,
+flashing eyes, tropical voices, and forms that bear the splendors of
+dress without growing pale beneath their lustre.  Among these you
+will find the most delicious women you will ever meet,--women whom
+dress and flattery and the round of city gayeties cannot spoil,--
+talking with whom, you forget their diamonds and laces,--and around
+whom all the nice details of elegance, which the cold-blooded beauty
+next them is scanning so nicely, blend in one harmonious whole, too
+perfect to be disturbed by the petulant sparkle of a jewel, or the
+yellow glare of a bangle, or the gay toss of a feather.
+
+There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion
+or wealth.  Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and
+loyalty, I think I love ease and independence better than the golden
+slavery of perpetual matinees and soirees, or the pleasures of
+accumulation.
+
+But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the
+frivolous class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff
+about.  Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms
+and social intercourse.  What business has a man who knows nothing
+about the beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to talk
+about fashion to a set of people who, if one of the quality left a
+card at their doors, would contrive to keep it on the very top of
+their heap of the names of their two-story acquaintances, till it
+was as yellow as the Codex Vaticanus?
+
+Wealth, too,--what an endless repetition of the same foolish
+trivialities about it!  Take the single fact of its alleged
+uncertain tenure and transitory character.  In old times, when men
+were all the time fighting and robbing each other,--in those
+tropical countries where the Sabeans and the Chaldeans stole all a
+man's cattle and camels, and there were frightful tornadoes and
+rains of fire from heaven, it was true enough that riches took wings
+to themselves not unfrequently in a very unexpected way.  But, with
+common prudence in investments, it is not so now.  In fact, there is
+nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole, as money.  A man's
+learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of remembrance,
+but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live
+and keep his memory green.
+
+I do not think there is much courage or originality in giving
+utterance to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by
+conventional trumpery.  The only distinction which it is necessary
+to point out to feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the
+breadth and depth of that significance which gives to fashion and
+fortune their tremendous power, we do not indorse the extravagances
+which often disgrace the one, nor the meanness which often degrades
+the other.
+
+A remark which seems to contradict a universally current opinion is
+not generally to be taken "neat," but watered with the ideas of
+common-sense and commonplace people.  So, if any of my young friends
+should be tempted to waste their substance on white kids and "all-
+rounds," or to insist on becoming millionaires at once, by anything
+I have said, I will give them references to some of the class
+referred to, well known to the public as providers of literary
+diluents, who will weaken any truth so that there is not an old
+woman in the land who cannot take it with perfect impunity.
+
+I am afraid some of the blessed saints in diamonds will think I mean
+to flatter them.  I hope not;--if I do, set it down as a weakness.
+But there is so much foolish talk about wealth and fashion, (which,
+of course, draw a good many heartless and essentially vulgar people
+into the glare of their candelabra, but which have a real
+respectability and meaning, if we will only look at them
+stereoscopically, with both eyes instead of one,) that I thought it
+a duty to speak a few words for them.  Why can't somebody give us a
+list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another
+list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?
+
+Lest my parish should suppose we have forgotten graver matters in
+these lesser topics, I beg them to drop these trifles and read the
+following lesson for the day.
+
+     THE TWO STREAMS.
+
+Behold the rocky wall
+That down its sloping sides
+Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
+In rushing river-tides!
+
+Yon stream, whose sources run
+Turned by a pebble's edge,
+Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
+Through the cleft mountain-ledge.
+
+The slender rill had strayed,
+But for the slanting stone,
+To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
+Of foam-flecked Oregon.
+
+So from the heights of Will
+Life's parting stream descends,
+And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
+Each widening torrent bends,
+
+>From the same cradle's side,
+>From the same mother's knee,--
+One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
+One to the Peaceful Sea!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Our landlady's daughter is a young lady of some pretensions to
+gentility.  She wears her bonnet well back on her head, which is
+known by all to be a mark of high breeding.  She wears her trains
+very long, as the great ladies do in Europe.  To be sure, their
+dresses are so made only to sweep the tapestried floors of chateaux
+and palaces; as those odious aristocrats of the other side do not go
+draggling through the mud in silks and satins, but, forsooth, must
+ride in coaches when they are in full dress.  It is true, that,
+considering various habits of the American people, also the little
+accidents which the best-kept sidewalks are liable to, a lady who
+has swept a mile of them is not exactly in such a condition that one
+would care to be her neighbor.  But then there is no need of being
+so hard on these slight weaknesses of the poor, dear women as our
+little deformed gentleman was the other day.
+
+--There are no such women as the Boston women, Sir,--he said.
+Forty-two degrees, north latitude, Rome, Sir, Boston, Sir!  They had
+grand women in old Rome, Sir,--and the women bore such men--children
+as never the world saw before.  And so it was here, Sir.  I tell
+you, the revolution the Boston boys started had to run in woman's
+milk before it ran in man's blood, Sir!
+
+But confound the make-believe women we have turned loose in our
+streets! --where do they come from?  Not out of Boston parlors, I
+trust.  Why, there is n't a beast or a bird that would drag its tail
+through the dirt in the way these creatures do their dresses.
+Because a queen or a duchess wears long robes on great occasions, a
+maid-of-all-work or a factory-girl thinks she must make herself a
+nuisance by trailing through the street, picking up and carrying
+about with her pah! --that's what I call getting vulgarity into your
+bones and marrow.  Making believe be what you are not is the essence
+of vulgarity.  Show over dirt is the one attribute of vulgar people.
+If any man can walk behind one of these women and see what she rakes
+up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he has got a tough stomach.
+I wouldn't let one of 'em into my room without serving 'em as David
+served Saul at the cave in the wilderness,--cut off his skirts, Sir!
+cut off his skirts!
+
+I suggested, that I had seen some pretty stylish ladies who offended
+in the way he condemned.
+
+Stylish women, I don't doubt,--said the Little Gentleman. --Don't
+tell me that a true lady ever sacrifices the duty of keeping all
+about her sweet and clean to the wish of making a vulgar show.  I
+won't believe it of a lady.  There are some things that no fashion
+has any right to touch, and cleanliness is one of those things.  If
+a woman wishes to show that her husband or her father has got money,
+which she wants and means to spend, but doesn't know how, let her
+buy a yard or two of silk and pin it to her dress when she goes out
+to walk, but let her unpin it before she goes into the house;--there
+may be poor women that will think it worth disinfecting.  It is an
+insult to a respectable laundress to carry such things into a house
+for her to deal with.  I don't like the Bloomers any too well,--in
+fact, I never saw but one, and she--or he, or it--had a mob of boys
+after her, or whatever you call the creature, as if she had been
+a-----
+
+The Little Gentleman stopped short,--flushed somewhat, and looked
+round with that involuntary, suspicious glance which the subjects of
+any bodily misfortune are very apt to cast round them.  His eye
+wandered over the company, none of whom, excepting myself and one
+other, had, probably, noticed the movement.  They fell at last on
+Iris,--his next neighbor, you remember.
+
+--We know in a moment, on looking suddenly at a person, if that
+person's eyes have been fixed on us.
+
+Sometimes we are conscious of it before we turn so as to see the
+person.  Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice,
+of love, leak out in this way.  There is no need of Mrs. Felix
+Lorraine's reflection in the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting
+evil for us behind our backs.  We know it, as we know by the ominous
+stillness of a child that some mischief or other is going-on.  A
+young girl betrays, in a moment, that her eyes have been feeding on.
+the face where you find them fixed, and not merely brushing over it
+with their pencils of blue or brown light.
+
+A certain involuntary adjustment assimilates us, you may also
+observe, to that upon which we look.  Roses redden the cheeks of her
+who stoops to gather them, and buttercups turn little people's chins
+yellow.  When we look at a vast landscape, our chests expand as if
+we would enlarge to fill it.  When we examine a minute object, we
+naturally contract, not only our foreheads, but all our dimensions.
+If I see two men wrestling, I wrestle too, with my limbs and
+features.  When a country-fellow comes upon the stage, you will see
+twenty faces in the boxes putting on the bumpkin expression.  There
+is no need of multiplying instances to reach this generalization;
+every person and thing we look upon puts its special mark upon us.
+If this is repeated often enough, we get a permanent resemblance to
+it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it.  Husband and
+wife come to look alike at last, as has often been noticed.  It is a
+common saying of a jockey, that he is "all horse"; and I have often
+fancied that milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an angular
+movement of the arm, that remind one of a pump and the working of
+its handle.
+
+All this came in by accident, just because I happened to mention
+that the Little Gentleman found that Iris had been looking at him
+with her soul in her eyes, when his glance rested on her after
+wandering round the company.  What he thought, it is hard to say;
+but the shadow of suspicion faded off from his face, and he looked
+calmly into the amber eyes, resting his cheek upon the hand that
+wore the red jewel.
+
+--If it were a possible thing,--women are such strange creatures!
+Is there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them?
+Just see how they marry!  A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood
+is like one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd,
+fantastic root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above
+and bifurcated below, will always contrive to make a man--such as he
+is--out of it.  I should like to see any kind of a man,
+distinguishable from a Gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman
+could not shape a husband out of.
+
+--A child,--yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child!  Do
+you know how Art brings all ages together?  There is no age to the
+angels and ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he
+shares their youth until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim.
+The youthful painter talks of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a
+brother, and the veteran forgets that Raphael died at an age to
+which his own is of patriarchal antiquity.
+
+But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom
+Nature has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain.  Pity, I
+suppose.  They say that leads to love.
+
+--I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and
+determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was
+going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were
+drifting.  I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I
+can look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent
+feebleness of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very
+hard to cheat, is only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine,
+knowing that all is in readiness and the slow-match burning quietly
+down to the powder.  He will leave it by-and-by, and then it will
+take care of itself.
+
+One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a
+house and the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the
+building is on fire.  Hark!  There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive,
+crisp, not loud, but very knowing little creeping crackle that is
+tolerably intelligible.  There is a whiff of something floating
+about, suggestive of toasting shingles.  Also a sharp pyroligneous-
+acid pungency in the air that stings one's eyes.  Let us get up and
+see what is going on. --Oh,--oh,--oh! do you know what has got hold
+of you?  It is the great red dragon that is born of the little red
+eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red manes, and his
+thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red eyes glaring
+at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues lapping
+the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath
+warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber
+sweat that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap.  Run for your
+life! leap! or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing
+but a coroner would take for the wreck of a human being!
+
+If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away
+comparison, I shall be much obliged to him.  All I intended to say
+was, that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know
+that they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among
+them.  I don't pretend to say or know what it is that brings these
+two persons together;--and when I say together, I only mean that
+there is an evident affinity of some kind or other which makes their
+commonest intercourse strangely significant, as that each seems to
+understand a look or a word of the other.  When the young girl laid
+her hand on the Little Gentleman's arm,--which so greatly shocked
+the Model, you may remember,--I saw that she had learned the lion-
+tamer's secret.  She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind
+of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster
+that he makes a baby of.
+
+One of two things must happen.  The first is love, downright love,
+on the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man.
+You may laugh, if you like.  But women are apt to love the men who
+they think have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love
+like one that has thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth
+and beauty, and seen it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the
+parched lips of him whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of
+human longing and disappointment?  What would become of him, if this
+fresh soul should stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the
+flamingo drops out of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in
+the marshes of Cagliari, with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a
+kindling of strange fires in the shadowy waters that hold her
+burning image?
+
+--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not of course.  I should think the
+chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her
+than she to marry him.
+
+There is one other thing that might happen.  If the interest he
+awakes in her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in
+it, she will glance off from him into some great passion or other.
+All excitements run to love in women of a certain--let us not say
+age, but youth.  An electrical current passing through a coil of
+wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not
+touching it.  So a woman is turned into a love-magnet by a tingling
+current of life running round her.  I should like to see one of them
+balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn
+so as to point north and south,--as she would, if the love-currents
+are like those of the earth our mother.
+
+Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's "Boy of Windermere"?
+This boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud,
+mimicking the hooting of the owls, who would answer him
+
+               "with quivering peals,
+     And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
+     Redoubled and redoubled."
+
+When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for
+their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far
+distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint
+itself with new force upon his perceptions. --Read the sonnet, if
+you please;--it is Wordsworth all over,--trivial in subject, solemn
+in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true meta-
+physically, but immensely suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild
+term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster.
+All I want of it is to enforce the principle, that, when the door of
+the soul is once opened to a guest, there is no knowing who will
+come in next.
+
+--Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and
+characters.  Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in
+the drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but
+there is a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin
+of her drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run
+riot in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to
+read her thoughts.  This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at
+it honorably.
+
+I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman's
+chamber.  How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only
+guess.  His hours are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in
+the night, I see the light through cracks in his window-shutters on
+the wall of the house opposite.  If the times of witchcraft were not
+over, I should be afraid to be so close a neighbor to a place from
+which there come such strange noises.  Sometimes it is the dragging
+of something heavy over the floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,-
+-it sounds so like what people that kill other people have to do now
+and then.  Occasionally I hear very sweet strains of music,--whether
+of a wind or stringed instrument, or a human voice, strange as it
+may seem, I have often tried to find out, but through the partition
+I could not be quite sure.  If I have not heard a woman cry and
+moan, and then again laugh as though she would die laughing, I have
+heard sounds so like them that--I am a fool to confess it--I have
+covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in my
+dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that so-
+called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,--a
+sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,--a young woman
+in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,--not a
+neck-lace, but a dull-stain.
+
+Of course you don't suppose that I have any foolish superstitions
+about the matter,--I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take
+all that nonsense out of any man's head!  It is not our beliefs that
+frighten us half so much as our fancies.  A man not only believes,
+but knows he runs a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but
+it does n't worry him much.  On the other hand, carry that man
+across a pasture a little way from some dreary country-village, and
+show him an old house where there were strange deaths a good many
+years ago, and there are rumors of ugly spots on the walls,--the old
+man hung himself in the garret, that is certain, and ever since the
+country-people have called it "the haunted house,"--the owners
+have n't been able to let it since the last tenants left on account
+of the noises,--so it has fallen into sad decay, and the moss grows
+on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have turned
+black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear, and
+the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking,--
+take the man who did n't mind the real risk of the cars to that old
+house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there
+alone,--how do you think he will like it?  He doesn't believe one
+word of ghosts,--but then he knows, that, whether waking or
+sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with
+ghostly images.  It is not what we believe, as I said before, that
+frightens us commonly, but what we conceive.  A principle that
+reaches a good way if I am not mistaken.  I say, then, that, if
+these odd sounds coming from the Little Gentleman's chamber
+sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get to sleep, it is not
+because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or mysterious way.
+The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head was one that
+was founded on the landlady's story of his having a pile of gold; it
+was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of sweating
+gold was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews odious
+and afford a pretext for plundering them.  As for the sound like a
+woman laughing and crying, I never said it was a woman's voice; for,
+in the first place, I could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly,
+he may have an organ, or some queer instrument or other, with what
+they call the vox humana stop.  If he moves his bed round to get
+away from the window, or for any such reason, there is nothing very
+frightful in that simple operation.  Most of our foolish conceits
+explain themselves in some such simple way.  And, yet, for all that,
+I confess, that, when I woke up the other evening, and heard, first
+a sweet complaining cry, and then footsteps, and then the dragging
+sound,--nothing but his bed, I am quite sure,--I felt a stirring in
+the roots of my hair as the feasters did in Keats's terrible poem of
+"Lamia."
+
+There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie
+awake and get listening for sounds.  Just keep your ears open any
+time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a
+dark night.  What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises
+you will hear!  The stillness of night is a vulgar error.  All the
+dead things seem to be alive.  Crack!  That is the old chest of
+drawers; you never hear it crack in the daytime.  Creak!  There's a
+door ajar; you know you shut them all.
+
+Where can that latch be that rattles so?  Is anybody trying it
+softly?  or, worse than any body, is----?  (Cold shiver.) Then a
+sudden gust that jars all the windows;--very strange!--there does
+not seem to be any wind about that it belongs to.  When it stops,
+you hear the worms boring in the powdery beams overhead.  Then steps
+outside,--a stray animal, no doubt.  All right,--but a gentle
+moisture breaks out all over you; and then something like a whistle
+or a cry,--another gust of wind, perhaps; that accounts for the
+rustling that just made your heart roll over and tumble about, so
+that it felt more like a live rat under your ribs than a part of
+your own body; then a crash of something that has fallen,--blown
+over, very likely---- Pater noster, qui es in coelis! for you are
+damp and cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed trembling so
+that the death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!
+
+No,--night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings.
+Who ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it,
+of that Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,--foxes, and
+owls, and crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on
+moonshiny nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the
+eyes of dead fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach?  Our
+old mother Nature has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when
+she comes in her dress of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops;
+but when she follows us up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black
+velvet and diamonds, every creak of her sandals and every whisper of
+her lips is full of mystery and fear.
+
+You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not believe there is
+anything about this singular little neighbor of mine which is as it
+should not be.  Probably a visit to his room would clear up all that
+has puzzled me, and make me laugh at the notions which began, I
+suppose, in nightmares, and ended by keeping my imagination at work
+so as almost to make me uncomfortable at times.  But it is not so
+easy to visit him as some of our other boarders, for various reasons
+which I will not stop to mention.  I think some of them are rather
+pleased to get "the Professor" under their ceilings.
+
+The young man John, for instance, asked me to come up one day and
+try some "old Burbon," which he said was A 1.  On asking him what
+was the number of his room, he answered, that it was forty-'leven,
+sky-parlor floor, but that I shouldn't find it, if he did n't go
+ahead to show me the way.  I followed him to his habitat, being very
+willing to see in what kind of warren he burrowed, and thinking I
+might pick up something about the boarders who had excited my
+curiosity.
+
+Mighty close quarters they were where the young man John bestowed
+himself and his furniture; this last consisting of a bed, a chair, a
+bureau, a trunk, and numerous pegs with coats and "pants" and
+"vests,"--as he was in the habit of calling waist-coats and
+pantaloons or trousers,--hanging up as if the owner had melted out
+of them.  Several prints were pinned up unframed,--among them that
+grand national portrait-piece, "Barnum presenting Ossian E. Dodge to
+Jenny Lind," and a picture of a famous trot, in which I admired anew
+the cabalistic air of that imposing array of expressions, and
+especially the Italicized word, "Dan Mace names b. h. Major Slocum,"
+and "Hiram Woodruff names g. m. Lady Smith."  "Best three in five.
+Time: 2.40, 2.46, 2.50."
+
+That set me thinking how very odd this matter of trotting horses is,
+as an index of the mathematical exactness of the laws of living
+mechanism.  I saw Lady Suffolk trot a mile in 2.26.  Flora Temple
+has trotted close down to 2.20; and Ethan Allen in 2.25, or less.
+Many horses have trotted their mile under 2.30; none that I remember
+in public as low down as 2.20.  From five to ten seconds, then, in
+about a hundred and sixty is the whole range of the maxima of the
+present race of trotting horses.  The same thing is seen in the
+running of men.  Many can run a mile in five minutes; but when one
+comes to the fractions below, they taper down until somewhere about
+4.30 the maximum is reached.  Averages of masses have been studied
+more than averages of maxima and minima.  We know from the
+Registrar-General's Reports, that a certain number of children--say
+from one to two dozen--die every year in England from drinking hot
+water out of spouts of teakettles.  We know, that, among suicides,
+women and men past a certain age almost never use fire-arms.  A
+woman who has made up her mind to die is still afraid of a pistol or
+a gun.  Or is it that the explosion would derange her costume?
+
+I say, averages of masses we have, but our tables of maxima we owe
+to the sporting men more than to the philosophers.  The lesson their
+experience teaches is, that Nature makes no leaps,--does nothing per
+saltum.  The greatest brain that ever lived, no doubt, was only a
+small fraction of an idea ahead of the second best.  Just look at
+the chess-players.  Leaving out the phenomenal exceptions, the nice
+shades that separate the skilful ones show how closely their brains
+approximate,--almost as closely as chronometers.  Such a person is a
+"knight-player,"--he must have that piece given him.  Another must
+have two pawns.  Another, "pawn and two," or one pawn and two moves.
+Then we find one who claims "pawn and move," holding himself, with
+this fractional advantage, a match for one who would be pretty sure
+to beat him playing even. --So much are minds alike; and you and I
+think we are "peculiar,"--that Nature broke her jelly-mould after
+shaping our cerebral convolutions.  So I reflected, standing and
+looking at the picture.
+
+--I say, Governor,--broke in the young man John,--them bosses '11
+stay jest as well, if you'll only set down.  I've had 'em this year,
+and they haven't stirred. --He spoke, and handed the chair towards
+me,--seating himself, at the same time, on the end of the bed.
+
+You have lived in this house some time?--I said,--with a note of
+interrogation at the end of the statement.
+
+Do I look as if I'd lost much flesh--said he, answering my question
+by another.
+
+No,--said I;--for that matter, I think you do credit to "the
+bountifully furnished table of the excellent lady who provides so
+liberally for the company that meets around her hospitable board."
+
+[The sentence in quotation-marks was from one of those disinterested
+editorials in small type, which I suspect to have been furnished by
+a friend of the landlady's, and paid for as an advertisement.  This
+impartial testimony to the superior qualities of the establishment
+and its head attracted a number of applicants for admission, and a
+couple of new boarders made a brief appearance at the table.  One of
+them was of the class of people who grumble if they don't get
+canvas-backs and woodcocks every day, for three-fifty per week.  The
+other was subject to somnambulism, or walking in the night, when he
+ought to have been asleep in his bed.  In this state he walked into
+several of the boarders' chambers, his eyes wide open, as is usual
+with somnambulists, and, from some odd instinct or other, wishing to
+know what the hour was, got together a number of their watches, for
+the purpose of comparing them, as it would seem.  Among them was a
+repeater, belonging to our young Marylander.  He happened to wake up
+while the somnambulist was in his chamber, and, not knowing his
+infirmity, caught hold of him and gave him a dreadful shaking, after
+which he tied his hands and feet, and so left him till morning, when
+he introduced him to a gentleman used to taking care of such cases
+of somnambulism.]
+
+If you, my reader, will please to skip backward, over this
+parenthesis, you will come to our conversation, which it has
+interrupted.
+
+It a'n't the feed,--said the young man John,--it's the old woman's
+looks when a fellah lays it in too strong.  The feed's well enough.
+After geese have got tough, 'n' turkeys have got strong, 'n' lamb's
+got old, 'n' veal's pretty nigh beef, 'n' sparragrass 's growin'
+tall 'n' slim 'n' scattery about the head, 'n' green peas are
+gettin' so big 'n' hard they'd be dangerous if you fired 'em out of
+a revolver, we get hold of all them delicacies of the season.  But
+it's too much like feedin' on live folks and devourin' widdah's
+substance, to lay yourself out in the eatin' way, when a fellah 's
+as hungry as the chap that said a turkey was too much for one 'n'
+not enough for two.  I can't help lookin' at the old woman.  Corned-
+beef-days she's tolerable calm.  Roastin'-days she worries some, 'n'
+keeps a sharp eye on the chap that carves.  But when there's
+anything in the poultry line, it seems to hurt her feelin's so to
+see the knife goin' into the breast and joints comin' to pieces,
+that there's no comfort in eatin'.  When I cut up an old fowl and
+help the boarders, I always feel as if I ought to say, Won't you
+have a slice of widdah?--instead of chicken.
+
+The young man John fell into a train of reflections which ended in
+his producing a Bologna sausage, a plate of "crackers," as we Boston
+folks call certain biscuits, and the bottle of whiskey described as
+being A 1.
+
+Under the influence of the crackers and sausage, he grew cordial and
+communicative.
+
+It was time, I thought, to sound him as to those of our boarders who
+had excited my curiosity.
+
+What do you think of our young Iris?--I began.
+
+Fust-rate little filly;-he said. --Pootiest and nicest little chap
+I've seen since the schoolma'am left.  Schoolma'am was a brown-
+haired one,--eyes coffee-color.  This one has got wine-colored
+eyes,--'n' that 's the reason they turn a fellah's head, I suppose.
+
+This is a splendid blonde,--I said,--the other was a brunette.
+Which style do you like best?
+
+Which do I like best, boiled mutton or roast mutton?--said the young
+man John.  Like 'em both,--it a'n't the color of 'em makes the
+goodness.  I 've been kind of lonely since schoolma'am went away.
+Used to like to look at her.  I never said anything particular to
+her, that I remember, but---
+
+I don't know whether it was the cracker and sausage, or that the
+young fellow's feet were treading on the hot ashes of some longing
+that had not had time to cool, but his eye glistened as he stopped.
+
+I suppose she wouldn't have looked at a fellah like me,--he said,--
+but I come pretty near tryin'.  If she had said, Yes, though, I
+shouldn't have known what to have done with her.  Can't marry a
+woman now-a-days till you're so deaf you have to cock your head like
+a parrot to hear what she says, and so longsighted you can't see
+what she looks like nearer than arm's-length.
+
+Here is another chance for you,--I said. --What do you want nicer
+than such a young lady as Iris?
+
+It's no use,--he answered. --I look at them girls and feel as the
+fellah did when he missed catchin' the trout. --'To'od 'a' cost more
+butter to cook him 'n' he's worth,--says the fellah. --Takes a whole
+piece o' goods to cover a girl up now-a-days.  I'd as lief undertake
+to keep a span of elephants,--and take an ostrich to board, too,--as
+to marry one of 'em.  What's the use?  Clerks and counter-jumpers
+ain't anything.  Sparragrass and green peas a'n't for them,--not
+while they're young and tender.  Hossback-ridin' a'n't for them,--
+except once a year, on Fast-day.  And marryin' a'n't for them.
+Sometimes a fellah feels lonely, and would like to have a nice young
+woman, to tell her how lonely he feels.  And sometimes a fellah,--
+here the young man John looked very confidential, and, perhaps, as
+if a little ashamed of his weakness,--sometimes a fellah would like
+to have one o' them small young ones to trot on his knee and push
+about in a little wagon,--a kind of a little Johnny, you know;--it's
+odd enough, but, it seems to me, nobody can afford them little
+articles, except the folks that are so rich they can buy everything,
+and the folks that are so poor they don't want anything.  It makes
+nice boys of us young fellahs, no doubt!  And it's pleasant to see
+fine young girls sittin', like shopkeepers behind their goods,
+waitin', and waitin', and waitin', 'n' no customers,--and the men
+lingerin' round and lookin' at the goods, like folks that want to be
+customers, but have n't the money!
+
+Do you think the deformed gentleman means to make love to Iris?--I
+said.
+
+What!  Little Boston ask that girl to marry him!  Well, now, that's
+cumin' of it a little too strong.  Yes, I guess she will marry him
+and carry him round in a basket, like a lame bantam: Look here!--he
+said, mysteriously;--one of the boarders swears there's a woman
+comes to see him, and that he has heard her singin' and screechin'.
+I should like to know what he's about in that den of his.  He lays
+low 'n' keeps dark,--and, I tell you, there's a good many of the
+boarders would like to get into his chamber, but he don't seem to
+want 'em.  Biddy could tell somethin' about what she's seen when she
+'s been to put his room to rights.  She's a Paddy 'n' a fool, but
+she knows enough to keep her tongue still.  All I know is, I saw her
+crossin' herself one day when she came out of that room.  She looked
+pale enough, 'n' I heard her mutterin' somethin' or other about the
+Blessed Virgin.  If it had n't been for the double doors to that
+chamber of his, I'd have had a squint inside before this; but,
+somehow or other, it never seems to happen that they're both open at
+once.
+
+What do you think he employs himself about?  said I.
+
+The young man John winked.
+
+I waited patiently for the thought, of which this wink was the
+blossom, to come to fruit in words.
+
+I don't believe in witches,--said the young man John.
+
+Nor I.
+
+We were both silent for a few minutes.
+
+
+--Did you ever see the young girl's drawing-books,--I said,
+presently.
+
+All but one,--he answered;--she keeps a lock on that, and won't show
+it.  Ma'am Allen, (the young rogue sticks to that name, in speaking
+of the gentleman with the diamond,) Ma'am Allen tried to peek into
+it one day when she left it on the sideboard.  "If you please," says
+she,--'n' took it from him, 'n' gave him a look that made him curl
+up like a caterpillar on a hot shovel.  I only wished he had n't,
+and had jest given her a little sass, for I've been takin' boxin'-
+lessons, 'n' I 've got a new way of counterin' I want to try on to
+somebody.
+
+--The end of all this was, that I came away from the young fellow's
+room, feeling that there were two principal things that I had to
+live for, for the next six weeks or six months, if it should take so
+long.  These were, to get a sight of the young girl's drawing.
+book, which I suspected had her heart shut up in it, and to get a
+look into the Little Gentleman's room.
+
+I don't doubt you think it rather absurd that I should trouble
+myself about these matters.  You tell me, with some show of reason,
+that all I shall find in the young girl's--book will be some
+outlines of angels with immense eyes, traceries of flowers, rural
+sketches, and caricatures, among which I shall probably have the
+pleasure of seeing my own features figuring.  Very likely.  But I'll
+tell you what I think I shall find.  If this child has idealized the
+strange little bit of humanity over which she seems to have spread
+her wings like a brooding dove,--if, in one of those wild vagaries
+that passionate natures are so liable to, she has fairly sprung upon
+him with her clasping nature, as the sea-flowers fold about the
+first stray shell-fish that brushes their outspread tentacles,
+depend upon it, I shall find the marks of it in this drawing-book of
+hers,--if I can ever get a look at it,--fairly, of course, for I
+would not play tricks to satisfy my curiosity.
+
+Then, if I can get into this Little Gentleman's room under any fair
+pretext, I shall, no doubt, satisfy myself in five minutes that he
+is just like other people, and that there is no particular mystery
+about him.
+
+The night after my visit to the young man John, I made all these and
+many more reflections.  It was about two o'clock in the morning,--
+bright starlight,--so light that I could make out the time on my
+alarm-clock,--when I woke up trembling and very moist.  It was the
+heavy dragging sound, as I had often heard it before that waked me.
+Presently a window was softly closed.  I had just begun to get over
+the agitation with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when
+I heard the sound which seemed to me as of a woman's voice,--the
+clearest, purest soprano which one could well conceive of.  It was
+not loud, and I could not distinguish a word, if it was a woman's
+voice; but there were recurring phrases of sound and snatches of
+rhythm that reached me, which suggested the idea of complaint, and
+sometimes, I thought, of passionate grief and despair.  It died away
+at last,--and then I heard the opening of a door, followed by a low,
+monotonous sound, as of one talking,--and then the closing of a
+door,--and presently the light on the opposite wall disappeared and
+all was still for the night.
+
+By George!  this gets interesting,--I said, as I got out of bed for
+a change of night-clothes.
+
+I had this in my pocket the other day, but thought I would n't read
+it at our celebration.  So I read it to the boarders instead, and
+print it to finish off this record with.
+
+
+          ROBINSON OF LEYDEN.
+
+He sleeps not here; in hope and prayer
+His wandering flock had gone before,
+But he, the shepherd, might not share
+Their sorrows on the wintry shore.
+
+Before the Speedwell's anchor swung,
+Ere yet the Mayflower's sail was spread,
+While round his feet the Pilgrims clung,
+The pastor spake, and thus he said:--
+
+"Men, brethren, sisters, children dear!
+God calls you hence from over sea;
+Ye may not build by Haerlem Meer,
+Nor yet along the Zuyder-Zee.
+
+"Ye go to bear the saving word
+To tribes unnamed and shores untrod:
+Heed well the lessons ye have heard
+>From those old teachers taught of God.
+
+"Yet think not unto them was lent
+All light for all the coming days,
+And Heaven's eternal wisdom spent
+In making straight the ancient ways.
+
+"The living fountain overflows
+For every flock, for every lamb,
+Nor heeds, though angry creeds oppose
+With Luther's dike or Calvin's dam."
+
+He spake; with lingering, long embrace,
+With tears of love and partings fond,
+They floated down the creeping Maas,
+Along the isle of Ysselmond.
+
+They passed the frowning towers of Briel,
+The "Hook of Holland's" shelf of sand,
+And grated soon with lifting keel
+The sullen shores of Fatherland.
+
+No home for these! --too well they knew
+The mitred king behind the throne;
+The sails were set, the pennons flew,
+And westward ho!  for worlds unknown.
+
+--And these were they who gave us birth,
+The Pilgrims of the sunset wave,
+Who won for us this virgin earth,
+And freedom with the soil they gave.
+
+The pastor slumbers by the Rhine,--
+In alien earth the exiles lie,--
+Their nameless graves our holiest shrine,
+His words our noblest battle-cry!
+
+Still cry them, and the world shall hear,
+Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea!
+Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer,
+Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee!
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our
+boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were
+going on.  There is no particular change that I can think of in the
+aspect of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were
+quietly playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this
+smooth surface of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show
+themselves some fine morning or other in events, if not in
+catastrophes.  I have been watchful, as I said I should be, but have
+little to tell as yet.  You may laugh at me, and very likely think
+me foolishly fanciful to trouble myself about what is going on in a
+middling-class household like ours.  Do as you like.  But here is
+that terrible fact to begin with,--a beautiful young girl, with the
+blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to Nature's women, turned
+loose among live men.
+
+-Terrible fact?
+
+Very terrible.  Nothing more so.  Do you forget the angels who lost
+heaven for the daughters of men?  Do you forget Helen, and the fair
+women who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was
+born?  If jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if
+pangs that waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness
+or moping melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful
+possibilities, then there is always something frightful about a
+lovely young woman. --I love to look at this "Rainbow," as her
+father used sometimes to call her, of ours.  Handsome creature that
+she is in forms and colors,--the very picture, as it seems to me, of
+that "golden blonde" my friend whose book you read last year fell in
+love with when he was a boy, (as you remember, no doubt,)--handsome
+as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her beauty alone
+that holds my eyes upon her.  Let me tell you one of my fancies, and
+then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for
+me.
+
+It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that
+there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they
+get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later
+years.  These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden
+startling flashes,--second wakings, as it were,--a waking out of the
+waking state, which last is very apt to be a half-sleep.  I have
+many times stopped short and held my breath, and felt the blood
+leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden clairvoyant flashes.  Of
+course I cannot tell what kind of a secret this is, but I think of
+it as a disclosure of certain relations of our personal being to
+time and space, to other intelligences, to the procession of events,
+and to their First Great Cause.  This secret seems to be broken up,
+as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word and there a
+syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is
+written out for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life.  I
+do not think it could be; for I am disposed to consider our beliefs
+about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind of premonition of
+an enlargement of our faculties in some future state than as an
+expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life.  Persons,
+however, have fallen into trances,--as did the Reverend William
+Tennent, among many others,--and learned some things which they
+could not tell in our human words.
+
+Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this
+infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women
+are those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great
+mystery.  There are women's faces, some real, some ideal, which
+contain something in them that becomes a positive element in our
+creed, so direct and palpable a revelation is it of the infinite
+purity and love.  I remember two faces of women with wings, such as
+they call angels, of Fra Angelico,--and I just now came across a
+print of Raphael's Santa Apollina, with something of the same
+quality,--which I was sure had their prototypes in the world above
+ours.  No wonder the Catholics pay their vows to the Queen of
+Heaven!  The unpoetical side of Protestantism is, that it has no
+women to be worshipped.
+
+But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great
+Secret to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces
+of it.  Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty
+of a plain countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the
+lips of a woman, not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a
+message for us, and wait almost with awe to hear their accents.  But
+this young girl has at once the beauty of feature and the unspoken
+mystery of expression.  Can she tell me anything?
+
+Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it
+which I have been groping after through so many friendships that I
+have tired of, and through--Hush!  Is the door fast?  Talking loud
+is a bad trick in these curious boarding-houses.
+
+You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind
+you of and to use for a special illustration.  Riding along over a
+rocky road, suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing
+gravel changes to a deep heavy rumble.  There is a great hollow
+under your feet,--a huge unsunned cavern.  Deep, deep beneath you in
+the core of the living rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away
+it stretches its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into
+streams where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the dark
+until their scales are white as milk and their eyes have withered
+out, obsolete and useless.
+
+So it is in life.  We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces,
+grinding over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--
+now and then jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must
+ride over or round as we best may, sometimes bringing short up
+against a disappointment, but still working along with the creaking
+and rattling and grating and jerking that belong to the journey of
+life, even in the smoothest-rolling vehicle.  Suddenly we hear the
+deep underground reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of
+some abyss of thought or passion beneath us.
+
+I wish the girl would go.  I don't like to look at her so much, and
+yet I cannot help it.  Always that same expression of something that
+I ought to know,--something that she was made to tell and I to
+hear,--lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap
+out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or
+perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet
+whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out
+thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an hour of passion.
+
+It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track.
+The Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three
+Words.  Set your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could
+give you which settle all that matter.  I don't wonder, however,
+that you confounded the Great Secret with the Three Words.
+
+I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to
+tell.  When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the
+morning of the fifth of July.  And just as that little patriotic
+implement is made with a slender train which leads to the magazine
+in its interior, so a sharp eye can almost always see the train
+leading from a young girl's eye or lip to the "I love you" in her
+heart.  But the Three Words are not the Great Secret I mean.  No,
+women's faces are only one of the tablets on which that is written
+in its partial, fragmentary symbols.  It lies deeper than Love,
+though very probably Love is a part of it.  Some, I think,--
+Wordsworth might be one of them,--spell out a portion of it from
+certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others.
+I can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which
+seem to me to come near the region where I think it lies.  I have
+known two persons who pursued it with the passion of the old
+alchemists,--all wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving
+up the daily search for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and
+their dreams changed to visions of things that ran and crawled about
+their floor and ceilings, and so they died.  The vulgar called them
+drunkards.
+
+I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this
+young girl's face produces on me.  It is akin to those influences a
+friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from
+certain voices.  I cannot translate it into words,--only into
+feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her
+face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing,
+which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world
+or on the very threshold of the next.
+
+You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful
+incomprehensibleness of my description of the expression in a young
+girl's face.  You forget what a miserable surface-matter this
+language is in which we try to reproduce our interior state of
+being.  Articulation is a shallow trick.  From the light Poh! which
+we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless scribbler's
+impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest utterances which
+comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need, is only a
+space of some three or four inches.  Words, which are a set of
+clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared
+to tones and expression of the features.  I give it up; I thought I
+could shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this
+young girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use.
+No doubt your head aches, trying to make something of my
+description.  If there is here and there one that can make anything
+intelligible out of my talk about the Great Secret, and who has
+spelt out a syllable or two of it on some woman's face, dead or
+living, that is all I can expect.  One should see the person with
+whom he converses about such matters.  There are dreamy-eyed people
+to whom I should say all these things with a certainty of being
+understood;--
+
+          That moment that his face I see,
+          I know the man that must hear me
+          To him my tale I teach.
+
+--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar
+for this August number, so that they will never see it.
+
+--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious
+attempt, which may go for nothing, and you can have your money
+refunded, if you will make the change.
+
+This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
+unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
+breakfast-table.  The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she
+again seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards
+him.  That slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity
+towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they
+sit side by side, is a physical fact I have often noticed.  Then
+there is a tendency in all the men's eyes to converge on her; and I
+do firmly believe, that, if all their chairs were examined, they
+would be found a little obliquely placed, so as to favor the
+direction in which their occupants love to look.
+
+That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting
+opposite to me, is no exception to the rule.  She brought down some
+mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber.  She
+gave a sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and
+sent another by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.
+
+--Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,--he said, and put it gallantly in
+his button-hole. --After breakfast he must see some of her drawings.
+Very fine performances,--very fine! --truly elegant productions,
+truly elegant! --Had seen Miss Linwood's needlework in London, in
+the year (eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)-
+patronized by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,--elegant,
+truly elegant productions, very fine performances; these drawings
+reminded him of them;--wonderful resemblance to Nature; an
+extraordinary art, painting; Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures
+that he remembered seeing when he was a boy.  Used to remember some
+lines about a portrait Written by Mr. Cowper, beginning,
+
+          Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
+          With me but roughly since I heard thee last."
+
+And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother
+of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and
+looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look.  The
+dead young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used
+to look at him so many, many years ago.  He stood still as if in a
+waking dream, his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines
+grew indistinct and they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face
+shaped itself out of the glimmering light through which he saw them.
+--What is there quite so profoundly human as an old man's memory of
+a mother who died in his earlier years?  Mother she remains till
+manhood, and by-and-by she grows to be as a sister; and at last,
+when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he looks back upon her in her
+fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he caresses, not his parent,
+but, as it were, his child.
+
+If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words
+with which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of
+thought.
+
+--If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!--he said.
+--All gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms
+of her great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest
+little picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody
+that you don't want to see. --The old gentleman put his hand to his
+forehead so as to shade his eyes.  I saw he was looking at the dim
+photograph of memory, and turned from him to Iris.
+
+How many drawing-books have you filled,--I said,--since you began to
+take lessons? --This was the first,--she answered,--since she was
+here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of
+large size she had covered with drawings.
+
+I turned over the leaves of the book before us.  Academic studies,
+principally of the human figure.  Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so
+forth.  Limbs from statues.  Hands and feet from Nature.  What a
+superb drawing of an arm!  I don't remember it among the figures
+from Michel Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly.
+>From Nature, I think, or after a cast from Nature. --Oh!
+
+--Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,--I said, taking up
+the drawing-book with a lock on it,--Yes,--she said. --I should like
+to see her style of working on a small scale. --There was nothing in
+it worth showing,--she said; and presently I saw her try the lock,
+which proved to be fast.  We are all caricatured in it, I haven't
+the least doubt.  I think, though, I could tell by her way of
+dealing with us what her fancies were about us boarders.  Some of
+them act as if they were bewitched with her, but she does not seem
+to notice it much.  Her thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor
+more than on anybody else.  The young fellow John appears to stand
+second in her good graces.  I think he has once or twice sent her
+what the landlady's daughter calls bo-kays of flowers,--somebody
+has, at any rate. --I saw a book she had, which must have come from
+the divinity-student.  It had a dreary title-page, which she had
+enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,--a face from memory,
+apparently,--one of those faces that small children loathe without
+knowing why, and which give them that inward disgust for heaven so
+many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these are
+"good men," and that heaven is full of such. --The gentleman with
+the diamond--the Koh-i-noor, so called by us--was not encouraged, I
+think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap.  He pulls
+his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never
+sees him, as it should seem.  The young Marylander, who I thought
+would have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks
+from his corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to
+say, I wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--
+which would, perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present
+one.  But nothing comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my
+sagacious idea of finding out the girl's fancies by looking into her
+locked drawing-book.
+
+Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made
+an attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber.  For
+this purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was
+just ready to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk,
+followed him as he toiled back to his room.  He rested on the
+landing and faced round toward me.  There was something in his eye
+which said, Stop there!  So we finished our conversation on the
+landing.  The next day, I mustered assurance enough to knock at his
+door, having a pretext ready. --No answer. --Knock again.  A door,
+as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and locked, and presently I
+heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen boots.
+The bolts and the lock of the inner door were unfastened,--with
+unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the passage.  He
+pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which I
+stood.  He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as
+"Mr. Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in;
+and a quaint-looking key in his hand.  Our conversation was short,
+but long enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not
+want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.
+
+I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a
+schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits.  I mean to give
+up such nonsense and mind my own business. --Hark!  What the deuse
+is that odd noise in his chamber?
+
+--I think I am a little superstitious.  There were two things, when
+I was a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a
+distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled
+round the neighborhood where I was born and bred.  The first was a
+series of marks called the "Devil's footsteps."  These were patches
+of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush
+blackberry, the "dewberry," as our Southern neighbors call it, in
+prettier and more Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging
+creepers,--where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet "everlasting" could
+not grow, but all was bare and blasted.  The second was a mark in
+one of the public buildings near my home,--the college dormitory
+named after a Colonial Governor.  I do not think many persons are
+aware of the existence of this mark,--little having been said about
+the story in print, as it was considered very desirable, for the
+sake of the Institution, to hush it up.  In the northwest corner,
+and on the level of the third or fourth story, there are signs of a
+breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be mistaken.  A
+considerable portion of that corner must have been carried away,
+from within outward.  It was an unpleasant affair; and I do not care
+to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred
+things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was
+variously explained, took place.  The story of the Appearance in the
+chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to
+the building there could be no question; and the zig-zag line, where
+the mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly
+visible.  The queer burnt spots, called the "Devil's footsteps," had
+never attracted attention before this time, though there is no
+evidence that they had not existed previously, except that of the
+late Miss M., a "Goody," so called, or sweeper, who was positive on
+the subject, but had a strange horror of referring to an affair of
+which she was thought to know something. --I tell you it was not so
+pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in
+an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper-chambers,
+and a most ghostly garret,--with the "Devil's footsteps" in the
+fields behind the house and in front of it the patched dormitory
+where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled
+those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them
+was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful
+season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for
+his ascetic sanctity.
+
+There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced
+by these two singular facts I have just mentioned.  There was a dark
+storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly
+see a heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which
+seemed to me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their
+fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other's
+backs,--as the people did in that awful crush where so many were
+killed, at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty.  Then the Lady's
+portrait, up-stairs, with the sword-thrusts through it,--marks of
+the British officers' rapiers,--and the tall mirror in which they
+used to look at their red coats,--confound them for smashing its
+mate?--and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy
+used to sit while his hair was dressing;--he was a gentleman, and
+always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save the silk
+covering my grandmother embroidered.  Then the little room
+downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on
+the hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,--"the
+study" in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of
+armed men,--sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will
+show you the "dents" left by the butts of their muskets all over the
+floor.  With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the
+wild stories those awful country-boys that came to live in our
+service brought with them;--of contracts written in blood and left
+out over night, not to be found the next morning, (removed by the
+Evil One, who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed
+away for future use,)--of dreams coming true,--of death-signs,--of
+apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was
+liable to superstitious fancies.
+
+Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly
+see a ghost is all very well-in the day-time.  All the reason in the
+world will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just
+such circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head.
+That is the only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of
+curiosity with which I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy
+with which I lie awake whenever I hear anything going on in his
+chamber after midnight.
+
+But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred
+for the present.  You will see in what way it happened that my
+thoughts were turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how
+I got my fancy full of material images,--faces, heads, figures,
+muscles, and so forth,--in such a way that I should have no chance
+in this number to gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the
+means of so doing.
+
+Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this
+time.  It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it
+that I should sit to him for my portrait.  When a soul draws a body
+in the great lottery of life, where every one is sure of a prize,
+such as it is, the said soul inspects the said body with the same
+curious interest with which one who has ventured into a "gift
+enterprise" examines the "massive silver pencil-case" with the
+coppery smell and impressible tube, or the "splendid gold ring" with
+the questionable specific gravity, which it has been his fortune to
+obtain in addition to his purchase.
+
+The soul, having studied the article of which it finds itself
+proprietor, thinks, after a time, it knows it pretty well.  But
+there is this difference between its view and that of a person
+looking at us:--we look from within, and see nothing but the mould
+formed by the elements in which we are incased; other observers look
+from without, and see us as living statues.  To be sure, by the aid
+of mirrors, we get a few glimpses of our outside aspect; but this
+occasional impression is always modified by that look of the soul
+from within outward which none but ourselves can take.  A portrait
+is apt, therefore, to be a surprise to us.  The artist looks only
+from without.  He sees us, too, with a hundred aspects on our faces
+we are never likely to see.  No genuine expression can be studied by
+the subject of it in the looking-glass.
+
+More than this; he sees us in a way in which many of our friends or
+acquaintances never see us.  Without wearing any mask we are
+conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.  For, in the
+first place, each puts a special reflection of himself upon us, on
+the principle of assimilation you found referred to in my last
+record, if you happened to read that document.  And secondly, each
+of our friends is capable of seeing just so far, and no farther,
+into our face, and each sees in it the particular thing that he
+looks for.  Now the artist, if he is truly an artist, does not take
+any one of these special views.  Suppose he should copy you as you
+appear to the man who wants your name to a subscription-list, you
+could hardly expect a friend who entertains you to recognize the
+likeness to the smiling face which sheds its radiance at his board.
+Even within your own family, I am afraid there is a face which the
+rich uncle knows, that is not so familiar to the poor relation.  The
+artist must take one or the other, or something compounded of the
+two, or something different from either.  What the daguerreotype and
+photograph do is to give the features and one particular look, the
+very look which kills all expression, that of self-consciousness.
+The artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in
+repose, puts your face through its exercises, observes its
+transitions, and so gets the whole range of its expression.  Out of
+all this he forms an ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your
+exact look at any one time or to any particular person.  Such a
+portrait cannot be to everybody what the ungloved call "as nat'ral
+as life."  Every good picture, therefore, must be considered wanting
+in resemblance by many persons.
+
+There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist
+shapes your features from his outline.  It is that you resemble so
+many relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular
+likeness in your countenance.
+
+He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances,
+thus:
+
+There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I
+never thought I had a sign of it.  The mother's eyebrow and grayish-
+blue eye, those I knew I had.  But there is a something which
+recalls a smile that faded away from my sister's lips--how many
+years ago!  I thought it so pleasant in her, that I love myself
+better for having a trace of it.
+
+Are we not young?  Are we not fresh and blooming?  Wait, a bit.  The
+artist takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines,
+diverging outwards from the eye over the temple.  Five years. --The
+artist draws one tolerably distinct and two faint lines,
+perpendicularly between the eyebrows.  Ten years. --The artist
+breaks up the contours round the mouth, so that they look a little
+as a hat does that has been sat upon and recovered itself, ready, as
+one would say, to crumple up again in the same creases, on smiling
+or other change of feature. --Hold on!  Stop that!  Give a young
+fellow a chance!  Are we not whole years short of that interesting
+period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc., etc., etc.?
+
+There now!  That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article,
+getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the
+wrongs of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye
+and the reflection of a red curtain on our cheek.  Is he not a POET
+that painted us?
+
+          "Blest be the art that can immortalize!"
+                                        COWPER.
+
+--Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school
+with any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive
+appellation, and in his features as special and definite an
+expression of his sole individuality as if he were the first created
+of his race: As soon as we are old enough to get the range of three
+or four generations well in hand, and to take in large family
+histories, we never see an individual in a face of any stock we
+know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with fragmentary tints from
+this and that ancestor.  The analysis of a face into its ancestral
+elements requires that it should be examined in the very earliest
+infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it brings
+with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief space when
+Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his silent
+servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he has
+wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all
+the traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after
+feature, from the slight outline to the finished portrait.
+
+--I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our
+bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as
+identified with ourselves.  In early years, while the child "feels
+its life in every limb," it lives in the body and for the body to a
+very great extent.  It ought to be so.  There have been many very
+interesting children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the
+things of earth and an extraordinary development of the spiritual
+nature.  There is a perfect literature of their biographies, all
+alike in their essentials; the same "disinclination to the usual
+amusements of childhood "; the same remarkable sensibility; the same
+docility; the same conscientiousness; in short, an almost uniform
+character, marked by beautiful traits, which we look at with a
+painful admiration.  It will be found that most of these children
+are the subjects of some constitutional unfitness for living, the
+most frequent of which I need not mention.  They are like the
+beautiful, blushing, half-grown fruit that falls before its time
+because its core is gnawed out.  They have their meaning,--they do
+not-live in vain,--but they are windfalls.  I am convinced that many
+healthy children are injured morally by being forced to read too
+much about these little meek sufferers and their spiritual
+exercises.  Here is a boy that loves to run, swim, kick football,
+turn somersets, make faces, whittle, fish, tear his clothes, coast,
+skate, fire crackers, blow squash "tooters," cut his name on fences,
+read about Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat the widest-
+angled slices of pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts with
+his back teeth and bite out the better part of another boy's apple
+with his front ones, turn up coppers, "stick" knives, call names,
+throw stones, knock off hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, "cut
+behind " anything on wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth,
+"holler" Fire! on slight evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an
+engine-company, or, in his own words, "blow for tub No. 11," or
+whatever it may be;--isn't that a pretty nice sort of a boy, though
+he has not got anything the matter with him that takes the taste of
+this world out?  Now, when you put into such a hot-blooded, hard-
+fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's hand a sad-looking volume or
+pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin, white-faced child, whose life
+is really as much a training for death as the last month of a
+condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in common between
+his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the
+experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents?  The time
+comes when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the
+beauty of resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the
+pillow of those who die before their time, in humble hope and trust.
+But it is not until he has worked his way through the period of
+honest hearty animal existence, which every robust child should make
+the most of,--not until he has learned the use of his various
+faculties, which is his first duty,--that a boy of courage and
+animal vigor is in a proper state to read these tearful records of
+premature decay.  I have no doubt that disgust is implanted in the
+minds of many healthy children by early surfeits of pathological
+piety.  I do verily believe that He who took children in His arms
+and blessed them loved the healthiest and most playful of them just
+as well as those who were richest in the tuberculous virtues.  I
+know what I am talking about, and there are more parents in this
+country who will be willing to listen to what I say than there are
+fools to pick a quarrel with me.  In the sensibility and the
+sanctity which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most
+beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the
+Divine benevolence.  But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust
+natures out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply
+what we Professors call "bad practice"; and I know by experience
+that there are worthy people who not only try it on their own
+children, but actually force it on those of their neighbors.
+
+--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed,
+or done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized.  A polite
+note from Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at
+their Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted.  We
+repaired to that scientific Golgotha.
+
+Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the
+woman in the toy called a "weather-house," both on the same wooden
+arm suspended on a pivot,--so that when one comes to the door, the
+other retires backwards, and vice versa.  The more particular
+speciality of one is to lubricate your entrance and exit,--that of
+the other to polish you off phrenologically in the recesses of the
+establishment.  Suppose yourself in a room full of casts and
+pictures, before a counterful of books with taking titles.  I wonder
+if the picture of the brain is there, "approved" by a noted
+Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor's, folio
+plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim.  An extra convolution, No.
+9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which was not to
+be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very liberally
+supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of
+"organs."  Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women,--
+horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of
+life,--looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or
+Joe Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them
+on his cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen "shiners" on a
+stripped twig of willow.
+
+The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let the
+horn-combers wait,--he shall be bumped without inspecting the
+antechamber.
+
+Tape round the head,--22 inches.  (Come on, old 23 inches, if you
+think you are the better man!)
+
+Feels thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles as those
+horrid old women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the
+provision-stalls at the Quincy Market.  Vitality, No.  5 or 6, or
+something or other.  Victuality, (organ at epigastrium,) some
+other number equally significant.
+
+Mild champooing of head now commences.  'Extraordinary revelations!
+Cupidiphilous, 6!  Hymeniphilous, 6 +!  Paediphilous, 5!
+Deipniphilous, 6!  Gelasmiphilous, 6!  Musikiphilous, 5!
+Uraniphilous, 5!  Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on.  Meant for a
+linguist. --Invaluable information.  Will invest in grammars and
+dictionaries immediately. --I have nothing against the grand total
+of my phrenological endowments.
+
+I never set great store by my head, and did not think Messrs.
+Bumpus and Crane would give me so good a lot of organs as they did,
+especially considering that I was a dead-head on that occasion.
+Much obliged to them for their politeness.  They have been useful in
+their way by calling attention to important physiological facts.
+(This concession is due to our immense bump of Candor.)
+
+
+A short Lecture on Phrenology, read to the Boarders at our
+Breakfast-Table.
+
+I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a Pseudo-science.
+A Pseudo-science consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting
+arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its
+doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells
+against it, is excluded.  It is invariably connected with some
+lucrative practical application.  Its professors and practitioners
+are usually shrewd people; they are very serious with the public,
+but wink and laugh a good deal among themselves.  The believing
+multitude consists of women of both sexes, feeble minded inquirers,
+poetical optimists, people who always get cheated in buying horses,
+philanthropists who insist on hurrying up the millennium, and others
+of this class, with here and there a clergyman, less frequently a
+lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a horse-jockey or
+a member of the detective police. --I do not say that Phrenology was
+one of the Pseudo-sciences.
+
+A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies.  It
+may contain many truths, and even valuable ones.  The rottenest bank
+starts with a little specie.  It puts out a thousand promises to pay
+on the strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly
+a good one.  The practitioners of the Pseudo-sciences know that
+common minds, after they have been baited with a real fact or two,
+will jump at the merest rag of a lie, or even at the bare hook.
+When we have one fact found us, we are very apt to supply the next
+out of our own imagination.  (How many persons can read Judges xv.
+16 correctly the first time?) The Pseudo-sciences take advantage of
+this. --I did not say that it was so with Phrenology.
+
+I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was
+something in Phrenology.  A broad, high forehead, it is commonly
+agreed, promises intellect; one that is "villanous low" and has a
+huge hind-head back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature.  I have
+as rarely met an unbiassed and sensible man who really believed in
+the bumps.  It is observed, however, that persons with what the
+Phrenologists call "good heads" are more prone than others toward
+plenary belief in the doctrine.
+
+It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that
+the moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable
+substance of the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary,
+I might be puzzled.  But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar
+cheese, I call on him to prove the truth of the Gaseous nature of
+our satellite, before I purchase.
+
+It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological
+statement.  It is only necessary to show that its truth is not
+proved, and cannot be, by the common course of argument.  The walls
+of the head are double, with a great air-chamber between them, over
+the smallest and most closely crowded "organs."  Can you tell how
+much money there is in a safe, which also has thick double walls, by
+kneading its knobs with your fingers?  So when a man fumbles about
+my forehead, and talks about the organs of Individuality, Size,
+etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt of the outside of
+my strong-box and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-
+dollar-bill under this or that particular rivet.  Perhaps there is;
+only he does n't know anything about at.  But this is a point that
+I, the Professor, understand, my friends, or ought to, certainly,
+better than you do.  The next argument you will all appreciate.
+
+I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of
+Phrenology, which is very similar to that of the Pseudo-sciences.
+An example will show it most conveniently.
+
+A. is a notorious thief.  Messrs. Bumpus and Crane examine him and
+find a good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness.  Positive fact for
+Phrenology.  Casts and drawings of A. are multiplied, and the bump
+does not lose in the act of copying. --I did not say it gained. --
+What do you look so for?  (to the boarders.)
+
+Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A.  But B. has no bump at
+all over Acquisitiveness.  Negative fact; goes against Phrenology.
+--Not a bit of it.  Don't you see how small Conscientiousness is?
+That's the reason B. stole.
+
+And then comes C., ten times as much a thief as either A. or B.,--
+used to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own
+pockets and put its contents in another, if he could find no other
+way of committing petty larceny.  Unfortunately, C.  has a hollow,
+instead of a bump, over Acquisitiveness.  Ah, but just look and see
+what a bump of Alimentiveness!  Did not C. buy nuts and gingerbread,
+when a boy, with the money he stole?  Of course you see why he is a
+thief, and how his example confirms our noble science.
+
+At last comes along a case which is apparently a settler, for there
+is a little brain with vast and varied powers,--a case like that of
+Byron, for instance.  Then comes out the grand reserve-reason which
+covers everything and renders it simply impossible ever to corner a
+Phrenologist.  "It is not the size alone, but the quality of an
+organ, which determines its degree of power."
+
+Oh! oh!  I see. --The argument may be briefly stated thus by the
+Phrenologist: "Heads I win, tails you lose."  Well, that's
+convenient.
+
+It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to
+the Pseudo-sciences.  I did not say it was a Pseudo-science.
+
+I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and
+amazed at the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of
+Phrenology had read their characters written upon their skulls.  Of
+course the Professor acquires his information solely through his
+cranial inspections and manipulations. --What are you laughing at?
+(to the boarders.)--But let us just suppose, for a moment, that a
+tolerably cunning fellow, who did not know or care anything about
+Phrenology, should open a shop and undertake to read off people's
+characters at fifty cents or a dollar apiece.  Let us see how well
+he could get along without the "organs."
+
+I will suppose myself to set up such a shop.  I would invest one
+hundred dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts,
+and other matters that would make the most show for the money.  That
+would do to begin with.  I would then advertise myself as the
+celebrated Professor Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and
+wait for my first customer.  My first customer is a middle-aged man.
+I look at him,--ask him a question or two, so as to hear him talk.
+When I have got the hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed
+to fumble his skull, dictating as follows:
+SCALE FROM 1 TO 10.
+
+LIST OF FACULTIES FOR           PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL.
+      CUSTOMER.
+                             Each to be accompanied with a wink.
+
+Amativeness, 7.        Most men love the conflicting sex, and all
+                    men love to be told they do.
+
+Alimentiveness, 8.     Don't you see that he has burst off his
+                 lowest waistcoat-button with feeding,--hey
+
+Acquisitiveness, 8.    Of course.  A middle-aged Yankee.
+
+Approbativeness 7+.    Hat well brushed.  Hair ditto.  Mark the
+                       effect of that plus sign.
+
+Self-Esteem 6.         His face shows that.
+
+Benevolence 9.         That'll please him.
+
+Conscientiousness 8�   That fraction looks first-rate.
+
+Mirthfulness 7         Has laughed twice since he came in.
+
+Ideality 9             That sounds well.
+
+Form, Size, Weight,    4 to 6.  Average everything that
+Color, Locality,       cannot be guessed.
+Eventuality, etc. etc.
+
+
+                And so of the other faculties.
+
+
+Of course, you know, that isn't the way the Phrenologists do.  They
+go only by the bumps. --What do you keep laughing so for?  (to the
+boarders.) I only said that is the way I should practise
+"Phrenology" for a living.
+
+                    End of my Lecture.
+
+
+--The Reformers have good heads, generally.  Their faces are
+commonly serene enough, and they are lambs in private intercourse,
+even though their voices may be like
+
+         The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore,
+
+when heard from the platform.  Their greatest spiritual danger is
+from the perpetual flattery of abuse to which they are exposed.
+These lines are meant to caution them.
+
+
+     SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER.
+
+          HIS TEMPTATION.
+
+No fear lest praise should make us proud!
+We know how cheaply that is won;
+The idle homage of the crowd
+Is proof of tasks as idly done.
+
+A surface-smile may pay the toil
+That follows still the conquering Right,
+With soft, white hands to dress the spoil
+That sunbrowned valor clutched in fight.
+
+Sing the sweet song of other days,
+Serenely placid, safely true,
+And o'er the present's parching ways
+Thy verse distils like evening dew.
+
+But speak in words of living power,--
+They fall like drops of scalding rain
+That plashed before the burning shower
+Swept o'er the cities of the plain!
+
+Then scowling Hate turns deadly pale,--
+Then Passion's half-coiled adders spring,
+And, smitten through their leprous mail,
+Strike right and left in hope to sting.
+
+If thou, unmoved by poisoning wrath,
+Thy feet on earth, thy heart above,
+Canst walk in peace thy kingly path,
+Unchanged in trust, unchilled in love,--
+
+Too kind for bitter words to grieve,
+Too firm for clamor to dismay,
+When Faith forbids thee to believe,
+And Meekness calls to disobey, --
+
+Ah, then beware of mortal pride!
+The smiling pride that calmly scorns
+Those foolish fingers, crimson dyed
+In laboring on thy crown of thorns!
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+One of our boarders--perhaps more than one was concerned in it--sent
+in some questions to me, the other day, which, trivial as some of
+them are, I felt bound to answer.
+
+1.--Whether a lady was ever known to write a letter covering only a
+single page?
+
+To this I answered, that there was a case on record where a lady had
+but half a sheet of paper and no envelope; and being obliged to send
+through the post-office, she covered only one side of the paper
+(crosswise, lengthwise, and diagonally).
+
+2.--What constitutes a man a gentleman?
+
+To this I gave several answers, adapted to particular classes of
+questioners.
+
+a.  Not trying to be a gentleman.
+
+b.  Self-respect underlying courtesy.
+
+c.  Knowledge and observance of the fitness of things in social
+intercourse.
+
+d.  f. s. d.  (as many suppose.)
+
+3.--Whether face or figure is most attractive in the female sex?
+
+Answered in the following epigram, by a young man about town:
+
+     Quoth Tom, "Though fair her features be,
+     It is her figure pleases me."
+     "What may her figure be?" I cried.
+     "One hundred thousand!" he replied.
+
+When this was read to the boarders, the young man John said he
+should like a chance to "step up" to a figger of that kind, if the
+girl was one of the right sort.
+
+The landlady said them that merried for money didn't deserve the
+blessin' of a good wife.  Money was a great thing when them that had
+it made a good use of it.  She had seen better days herself, and
+knew what it was never to want for anything.  One of her cousins
+merried a very rich old gentleman, and she had heerd that he said he
+lived ten year longer than if he'd staid by himself without anybody
+to take care of him.  There was nothin' like a wife for nussin' sick
+folks and them that couldn't take care of themselves.
+
+The young man John got off a little wink, and pointed slyly with his
+thumb in the direction of our diminutive friend, for whom he seemed
+to think this speech was intended.
+
+If it was meant for him, he did n't appear to know that it was.
+Indeed, he seems somewhat listless of late, except when the
+conversation falls upon one of those larger topics that specially
+interest him, and then he grows excited, speaks loud and fast,
+sometimes almost savagely,--and, I have noticed once or twice,
+presses his left hand to his right side, as if there were something
+that ached, or weighed, or throbbed in that region.
+
+While he speaks in this way, the general conversation is
+interrupted, and we all listen to him.  Iris looks steadily in his
+face, and then he will turn as if magnetized and meet the amber eyes
+with his own melancholy gaze.  I do believe that they have some kind
+of understanding together, that they meet elsewhere than at our
+table, and that there is a mystery, which is going to break upon us
+all of a sudden, involving the relations of these two persons.  From
+the very first, they have taken to each other.  The one thing they
+have in common is the heroic will.  In him, it shows itself in
+thinking his way straightforward, in doing battle for "free trade
+and no right of search" on the high seas of religious controversy,
+and especially in fighting the battles of his crooked old city.  In
+her, it is standing up for her little friend with the most queenly
+disregard of the code of boarding-house etiquette.  People may say
+or look what they like,--she will have her way about this sentiment
+of hers.
+
+The Poor Relation is in a dreadful fidget whenever the Little
+Gentleman says anything that interferes with her own infallibility.
+She seems to think Faith must go with her face tied up, as if she
+had the toothache,--and that if she opens her mouth to the quarter
+the wind blows from, she will catch her "death o' cold."
+
+The landlady herself came to him one day, as I have found out, and
+tried to persuade him to hold his tongue. --The boarders was gettin'
+uneasy,--she said,--and some of 'em would go, she mistrusted, if he
+talked any more about things that belonged to the ministers to
+settle.  She was a poor woman, that had known better days, but all
+her livin' depended on her boarders, and she was sure there was n't
+any of 'em she set so much by as she did by him; but there was them
+that never liked to hear about sech things, except on Sundays.
+
+The Little Gentleman looked very smiling at the landlady, who smiled
+even more cordially in return, and adjusted her cap-ribbon with an
+unconscious movement,--a reminiscence of the long-past pairing-time,
+when she had smoothed her locks and softened her voice, and won her
+mate by these and other bird-like graces. --My dear Madam,--he
+said,--I will remember your interests, and speak only of matters to
+which I am totally indifferent. --I don't doubt he meant this; but a
+day or two after, something stirred him up, and I heard his voice
+uttering itself aloud, thus:
+
+-It must be done, Sir! --he was saying,--it must be done!  Our
+religion has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has been
+Orientalized, it has been Anglicized, and the time is at hand when
+it must be AMERICANIZED!  Now, Sir, you see what Americanizing is in
+politics;--it means that a man shall have a vote because he is a
+man,--and shall vote for whom he pleases, without his neighbor's
+interference.  If he chooses to vote for the Devil, that is his
+lookout;--perhaps he thinks the Devil is better than the other
+candidates; and I don't doubt he's often right, Sir.  Just so a
+man's soul has a vote in the spiritual community; and it doesn't do,
+Sir, or it won't do long, to call him "schismatic" and "heretic" and
+those other wicked names that the old murderous Inquisitors have
+left us to help along "peace and goodwill to men"!
+
+As long as you could catch a man and drop him into an oubliette, or
+pull him out a few inches longer by machinery, or put a hot iron
+through his tongue, or make him climb up a ladder and sit on a board
+at the top of a stake so that he should be slowly broiled by the
+fire kindled round it, there was some sense in these words; they led
+to something.  But since we have done with those tools, we had
+better give up those words.  I should like to see a Yankee
+advertisement like this! --(the Little Gentleman laughed fiercely as
+he uttered the words,--)
+
+--Patent thumb-screws,--will crush the bone in three turns.
+
+--The cast-iron boot, with wedge and mallet, only five dollars!
+
+--The celebrated extension-rack, warranted to stretch a man six
+inches in twenty minutes,--money returned, if it proves
+unsatisfactory.
+
+I should like to see such an advertisement, I say, Sir!  Now, what's
+the use of using the words that belonged with the thumb-screws, and
+the Blessed Virgin with the knives under her petticoats and sleeves
+and bodice, and the dry pan and gradual fire, if we can't have the
+things themselves, Sir?  What's the use of painting the fire round a
+poor fellow, when you think it won't do to kindle one under him,--as
+they did at Valencia or Valladolid, or wherever it was?
+
+--What story is that?--I said.
+
+Why,--he answered,--at the last auto-da-fe, in 1824 or '5, or
+somewhere there,--it's a traveller's story, but a mighty knowing
+traveller he is,--they had a "heretic" to use up according to the
+statutes provided for the crime of private opinion.  They could n't
+quite make up their minds to burn him, so they only hung him in a
+hogshead painted all over with flames!
+
+No, Sir!  when a man calls you names because you go to the ballot-
+box and vote for your candidate, or because you say this or that is
+your opinion, he forgets in which half of the world he was born,
+Sir!  It won't be long, Sir, before we have Americanized religion as
+we have Americanized government; and then, Sir, every soul God sends
+into the world will be good in the face of all men for just so much
+of His "inspiration" as "giveth him understanding"! --None of my
+words, Sir!  none of my words!
+
+--If Iris does not love this Little Gentleman, what does love look
+like when one sees it?  She follows him with her eyes, she leans
+over toward him when he speaks, her face changes with the changes of
+his speech, so that one might think it was with her as with
+Christabel,--
+
+          That all her features were resigned
+          To this sole image in her mind.
+
+But she never looks at him with such intensity of devotion as when
+he says anything about the soul and the soul's atmosphere, religion.
+
+Women are twice as religious as men;--all the world knows that.
+Whether they are any better, in the eyes of Absolute Justice, might
+be questioned; for the additional religious element supplied by sex
+hardly seems to be a matter of praise or blame.  But in all common
+aspects they are so much above us that we get most of our religion
+from them,--from their teachings, from their example,--above all,
+from their pure affections.
+
+Now this poor little Iris had been talked to strangely in her
+childhood.  Especially she had been told that she hated all good
+things,--which every sensible parent knows well enough is not true
+of a great many children, to say the least.  I have sometimes
+questioned whether many libels on human nature had not been a
+natural consequence of the celibacy of the clergy, which was
+enforced for so long a period.
+
+The child had met this and some other equally encouraging statements
+as to her spiritual conditions, early in life, and fought the battle
+of spiritual independence prematurely, as many children do.  If all
+she did was hateful to God, what was the meaning of the approving or
+else the disapproving conscience, when she had done "right" or
+"wrong"?  No "shoulder-striker" hits out straighter than a child
+with its logic.  Why, I can remember lying in my bed in the nursery
+and settling questions which all that I have heard since and got out
+of books has never been able to raise again.  If a child does not
+assert itself in this way in good season, it becomes just what its
+parents or teachers were, and is no better than a plastic image. --
+How old was I at the time?--I suppose about 5823 years old,--that
+is, counting from Archbishop Usher's date of the Creation, and
+adding the life of the race, whose accumulated intelligence is a
+part of my inheritance, to my own.  A good deal older than Plato,
+you see, and much more experienced than my Lord Bacon and most of
+the world's teachers. --Old books, as you well know, are books of
+the world's youth, and new books are fruits of its age.  How many of
+all these ancient folios round me are like so many old cupels!  The
+gold has passed out of them long ago, but their pores are full of
+the dross with which it was mingled.
+
+And so Iris--having thrown off that first lasso which not only
+fetters, but chokes those whom it can hold, so that they give
+themselves up trembling and breathless to the great soul-subduer,
+who has them by the windpipe had settled a brief creed for herself,
+in which love of the neighbor, whom we have seen, was the first
+article, and love of the Creator, whom we have not seen, grew out of
+this as its natural development, being necessarily second in order
+of time to the first unselfish emotions which we feel for the
+fellow-creatures who surround us in our early years.
+
+The child must have some place of worship.  What would a young girl
+be who never mingled her voice with the songs and prayers that rose
+all around her with every returning day of rest?  And Iris was free
+to choose.  Sometimes one and sometimes another would offer to carry
+her to this or that place of worship; and when the doors were
+hospitably opened, she would often go meekly in by herself.  It was
+a curious fact, that two churches as remote from each other in
+doctrine as could well be divided her affections.
+
+The Church of Saint Polycarp had very much the look of a Roman
+Catholic chapel.  I do not wish to run the risk of giving names to
+the ecclesiastical furniture which gave it such a Romish aspect; but
+there were pictures, and inscriptions in antiquated characters, and
+there were reading-stands, and flowers on the altar, and other
+elegant arrangements.  Then there were boys to sing alternately in
+choirs responsive to each other, and there was much bowing, with
+very loud responding, and a long service and a short sermon, and a
+bag, such as Judas used to hold in the old pictures, was carried
+round to receive contributions.  Everything was done not only
+"decently and in order," but, perhaps one might say, with a certain
+air of magnifying their office on the part of the dignified
+clergymen, often two or three in number.  The music and the free
+welcome were grateful to Iris, and she forgot her prejudices at the
+door of the chapel.  For this was a church with open doors, with
+seats for all classes and all colors alike,--a church of zealous
+worshippers after their faith, of charitable and serviceable men and
+women, one that took care of its children and never forgot its poor,
+and whose people were much more occupied in looking out for their
+own souls than in attacking the faith of their neighbors.  In its
+mode of worship there was a union of two qualities,--the taste and
+refinement, which the educated require just as much in their
+churches as elsewhere, and the air of stateliness, almost of pomp,
+which impresses the common worshipper, and is often not without its
+effect upon those who think they hold outward forms as of little
+value.  Under the half-Romish aspect of the Church of Saint
+Polycarp, the young girl found a devout and loving and singularly
+cheerful religious spirit.  The artistic sense, which betrayed
+itself in the dramatic proprieties of its ritual, harmonized with
+her taste.  The mingled murmur of the loud responses, in those
+rhythmic phrases, so simple, yet so fervent, almost as if every
+tenth heart-beat, instead of its dull tic-tac, articulated itself as
+"Good Lord, deliver us!  "--the sweet alternation of the two choirs,
+as their holy song floated from side to side, the keen young voices
+rising like a flight of singing-birds that passes from one grove to
+another, carrying its music with it back and forward,--why should
+she not love these gracious outward signs of those inner harmonies
+which none could deny made beautiful the lives of many of her
+fellow-worshippers in the humble, yet not inelegant Chapel of Saint
+Polycarp?
+
+The young Marylander, who was born and bred to that mode of worship,
+had introduced her to the chapel, for which he did the honors for
+such of our boarders as were not otherwise provided for.  I saw them
+looking over the same prayer-book one Sunday, and I could not help
+thinking that two such young and handsome persons could hardly
+worship together in safety for a great while.  But they seemed to
+mind nothing but their prayer-book.  By-and-by the silken bag was
+handed round. --I don't believe she will; so awkward, you know;-
+besides, she only came by invitation.  There she is, with her hand
+in her pocket, though,--and sure enough, her little bit of silver
+tinkled as it struck the coin beneath.  God bless her! she has n't
+much to give; but her eye glistens when she gives it, and that is
+all Heaven asks. --That was the first time I noticed these young
+people together, and I am sure they behaved with the most charming
+propriety,--in fact, there was one of our silent lady-boarders with
+them, whose eyes would have kept Cupid and Psyche to their good
+behavior.  A day or two after this I noticed that the young
+gentleman had left his seat, which you may remember was at the
+corner diagonal to that of Iris, so that they have been as far
+removed from each other as they could be at the table.  His new seat
+is three or four places farther down the table.  Of course I made a
+romance out of this, at once.  So stupid not to see it!  How could
+it be otherwise?--Did you speak, Madam?  I beg your pardon.  (To my
+lady-reader.)
+
+I never saw anything like the tenderness with which this young girl
+treats her little deformed neighbor.  If he were in the way of going
+to church, I know she would follow him.  But his worship, if any, is
+not with the throng of men and women and staring children.
+
+I, the Professor, on the other hand, am a regular church-goer.  I
+should go for various reasons if I did not love it; but I am happy
+enough to find great pleasure in the midst of devout multitudes,
+whether I can accept all their creeds or not.  One place of worship
+comes nearer than the rest to my ideal standard, and to this it was
+that I carried our young girl.
+
+The Church of the Galileans, as it is called, is even humbler in
+outside pretensions than the Church of Saint Polycarp.  Like that,
+it is open to all comers.  The stranger who approaches it looks down
+a quiet street and sees the plainest of chapels,--a kind of wooden
+tent, that owes whatever grace it has to its pointed windows and the
+high, sharp roofs--traces, both, of that upward movement of
+ecclesiastical architecture which soared aloft in cathedral-spires,
+shooting into the sky as the spike of a flowering aloe from the
+cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below.  This suggestion of
+medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which a hand-bell
+might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was all of
+outward show the small edifice could boast.  Within there was very
+little that pretended to be attractive.  A small organ at one side,
+and a plain pulpit, showed that the building was a church; but it
+was a church reduced to its simplest expression:
+
+Yet when the great and wise monarch of the East sat upon his throne,
+in all the golden blaze of the spoils of Ophir and the freights of
+the navy of Tarshish, his glory was not like that of this simple
+chapel in its Sunday garniture.  For the lilies of the field, in
+their season, and the fairest flowers of the year, in due
+succession, were clustered every Sunday morning over the preacher's
+desk.  Slight, thin-tissued blossoms of pink and blue and virgin
+white in early spring, then the full-breasted and deep-hearted roses
+of summer, then the velvet-robed crimson and yellow flowers of
+autumn, and in the winter delicate exotics that grew under skies of
+glass in the false summers of our crystal palaces without knowing
+that it was the dreadful winter of New England which was rattling
+the doors and frosting the panes,--in their language the whole year
+told its history of life and growth and beauty from that simple
+desk.  There was always at least one good sermon,--this floral
+homily.  There was at least one good prayer,--that brief space when
+all were silent, after the manner of the Friends at their devotions.
+
+Here, too, Iris found an atmosphere of peace and love.  The same
+gentle, thoughtful faces, the same cheerful but reverential spirit,
+the same quiet, the same life of active benevolence.  But in all
+else how different from the Church of Saint Polycarp!  No clerical
+costume, no ceremonial forms, no carefully trained choirs.  A
+liturgy they have, to be sure, which does not scruple to borrow from
+the time-honored manuals of devotion, but also does not hesitate to
+change its expressions to its own liking.
+
+Perhaps the good people seem a little easy with each other;--they
+are apt to nod familiarly, and have even been known to whisper
+before the minister came in.  But it is a relief to get rid of that
+old Sunday--no,--Sabbath face, which suggests the idea that the
+first day of the week is commemorative of some most mournful event.
+The truth is, these brethren and sisters meet very much as a family
+does for its devotions, not putting off their humanity in the least,
+considering it on the whole quite a delightful matter to come
+together for prayer and song and good counsel from kind and wise
+lips.  And if they are freer in their demeanor than some very
+precise congregations, they have not the air of a worldly set of
+people.  Clearly they have not come to advertise their tailors and
+milliners, nor for the sake of exchanging  criticisms on the
+literary character of the sermon they  may hear.  There is no
+restlessness and no restraint  among these quiet, cheerful
+worshippers.  One thing  that keeps them calm and happy during the
+season so evidently trying to many congregations is, that they join
+very generally in the singing.  In this way they  get rid of that
+accumulated nervous force which escapes in all sorts of fidgety
+movements, so that a minister trying to keep his congregation still
+reminds one of a boy with his hand over the nose of a pump which
+another boy is working,--this spirting impatience of the people is
+so like the jets that find their way through his fingers, and the
+grand rush out at the final Amen! has such a wonderful likeness to
+the gush that takes place when the boy pulls his hand away, with
+immense relief, as it seems, to both the pump and the officiating
+youngster.
+
+How sweet is this blending of all voices and all hearts in one
+common song of praise!  Some will sing a little loud, perhaps,--and
+now and then an impatient chorister will get a syllable or two in
+advance, or an enchanted singer so lose all thought of time and
+place in the luxury of a closing cadence that he holds on to the
+last semi-breve upon his private responsibility; but how much more
+of the spirit of the old Psalmist in the music of these imperfectly
+trained voices than in the academic niceties of the paid performers
+who take our musical worship out of our hands!
+
+I am of the opinion that the creed of the Church of the Galileans is
+not laid down in as many details as that of the Church of Saint
+Polycarp.  Yet I suspect, if one of the good people from each of
+those churches had met over the bed of a suffering fellow-creature,
+or for the promotion of any charitable object, they would have found
+they had more in common than all the special beliefs or want of
+beliefs that separated them would amount to.  There are always many
+who believe that the fruits of a tree afford a better test of its
+condition than a statement of the composts with which it is dressed,
+though the last has its meaning and importance, no doubt.
+
+Between these two churches, then, our young Iris divides her
+affections.  But I doubt if she listens to the preacher at either
+with more devotion than she does to her little neighbor when he
+talks of these matters.
+
+What does he believe?  In the first place, there is some deep-rooted
+disquiet lying at the bottom of his soul, which makes him very
+bitter against all kinds of usurpation over the right of private
+judgment.  Over this seems to lie a certain tenderness for humanity
+in general, bred out of life-long trial, I should say, but sharply
+streaked with fiery lines of wrath at various individual acts of
+wrong, especially if they come in an ecclesiastical shape, and
+recall to him the days when his mother's great-grandmother was
+strangled on Witch Hill, with a text from the Old Testament for her
+halter.  With all this, he has a boundless belief in the future of
+this experimental hemisphere, and especially in the destiny of the
+free thought of its northeastern metropolis.
+
+--A man can see further, Sir,--he said one day,--from the top of
+Boston State House, and see more that is worth seeing, than from all
+the pyramids and turrets and steeples in all the places in the
+world!  No smoke, Sir; no fog, Sir; and a clean sweep from the Outer
+Light and the sea beyond it to the New Hampshire mountains!  Yes,
+Sir,--and there are great truths that are higher than mountains and
+broader than seas, that people are looking for from the tops of
+these hills of ours;--such as the world never saw, though it might
+have seen them at Jerusalem, if its eyes had been open! --Where do
+they have most crazy people?  Tell me that, Sir!
+
+I answered, that I had heard it said there were more in New England
+than in most countries, perhaps more than in any part of the world.
+
+Very good, Sir,--he answered. --When have there been most people
+killed and wounded in the course of this century?
+
+During the wars of the French Empire, no doubt,--I said.
+
+That's it! that's it! --said the Little Gentleman;--where the battle
+of intelligence is fought, there are most minds bruised and broken!
+We're battling for a faith here, Sir.
+
+The divinity-student remarked, that it was rather late in the
+world's history for men to be looking out for a new faith.
+
+I did n't say a new faith,--said the Little Gentleman;--old or new,
+it can't help being different here in this American mind of ours
+from anything that ever was before; the people are new, Sir, and
+that makes the difference.  One load of corn goes to the sty, and
+makes the fat of swine,--another goes to the farm-house, and becomes
+the muscle that clothes the right arms of heroes.  It is n't where a
+pawn stands on the board that makes the difference, but what the
+game round it is when it is on this or that square.
+
+Can any man look round and see what Christian countries are now
+doing, and how they are governed, and what is the general condition
+of society, without seeing that Christianity is the flag under which
+the world sails, and not the rudder that steers its course?  No,
+Sir!  There was a great raft built about two thousand years ago,--
+call it an ark, rather,--the world's great ark! big enough to hold
+all mankind, and made to be launched right out into the open waves
+of life,--and here it has been lying, one end on the shore and one
+end bobbing up and down in the water, men fighting all the time as
+to who should be captain and who should have the state-rooms, and
+throwing each other over the side because they could not agree about
+the points of compass, but the great vessel never getting afloat
+with its freight of nations and their rulers;--and now, Sir, there
+is and has been for this long time a fleet of "heretic" lighters
+sailing out of Boston Bay, and they have been saying, and they say
+now, and they mean to keep saying, "Pump out your bilge-water,
+shovel over your loads of idle ballast, get out your old rotten
+cargo, and we will carry it out into deep waters and sink it where
+it will never be seen again; so shall the ark of the world's hope
+float on the ocean, instead of sticking in the dock-mud where it is
+lying!"
+
+It's a slow business, this of getting the ark launched.  The Jordan
+was n't deep enough, and the Tiber was n't deep enough, and the
+Rhone was n't deep enough, and the Thames was n't deep enough, and
+perhaps the Charles is n't deep enough; but I don't feel sure of
+that, Sir, and I love to hear the workmen knocking at the old blocks
+of tradition and making the ways smooth with the oil of the Good
+Samaritan.  I don't know, Sir,--but I do think she stirs a little,--
+I do believe she slides;--and when I think of what a work that is
+for the dear old three-breasted mother of American liberty, I would
+not take all the glory of all the greatest cities in the world for
+my birthright in the soil of little Boston!
+
+--Some of us could not help smiling at this burst of local
+patriotism, especially when it finished with the last two words.
+
+And Iris smiled, too.  But it was the radiant smile of pleasure
+which always lights up her face when her little neighbor gets
+excited on the great topics of progress in freedom and religion, and
+especially on the part which, as he pleases himself with believing,
+his own city is to take in that consummation of human development to
+which he looks forward.
+
+Presently she looked into his face with a changed expression,--the
+anxiety of a mother that sees her child suffering.
+
+You are not well,--she said.
+
+I am never well,--he answered. --His eyes fell mechanically on the
+death's-head ring he wore on his right hand.  She took his hand as
+if it had been a baby's, and turned the grim device so that it
+should be out of sight.  One slight, sad, slow movement of the head
+seemed to say, "The death-symbol is still there!"
+
+A very odd personage, to be sure!  Seems to know what is going on,--
+reads books, old and new,--has many recent publications sent him,
+they tell me, but, what is more curious, keeps up with the everyday
+affairs of the world, too.  Whether he hears everything that is said
+with preternatural acuteness, or whether some confidential friend
+visits him in a quiet way, is more than I can tell.  I can make
+nothing more of the noises I hear in his room than my old
+conjectures.  The movements I mention are less frequent, but I often
+hear the plaintive cry,--I observe that it is rarely laughing of
+late;--I never have detected one articulate word, but I never heard
+such tones from anything but a human voice.
+
+There has been, of late, a deference approaching to tenderness, on
+the part of the boarders generally so far as he is concerned.  This
+is doubtless owing to the air of suffering which seems to have
+saddened his look of late.  Either some passion is gnawing at him
+inwardly, or some hidden disease is at work upon him.
+
+--What 's the matter with Little Boston?--said the young man John to
+me one day. --There a'n't much of him, anyhow; but 't seems to me he
+looks peakeder than ever.  The old woman says he's in a bad way, 'n'
+wants a puss to take care of him.  Them pusses that take care of old
+rich folks marry 'em sometimes,--'n' they don't commonly live a
+great while after that.  No, Sir!  I don't see what he wants to die
+for, after he's taken so much trouble to live in such poor
+accommodations as that crooked body of his.  I should like to know
+how his soul crawled into it, 'n' how it's goin' to get out.  What
+business has he to die, I should like to know?  Let Ma'am Allen (the
+gentleman with the diamond) die, if he likes, and be (this is a
+family-magazine); but we a'n't goin' to have him dyin'.  Not by a
+great sight.  Can't do without him anyhow.  A'n't it fun to hear him
+blow off his steam?
+
+I believe the young fellow would take it as a personal insult, if
+the Little Gentleman should show any symptoms of quitting our table
+for a better world.
+
+--In the mean time, what with going to church in company with our
+young lady, and taking every chance I could get to talk with her, I
+have found myself becoming, I will not say intimate, but well
+acquainted with Miss Iris.  There is a certain frankness and
+directness about her that perhaps belong to her artist nature.  For,
+you see, the one thing that marks the true artist is a clear
+perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction from that imperfect
+mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the feeble pictures
+and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or in stone.  A
+true artist, therefore, can hardly fail to have a sharp, well-
+defined mental physiognomy.  Besides this, many young girls have a
+strange audacity blended with their instinctive delicacy.  Even in
+physical daring many of them are a match for boys; whereas you will
+find few among mature women, and especially if they are mothers, who
+do not confess, and not unfrequently proclaim, their timidity.  One
+of these young girls, as many of us hereabouts remember, climbed to
+the top of a jagged, slippery rock lying out in the waves,--an ugly
+height to get up, and a worse one to get down, even for a bold young
+fellow of sixteen.  Another was in the way of climbing tall trees
+for crows' nests,--and crows generally know about how far boys can
+"shin up," and set their household establishments above that high-
+water mark.  Still another of these young ladies I saw for the first
+time in an open boat, tossing on the ocean ground-swell, a mile or
+two from shore, off a lonely island.  She lost all her daring, after
+she had some girls of her own to look out for.
+
+Many blondes are very gentle, yielding in character, impressible,
+unelastic.  But the positive blondes, with the golden tint running
+through them, are often full of character.  They come, probably
+enough, from those deep-bosomed German women that Tacitus portrayed
+in such strong colors.  The negative blondes, or those women whose
+tints have faded out as their line of descent has become
+impoverished, are of various blood, and in them the soul has often
+become pale with that blanching of the hair and loss of color in the
+eyes which makes them approach the character of Albinesses.
+
+I see in this young girl that union of strength and sensibility
+which, when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to
+accompany this combination of active and passive capacity, we call
+genius.  She is not an accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but
+there is always an air in every careless figure she draws, as it
+were of upward aspiration,--the elan of John of Bologna's Mercury,--
+a lift to them, as if they had on winged sandals, like the herald of
+the Gods.  I hear her singing sometimes; and though she evidently is
+not trained, yet is there a wild sweetness in her fitful and
+sometimes fantastic melodies,--such as can come only from the
+inspiration of the moment,--strangely enough, reminding me of those
+long passages I have heard from my little neighbor's room, yet of
+different tone, and by no means to be mistaken for those weird
+harmonies.
+
+I cannot pretend to deny that I am interested in the girl.  Alone,
+unprotected, as I have seen so many young girls left in boarding-
+houses, the centre of all the men's eyes that surround the table,
+watched with jealous sharpness by every woman, most of all by that
+poor relation of our landlady, who belongs to the class of women
+that like to catch others in mischief when they themselves are too
+mature for indiscretions, (as one sees old rogues turn to thief-
+catchers,) one of Nature's gendarmerie, clad in a complete suit of
+wrinkles, the cheapest coat-of-mail against the shafts of the great
+little enemy,--so surrounded, Iris spans this commonplace household-
+life of ours with her arch of beauty, as the rainbow, whose name she
+borrows, looks down on a dreary pasture with its feeding flocks and
+herds of indifferent animals.
+
+These young girls that live in boarding-houses can do pretty much as
+they will.  The female gendarmes are off guard occasionally.  The
+sitting-room has its solitary moments, when any two boarders who
+wish to meet may come together accidentally, (accidentally, I said,
+Madam, and I had not the slightest intention of Italicizing the
+word,) and discuss the social or political questions of the day, or
+any other subject that may prove interesting.  Many charming
+conversations take place at the foot of the stairs, or while one of
+the parties is holding the latch of a door,--in the shadow of
+porticoes, and especially on those outside balconies which some of
+our Southern neighbors call "stoops," the most charming places in
+the world when the moon is just right and the roses and honeysuckles
+are in full blow,--as we used to think in eighteen hundred and never
+mention it.
+
+On such a balcony or "stoop," one evening, I walked with Iris.  We
+were on pretty good terms now, and I had coaxed her arm under mine,-
+-my left arm, of course.  That leaves one's right arm free to defend
+the lovely creature, if the rival--odious wretch! attempt, to ravish
+her from your side.  Likewise if one's heart should happen to beat a
+little, its mute language will not be without its meaning, as you
+will perceive when the arm you hold begins to tremble, a
+circumstance like to occur, if you happen to be a good-looking young
+fellow, and you two have the "stoop" to yourselves.
+
+We had it to ourselves that evening.  The Koh-inoor, as we called
+him, was in a corner with our landlady's daughter.  The young fellow
+John was smoking out in the yard.  The gendarme was afraid of the
+evening air, and kept inside, The young Marylander came to the door,
+looked out and saw us walking together, gave his hat a pull over his
+forehead and stalked off.  I felt a slight spasm, as it were, in the
+arm I held, and saw the girl's head turn over her shoulder for a
+second.  What a kind creature this is!  She has no special interest
+in this youth, but she does not like to see a young fellow going off
+because he feels as if he were not wanted.
+
+She had her locked drawing-book under her arm. --Let me take it,--I
+said.
+
+She gave it to me to carry.
+
+This is full of caricatures of all of us, I am sure,--said I.
+
+She laughed, and said,--No,--not all of you.
+
+I was there, of course?
+
+Why, no,--she had never taken so much pains with me.
+
+Then she would let me see the inside of it?
+
+She would think of it.
+
+Just as we parted, she took a little key from her pocket and handed
+it to me.  This unlocks my naughty book,--she said,--you shall see
+it.  I am not afraid of you.
+
+I don't know whether the last words exactly pleased me.  At any
+rate, I took the book and hurried with it to my room.  I opened it,
+and saw, in a few glances, that I held the heart of Iris in my hand.
+
+--I have no verses for you this month, except these few lines
+suggested by the season.
+
+
+          MIDSUMMER.
+
+Here!  sweep these foolish leaves away,
+I will not crush my brains to-day!
+Look! are the southern curtains drawn?
+Fetch me a fan, and so begone!
+
+Not that,--the palm-tree's rustling leaf
+Brought from a parching coral-reef!
+Its breath is heated;--I would swing
+The broad gray plumes,--the eagle's wing.
+
+I hate these roses' feverish blood!
+Pluck me a half-blown lily-bud,
+A long-stemmed lily from the lake,
+Cold as a coiling water-snake.
+
+Rain me sweet odors on the air,
+And wheel me up my Indian chair,
+And spread some book not overwise
+Flat out before my sleepy eyes.
+
+--Who knows it not,--this dead recoil
+Of weary fibres stretched with toil,
+The pulse that flutters faint and low
+When Summer's seething breezes blow?
+
+O Nature!  bare thy loving breast
+And give thy child one hour of rest,
+One little hour to lie unseen
+Beneath thy scarf of leafy green!
+
+So, curtained by a singing pine,
+Its murmuring voice shall blend with mine,
+Till, lost in dreams, my faltering lay
+In sweeter music dies away.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+          IRIS, HER BOOK
+
+I pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
+By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
+Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!
+
+For Iris had no mother to infold her,
+Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
+Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her.
+
+She had not learned the mystery of awaking
+Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow's aching,
+Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.
+
+Yet lived, wrought, suffered.  Lo, the pictured token!
+Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
+Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?
+
+She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,
+Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
+And talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.
+
+Twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wearing,
+Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
+Then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.
+
+Questioning all things: Why her Lord had sent her?
+What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her?
+Scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.
+
+And then all tears and anguish: Queen of Heaven,
+Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven,
+Save me!  oh, save me!  Shall I die forgiven?
+
+And then--Ah, God!  But nay, it little matters
+Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters,
+The myriad germs that Nature shapes and shatters!
+
+If she had--Well!  She longed, and knew not wherefore
+Had the world nothing she might live to care for?
+No second self to say her evening prayer for?
+
+She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
+Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
+Showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.
+
+Vain?  Let it be so!  Nature was her teacher.
+What if a lonely and unsistered creature
+Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,
+
+Saying, unsaddened,--This shall soon be faded,
+And double-hued the shining tresses braided,
+And all the sunlight of the morning shaded?
+
+--This her poor book is full of saddest follies,
+Of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
+With summer roses twined and wintry hollies.
+
+In the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
+Somewhere, beneath some maiden's tear-dimmed glances
+May fall her little book of dreams and fancies.
+
+Sweet sister!  Iris, who shall never name thee,
+Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
+Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.
+
+Spare her, I pray thee!  If the maid is sleeping,
+Peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping.
+No more!  She leaves her memory in thy keeping.
+
+
+These verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume.
+As I turned the pages, I hesitated for a moment.  Is it quite fair
+to take advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the
+unsunned depths of a young girl's nature, which I can look through,
+as the balloon-voyagers tell us they see from their hanging-baskets
+through the translucent waters which the keenest eye of such as sail
+over them in ships might strive to pierce in vain?  Why has the
+child trusted me with such artless confessions,--self-revelations,
+which might be whispered by trembling lips, under the veil of
+twilight, in sacred confessionals, but which I cannot look at in the
+light of day without a feeling of wronging a sacred confidence?
+
+To all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought.
+She did not know how fearfully she had disclosed herself; she was
+too profoundly innocent.  Her soul was no more ashamed than the fair
+shapes that walked in Eden without a thought of over-liberal
+loveliness.  Having nobody to tell her story to,--having, as she
+said in her verses, no musical instrument to laugh and cry with
+her,--nothing, in short, but the language of pen and pencil,--all
+the veinings of her nature were impressed on these pages as those of
+a fresh leaf are transferred to the blank sheets which inclose it.
+It was the same thing which I remember seeing beautifully shown in a
+child of some four or five years we had one day at our boarding-
+house.  The child was a deaf mute.  But its soul had the inner sense
+that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity which through
+natural organs realizes itself in words.  Only it had to talk with
+its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alternations of
+feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted over its
+face, I have never seen in any other human countenance.
+
+I wonder if something of spiritual transparency is not typified in
+the golden-blonde organization.  There are a great many little
+creatures,--many small fishes, for instance,--which are literally
+transparent, with the exception of some of the internal organs.  The
+heart can be seen beating as if in a case of clouded crystal.  The
+central nervous column with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through
+the whole length of the diaphanous muscles of the body.  Other
+little creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only
+their surface.  Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black,
+beady-eyes and swarthy hue; Judas, in Leonardo's picture, is the
+model of them all.
+
+However this may be, I should say there never had been a book like
+this of Iris,--so full of the heart's silent language, so
+transparent that the heart itself could be seen beating through it.
+I should say there never could have been such a book, but for one
+recollection, which is not peculiar to myself, but is shared by a
+certain number of my former townsmen.  If you think I over-color
+this matter of the young girl's book, hear this, which there are
+others, as I just said, besides myself, will tell you is strictly
+true.
+
+
+THE BOOK OF THE THREE MAIDEN SISTERS.
+
+In the town called Cantabridge, now a city, water-veined and gas
+windpiped, in the street running down to the Bridge, beyond which
+dwelt Sally, told of in a book of a friend of mine, was of old a
+house inhabited by three maidens.  They left no near kinsfolk, I
+believe; whether they did or not, I have no ill to speak of them;
+for they lived and died in all good report and maidenly credit.  The
+house they lived in was of the small, gambrel-roofed cottage
+pattern, after the shape of Esquires' houses, but after the size of
+the dwellings of handicraftsmen.  The lower story was fitted up as a
+shop.  Specially was it provided with one of those half-doors now so
+rarely met with, which are to whole doors as spencers worn by old
+folk are to coats.  They speak of limited commerce united with a
+social or observing disposition--on the part of the shopkeeper,--
+allowing, as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping off such as
+have not the excuse of business to cross the threshold.  On the
+door-posts, at either side, above the half-door, hung certain
+perennial articles of merchandise, of which my memory still has
+hanging among its faded photographs a kind of netted scarf and some
+pairs of thick woollen stockings.  More articles, but not very many,
+were stored inside; and there was one drawer, containing children's
+books, out of which I once was treated to a minute quarto ornamented
+with handsome cuts.  This was the only purchase I ever knew to be
+made at the shop kept by the three maiden ladies, though it is
+probable there were others.  So long as I remember the shop, the
+same scarf and, I should say, the same stockings hung on the door-
+posts. --You think I am exaggerating again, and that shopkeepers
+would not keep the same article exposed for years.  Come to me, the
+Professor, and I will take you in five minutes to a shop in this
+city where I will show you an article hanging now in the very place
+where more than thirty years ago I myself inquired the price of it
+of the present head of the establishment. [ This was a glass
+alembic, which hung up in Daniel Henchman's apothecary shop, corner
+of Cambridge and Chambers streets.]
+
+The three maidens were of comely presence, and one of them had had
+claims to be considered a Beauty.  When I saw them in the old
+meeting-house on Sundays, as they rustled in through the aisles in
+silks and satins, not gay, but more than decent, as I remember them,
+I thought of My Lady Bountiful in the history of "Little King
+Pippin," and of the Madam Blaize of Goldsmith (who, by the way, must
+have taken the hint of it from a pleasant poem, "Monsieur de la
+Palisse," attributed to De la Monnoye, in the collection of French
+songs before me).  There was some story of an old romance in which
+the Beauty had played her part.  Perhaps they all had had lovers;
+for, as I said, they were shapely and seemly personages, as I
+remember them; but their lives were out of the flower and in the
+berry at the time of my first recollections.
+
+One after another they all three dropped away, objects of kindly
+attention to the good people round, leaving little or almost
+nothing, and nobody to inherit it.  Not absolutely nothing, of
+course.  There must have been a few old dresses--perhaps some bits
+of furniture, a Bible, and the spectacles the good old souls read it
+through, and little keepsakes, such as make us cry to look at, when
+we find them in old drawers;--such relics there must have been.  But
+there was more.  There was a manuscript of some hundred pages,
+closely written, in which the poor things had chronicled for many
+years the incidents of their daily life.  After their death it was
+passed round somewhat freely, and fell into my hands.  How I have
+cried and laughed and colored over it!  There was nothing in it to
+be ashamed of, perhaps there was nothing in it to laugh at, but such
+a picture of the mode of being of poor simple good old women I do
+believe was never drawn before.  And there were all the smallest
+incidents recorded, such as do really make up humble life, but which
+die out of all mere literary memoirs, as the houses where the
+Egyptians or the Athenians lived crumble and leave only their
+temples standing.  I know, for instance, that on a given day of a
+certain year, a kindly woman, herself a poor widow, now, I trust,
+not without special mercies in heaven for her good deeds,--for I
+read her name on a proper tablet in the churchyard a week ago,--sent
+a fractional pudding from her own table to the Maiden Sisters, who,
+I fear, from the warmth and detail of their description, were
+fasting, or at least on short allowance, about that time.  I know
+who sent them the segment of melon, which in her riotous fancy one
+of them compared to those huge barges to which we give the
+ungracious name of mudscows.  But why should I illustrate further
+what it seems almost a breach of confidence to speak of?  Some kind
+friend, who could challenge a nearer interest than the curious
+strangers into whose hands the book might fall, at last claimed it,
+and I was glad that it should be henceforth sealed to common eyes.
+I learned from it that every good and, alas! every evil act we do
+may slumber unforgotten even in some earthly record.  I got a new
+lesson in that humanity which our sharp race finds it so hard to
+learn.  The poor widow, fighting hard to feed and clothe and educate
+her children, had not forgotten the poorer ancient maidens.
+I remembered it the other day, as I stood by her place of rest, and
+I felt sure that it was remembered elsewhere.  I know there are
+prettier words than pudding, but I can't help it,--the pudding went
+upon the record, I feel sure, with the mite which was cast into the
+treasury by that other poor widow whose deed the world shall
+remember forever, and with the coats and garments which the good
+women cried over, when Tabitha, called by interpretation Dorcas, lay
+dead in the upper chamber, with her charitable needlework strewed
+around her.
+
+--Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters.  You will believe me more
+readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one
+that lay open before me.  Sometimes it was a poem that held it,
+sometimes a drawing, angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere
+hieroglyphic symbol of which I could make nothing.  A rag of cloud
+on one page, as I remember, with a streak of red zigzagging out of
+it across the paper as naturally as a crack runs through a China
+bowl.  On the next page a dead bird,--some little favorite, I
+suppose; for it was worked out with a special love, and I saw on the
+leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life I have had a
+letter sealed,--a round spot where the paper is slightly corrugated,
+and, if there is writing there, the letters are somewhat faint and
+blurred.  Most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic
+traceries.  It was strange to me at first to see how often she
+introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,--for it
+seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none
+too little cared for by Nature to be without its beauty for her
+artist eye and pencil.  By the side of the garden-flowers,--of
+Spring's curled darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to
+sketching maidens, of flower-de-luces and morning-glories, nay,
+oftener than these, and more tenderly caressed by the colored brush
+that rendered them,--were those common growths which fling
+themselves to be crushed under our feet and our wheels, making
+themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that we forget each
+of them is a ray of the Divine beauty.
+
+Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,--just as we
+see them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the
+kindling sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens
+the fields, to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems
+fair to loving eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round
+with milk-white rays; the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale
+blue flowers aflame, one after another, sparingly, as the lights are
+kindled in the candelabra of decaying palaces where the heirs of
+dethroned monarchs are dying out; the red and white clovers, the
+broad, flat leaves of the plantain,--"the white man's foot," as the
+Indians called it,--the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping
+plant which we call "knot-grass," and which loves its life so dearly
+that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings
+to the cracks of the pavement;--all these plants, and many more, she
+wove into her fanciful garlands and borders. --On one of the pages
+were some musical notes.  I touched them from curiosity on a piano
+belonging to one of our boarders.  Strange!  There are passages that
+I have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if
+they were gasping for words to interpret them.  She must have heard
+the strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my
+neighbor's chamber.  The illuminated border she had traced round the
+page that held these notes took the place of the words they seemed
+to be aching for.  Above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-
+hued, anxious and jaded and sullen, if you can imagine such an
+expression in water.  On one side an Alpine needle, as it were, of
+black basalt, girdled with snow.  On the other a threaded waterfall.
+The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had a strange look,--
+one would say the cliff was bleeding;--perhaps she did not mean it.
+Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with his
+wings spread over some unseen object. --And on the very next page a
+procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page
+of Fuller's "Holy War," in which I recognized without difficulty
+every boarder at our table in all the glory of the most resplendent
+caricature--three only excepted,--the Little Gentleman, myself, and
+one other.
+
+I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the
+girl's little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him. --There is
+a left arm again, though;--no,--that is from the "Fighting
+Gladiator,"the "Jeune Heros combattant" of the Louvre;--there is the
+broad ring of the shield.  From a cast, doubtless.  [The separate
+casts of the "Gladiator's" arm look immense; but in its place the
+limb looks light, almost slender,--such is the perfection of that
+miraculous marble.  I never felt as if I touched the life of the old
+Greeks until I looked on that statue.]--Here is something very odd,
+to be sure.  An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures!  What
+could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy?  She
+has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy
+grace.  A Bactrian camel lying under a palm.  A dromedary flashing
+up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the
+desert."  A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the
+forehand, light in the hind-quarter.  [The buffalo is the lion of
+the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough
+collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast.
+And here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering
+curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood under
+their white feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons standing on
+one foot like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold
+stare of monumental effigies. --A very odd page indeed!  Not a
+creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a
+mean figure to look at.  You can make your own comment; I am
+fanciful, you know.  I believe she is trying to idealize what we
+vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light
+of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of
+beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections,
+though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like
+the circle and ellipse.  At any rate, I cannot help referring this
+paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head
+connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.
+--That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine.  I
+believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,
+--if it does not really get freed or half freed from her own.  Did
+you ever see a case of catalepsy?  You know what I mean,--transient
+loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position
+in which they are put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure.  She had
+been talking with him and listening to him one day when the boarders
+moved from the table nearly all at once.  But she sat as before, her
+cheek resting on her hand, her amber eyes wide open and still.  I
+went to her, she was breathing as usual, and her heart was beating
+naturally enough,--but she did not answer.  I bent her arm; it was
+as plastic as softened wag, and kept the place I gave it. --This
+will never do, though, and I sprinkled a few drops of water on her
+forehead.  She started and looked round. --I have been in a dream,--
+she said;--I feel as if all my strength were in this arm;--give me
+your hand! --She took my right hand in her left, which looked soft
+and white enough, but--Good Heaven!  I believe she will crack my
+bones!  All the nervous power in her body must have flashed through
+those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,--she
+who could hardly glove herself when in her common health.  Iris
+turned pale, and the tears came to her eyes;--she saw she had given
+pain.  Then she trembled, and might have fallen but for me;--the
+poor little soul had been in one of those trances that belong to the
+spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly those of women.
+
+To come back to this wondrous book of Iris.  Two pages faced each
+other which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind.
+On the left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked
+with a single bird.  No trace of earth, but still the winged
+creature seemed to be soaring upward and upward.  Facing it, one of
+those black dungeons such as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured.
+I am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of his, out of
+which the Opium-Eater got his nightmare vision, described by another
+as "cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous and forbidden
+things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions among
+mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscriptions."
+Such a black dungeon faced the page that held the blue sky and the
+single bird; at the bottom of it something was coiled,--what, and
+whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not make out.
+
+I told you the young girl's soul was in this book.  As I turned over
+the last leaves I could not help starting.  There were all sorts of
+faces among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders
+that ran round the pages.  They had mostly the outline of childish
+or womanly or manly beauty, without very distinct individuality.
+But at last it seemed to me that some of them were taking on a look
+not wholly unfamiliar to me; there were features that did not seem
+new. --Can it be so?  Was there ever such innocence in a creature so
+full of life?  She tells her heart's secrets as a three-years-old
+child betrays itself without need of being questioned!  This was no
+common miss, such as are turned out in scores from the young-lady-
+factories, with parchments warranting them accomplished and
+virtuous,--in case anybody should question the fact.  I began to
+understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret of a
+real femme incomprise?--for such there are, though they are not the
+ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.
+
+Poets are never young, in one sense.  Their delicate ear hears the
+far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel
+towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by
+them.  A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.  I
+have frequently seen children, long exercised by pain and
+exhaustion, whose features had a strange look of advanced age.  Too
+often one meets such in our charitable institutions.  Their faces
+are saddened and wrinkled, as if their few summers were threescore
+years and ten.
+
+And so, many youthful poets have written as if their hearts were old
+before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool
+and saddening as that of evening in more common lives.  The profound
+melancholy of those lines of Shelley,
+
+     "I could lie down like a tired child
+      And weep away the life of care
+      Which I have borne and yet must bear "
+
+came from a heart, as he says, "too soon grown old,"--at twenty-six
+years, as dull people count time, even when they talk of poets.
+
+I know enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,--only this
+gift of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as
+well as in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of
+feeling and imagery that takes me by surprise.  And then besides,
+and most of all, I am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy
+confidence in me.  Perhaps I owe it to my--Well, no matter!  How one
+must love the editor who first calls him the venerable So-and-So!
+
+--I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down.  The world is
+always ready to receive talent with open arms.  Very often it does
+not know what to do with genius.  Talent is a docile creature.  It
+bows its head meekly while the world slips the collar over it.  It
+backs into the shafts like a lamb.  It draws its load cheerfully,
+and is patient of the bit and of the whip.  But genius is always
+impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train.
+
+Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius,--namely,
+that it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will, and
+therefore more distinctly human in its character.  Genius, on the
+other hand, is much more like those instincts which govern the
+admirable movements of the lower creatures, and therefore seems to
+have something of the lower or animal character.  A goose flies by a
+chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.  A poet,
+like the goose, sails without visible landmarks to unexplored
+regions of truth, which philosophy has yet to lay down on its atlas.
+The philosopher gets his track by observation; the poet trusts to
+his inner sense, and makes the straighter and swifter line.
+
+And yet, to look at it in another light, is not even the lowest
+instinct more truly divine than any voluntary human act done by the
+suggestion of reason?  What is a bee's architecture but an
+unobstructed divine thought?--what is a builder's approximative rule
+but an obstructed thought of the Creator, a mutilated and imperfect
+copy of some absolute rule Divine Wisdom has established,
+transmitted through a human soul as an image through clouded glass?
+
+Talent is a very common family-trait; genius belongs rather to
+individuals;--just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family,
+but rarely a whole brood of either.  Talent is often to be envied,
+and genius very commonly to be pitied.  It stands twice the chance
+of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute.
+It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass
+against somebody's vested ideas,--blasphemy against somebody's O'm,
+or intangible private truth.
+
+--What is the use of my weighing out antitheses in this way, like a
+rhetorical grocer?--You know twenty men of talent, who are making
+their way in the world; you may, perhaps, know one man of genius,
+and very likely do not want to know any more.  For a divine
+instinct, such as drives the goose southward and the poet
+heavenward, is a hard thing to manage, and proves too strong for
+many whom it possesses.  It must have been a terrible thing to have
+a friend like Chatterton or Burns.  And here is a being who
+certainly has more than talent, at once poet and artist in tendency,
+if not yet fairly developed,--a woman, too;--and genius grafted on
+womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem, as you may see
+a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which cannot keep pace
+with its evolution.
+
+I think now you know something of this young person.  She wants
+nothing but an atmosphere to expand in.  Now and then one meets with
+a nature for which our hard, practical New England life is obviously
+utterly incompetent.  It comes up, as a Southern seed, dropped by
+accident in one of our gardens, finds itself trying to grow and blow
+into flower among the homely roots and the hardy shrubs that
+surround it.  There is no question that certain persons who are born
+among us find themselves many degrees too far north.  Tropical by
+organization, they cannot fight for life with our eastern and
+northwestern breezes without losing the color and fragrance into
+which their lives would have blossomed in the latitude of myrtles
+and oranges.  Strange effects are produced by suffering any living
+thing to be developed under conditions such as Nature had not
+intended for it.  A French physiologist confined some tadpoles under
+water in the dark.  Removed from the natural stimulus of light, they
+did not develop legs and arms at the proper period of their growth,
+and so become frogs; they swelled and spread into gigantic tadpoles.
+I have seen a hundred colossal human tadpoles, overgrown Zarvce or
+embryos; nay, I am afraid we Protestants should look on a
+considerable proportion of the Holy Father's one hundred and thirty-
+nine millions as spiritual larvae, sculling about in the dark by the
+aid of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs,
+and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven
+into the lungs made to receive it.  Of course we never try to keep
+young souls in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or
+two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been
+bred and fed!  Never!  Never.  Never?
+
+Now to go back to our plant.  You may know, that, for the earlier
+stages of development of almost any vegetable, you only want air,
+water, light, and warmth.  But by-and-by, if it is to have special
+complex principles as a part of its organization, they must be
+supplied by the soil;--your pears will crack, if the root of the
+tree gets no iron,--your asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do.
+Just at the period of adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to
+come into flower and to set its fruit.  Then it is that many young
+natures, having exhausted the spiritual soil round them of all it
+contains of the elements they demand, wither away, undeveloped and
+uncolored, unless they are transplanted.
+
+Pray for these dear young souls!  This is the second natural birth;-
+for I do not speak of those peculiar religious experiences which
+form the point of transition in many lives between the consciousness
+of a general relation to the Divine nature and a special personal
+relation.  The litany should count a prayer for them in the list of
+its supplications; masses should be said for them as for souls in
+purgatory; all good Christians should remember them as they remember
+those in peril through travel or sickness or in warfare.
+
+I would transport this child to Rome at once, if I had my will.  She
+should ripen under an Italian sun.  She should walk under the
+frescoed vaults of palaces, until her colors deepened to those of
+Venetian beauties, and her forms were perfected into rivalry with
+the Greek marbles, and the east wind was out of her soil.  Has she
+not exhausted this lean soil of the elements her growing nature
+requires?
+
+I do not know.  The magnolia grows and comes into full flower on
+Cape Ann, many degrees out of its proper region.  I was riding once
+along that delicious road between the hills and the sea, when we
+passed a thicket where there seemed to be a chance of finding it.
+In five minutes I had fallen on the trees in full blossom, and
+filled my arms with the sweet, resplendent flowers.  I could not
+believe I was in our cold, northern Essex, which, in the dreary
+season when I pass its slate-colored, unpainted farm-houses, and
+huge, square, windy, 'squire-built "mansions," looks as brown and
+unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all trodden out and the
+colored fringe worn from all its border.
+
+If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a
+poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well?  Yes,
+but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak
+of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders,
+is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of
+imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread
+its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone
+of humanity?
+
+Take the poet.  On the one hand, I believe that a person with the
+poetical faculty finds material everywhere.  The grandest objects of
+sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations.  The
+sky, the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death love, the hope
+and vision of eternity,--these are images that write themselves in
+poetry in every soul which has anything of the divine gift.
+
+On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished
+life, in distinction from a rich and suggestive one.  Which our
+common New England life might be considered, I will not decide.  But
+there are some things I think the poet misses in our western Eden.
+I trust it is not unpatriotic to mention them in this point of view
+as they come before us in so many other aspects.
+
+There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which
+we grow.  At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked
+up an Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow.  At Canoe Meadow, in the
+Berkshire Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads.  So everywhere
+Indian arrowheads.  Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who
+knows? who cares?  There is no history to the red race,--there is
+hardly an individual in it;--a few instincts on legs and holding a
+tomahawk--there is the Indian of all time.  The story of one red ant
+is the story of all red ants.  So, the poet, in trying to wing his
+way back through the life that has kindled, flitted, and faded along
+our watercourses and on our southern hillsides for unknown
+generations, finds nothing to breathe or fly in; he meets
+
+    "A vast vacuity!  all unawares,
+     Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
+     Ten thousand fathom deep."
+
+But think of the Old World,--that part of it which is the seat of
+ancient civilization!  The stakes of the Britons' stockades are
+still standing in the bed of the Thames.  The ploughman turns up an
+old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the
+time of the Caesars.  In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to
+be of yesterday,--Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding
+newcomer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls
+of Fiesole or Volterra.  It makes a man human to live on these old
+humanized soils.  He cannot help marching in step with his kind in
+the rear of such a procession.  They say a dead man's hand cures
+swellings, if laid on them.  There is nothing like the dead cold
+hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the
+solemn flow of the life of our race.  Rousseau came out of one of
+his sad self-torturing fits, as he cast his eye on the arches of the
+old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.
+
+I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving
+railroad village.  The new "depot," the smartly-painted pine houses,
+the spacious brick hotel, the white meeting-house, and the row of
+youthful and leggy trees before it, are exhilarating.  They speak of
+progress, and the time when there shall be a city, with a His Honor
+the Mayor, in the place of their trim but transient architectural
+growths.  Pardon me, if I prefer the pyramids.  They seem to me
+crystals formed from a stronger solution of humanity than the
+steeple of the new meeting-house.  I may be wrong, but the Tiber has
+a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the Pons Alius, even
+more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles eddying round the
+piles of West Boston Bridge.
+
+Then, again, we Yankees are a kind of gypsies,--a mechanical and
+migratory race.  A poet wants a home.  He can dispense with an
+apple-parer and a reaping-machine.  I feel this more for others than
+for myself, for the home of my birth and childhood has been as yet
+exempted from the change which has invaded almost everything around
+it.
+
+--Pardon me a short digression.  To what small things our memory and
+our affections attach themselves!  I remember, when I was a child,
+that one of the girls planted some Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs in the
+southwest gorner of our front-yard.  Well, I left the paternal roof
+and wandered in other lands, and learned to think in the words of
+strange people.  But after many years, as I looked on the little
+front-yard again, it occurred to me that there used to be some Star-
+of-Bethlehems in the southwest corner.  The grass was tall there,
+and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and
+glossier.  Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he
+hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of
+Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my
+monumental memorial-flower.  Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly
+in her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they
+are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by
+the shade of the elms and rooted in the matted turf.
+
+Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial
+as that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil,
+you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time.  Even a stone
+with a whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the
+back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory.
+This intussusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their
+faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured
+in the material structure of the thinking centre itself.  In the
+very core of the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the
+soul, is a small mineral deposit, consisting, as I have seen it in
+the microscope, of grape-like masses of crystalline matter.
+
+But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the
+Star-of-Bethlehems, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest
+home-feeling.  Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the
+dwelling of pleasant old Neighbor Walrus.  I remember the sweet
+honeysuckle that I saw in flower against the wall of his house a few
+months ago, as long as I remember the sky and stars.  That clump of
+peonies, butting their purple heads through the soil every spring in
+just the same circle, and by-and-by unpacking their hard balls of
+buds in flowers big enough to make a double handful of leaves, has
+come up in just that place, Neighbor Walrus tells me, for more years
+than I have passed on this planet.  It is a rare privilege in our
+nomadic state to find the home of one's childhood and its immediate
+neighborhood thus unchanged.  Many born poets, I am afraid, flower
+poorly in song, or not at all, because they have been too often
+transplanted.
+
+Then a good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;--their
+voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery
+without elasticity or oil.  I wish it were fair to print a letter a
+young girl, about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since.  "I
+am *** *** ***," she says, and tells her whole name outright.  Ah!--
+said I, when I read that first frank declaration,--you are one of
+the right sort!--She was.  A winged creature among close-clipped
+barn door fowl.  How tired the poor girl was of the dull life about
+her,--the old woman's "skeleton hand " at the window opposite,
+drawing her curtains,--"Ma'am shooing away the hens,"--the vacuous
+country eyes staring at her as only country eyes can stare,--a
+routine of mechanical duties, and the soul's half-articulated cry
+for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,--pray for her, and for all
+such!  Faith often cures their longings; but it is so hard to give a
+soul to heaven that has not first been trained in the fullest and
+sweetest human affections!  Too often they fling their hearts away
+on unworthy objects.  Too often they pine in a secret discontent,
+which spreads its leaden cloud over the morning of their youth.  The
+immeasurable distance between one of these delicate natures and the
+average youths among whom is like to be her only choice makes one's
+heart ache.  How many women are born too finely organized in sense
+and soul for the highway they must walk with feet unshod!  Life is
+adjusted to the wants of the stronger sex.  There are plenty of
+torrents to be crossed in its journey; but their stepping-stones are
+measured by the stride of man, and not of woman.
+
+Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart.  So says
+the great medical authority, Laennec.  Incurable cases of this kind
+used to find their hospitals in convents.  We have the disease in
+New England,--but not the hospitals.  I don't like to think of it.
+I will not believe our young Iris is going to die out in this way.
+Providence will find her some great happiness, or affliction, or
+duty,--and which would be best for her, I cannot tell.  One thing is
+sure: the interest she takes in her little neighbor is getting to be
+more engrossing than ever.  Something is the matter with him, and
+she knows it, and I think worries herself about it.
+
+I wonder sometimes how so fragile and distorted a frame has kept the
+fiery spirit that inhabits it so long its tenant.  He accounts for
+it in his own way.
+
+The air of the Old World is good for nothing, he said, one day. --
+Used up, Sir,--breathed over and over again.  You must come to this
+side, Sir, for an atmosphere fit to breathe nowadays.  Did not
+worthy Mr. Higginson say that a breath of New England's air is
+better than a sup of Old England's ale?  I ought to have died when I
+was a boy, Sir; but I could n't die in this Boston air,--and I think
+I shall have to go to New York one of these days, when it's time for
+me to drop this bundle,--or to New Orleans, where they have the
+yellow fever,--or to Philadelphia, where they have so many doctors.
+
+This was some time ago; but of late he has seemed, as I have before
+said, to be ailing.  An experienced eye, such as I think I may call
+mine, can tell commonly whether a man is going to die, or not, long
+before he or his friends are alarmed about him.  I don't like it.
+
+Iris has told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her
+family, and that she is afraid she has it.  Those who are so endowed
+look upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him.  According to
+the degree to which it covers him, his death will be near or more
+remote.  It is an awful faculty; but science gives one too much like
+it.  Luckily for our friends, most of us who have the scientific
+second-sight school ourselves not to betray our knowledge by word or
+look.
+
+Day by day, as the Little Gentleman comes to the table, it seems to
+me that the shadow of some approaching change falls darker and
+darker over his countenance.  Nature is struggling with something,
+and I am afraid she is under in the wrestling-match.  You do not
+care much, perhaps, for my particular conjectures as to the nature
+of his difficulty.  I should say, however, from the sudden flushes
+to which he is subject, and certain other marks which, as an expert,
+I know how to interpret, that his heart was in trouble; but then he
+presses his hand to the right side, as if there were the centre of
+his uneasiness.
+
+When I say difficulty about the heart, I do not mean any of those
+sentimental maladies of that organ which figure more largely in
+romances than on the returns which furnish our Bills of Mortality.
+I mean some actual change in the organ itself, which may carry him
+off by slow and painful degrees, or strike him down with one huge
+pang and only time for a single shriek,--as when the shot broke
+through the brave Captain Nolan's breast, at the head of the Light
+Brigade at Balaklava, and with a loud cry he dropped dead from his
+saddle.
+
+I thought it only fair to say something of what I apprehended to
+some who were entitled to be warned.  The landlady's face fell when
+I mentioned my fears.
+
+Poor man! --she said. --And will leave the best room empty!  Has n't
+he got any sisters or nieces or anybody to see to his things, if he
+should be took away?  Such a sight of cases, full of everything!
+Never thought of his failin' so suddin.  A complication of diseases,
+she expected.  Liver-complaint one of 'em?
+
+After this first involuntary expression of the too natural selfish
+feelings, (which we must not judge very harshly, unless we happen to
+be poor widows ourselves, with children to keep filled, covered, and
+taught,--rents high,--beef eighteen to twenty cents per pound,)--
+after this first squeak of selfishness, followed by a brief movement
+of curiosity, so invariable in mature females, as to the nature of
+the complaint which threatens the life of a friend or any person who
+may happen to be mentioned as ill,--the worthy soul's better
+feelings struggled up to the surface, and she grieved for the doomed
+invalid, until a tear or two came forth and found their way down a
+channel worn for them since the early days of her widowhood.
+
+Oh, this dreadful, dreadful business of being the prophet of evil!
+Of all the trials which those who take charge of others' health and
+lives have to undergo, this is the most painful.  It is all so plain
+to the practised eye!--and there is the poor wife, the doting
+mother, who has never suspected anything, or at least has clung
+always to the hope which you are just going to wrench away from her!
+--I must tell Iris that I think her poor friend is in a precarious
+state.  She seems nearer to him than anybody.
+
+I did tell her.  Whatever emotion it produced, she kept a still
+face, except, perhaps, a little trembling of the lip. --Could I be
+certain that there was any mortal complaint?--Why, no, I could not
+be certain; but it looked alarming to me. --He shall have some of my
+life,--she said.
+
+I suppose this to have been a fancy of hers, or a kind of magnetic
+power she could give out;--at any rate, I cannot help thinking she
+wills her strength away from herself, for she has lost vigor and
+color from that day.  I have sometimes thought he gained the force
+she lost; but this may have been a whim, very probably.
+
+One day she came suddenly to me, looking deadly pale.  Her lips
+moved, as if she were speaking; but I could not at first hear a
+word.  Her hair looked strangely, as if lifting itself, and her eyes
+were full of wild light.  She sunk upon a chair, and I thought was
+falling into one of her trances.  Something had frozen her blood
+with fear; I thought, from what she said, half audibly, that she
+believed she had seen a shrouded figure.
+
+That night, at about eleven o'clock, I was sent for to see the
+Little Gentleman, who was taken suddenly ill.  Bridget, the servant,
+went before me with a light.  The doors were both unfastened, and I
+found myself ushered, without hindrance, into the dim light of the
+mysterious apartment I had so longed to enter.
+
+I found these stanzas in the young girl's book among many others.  I
+give them as characterizing the tone of her sadder moments.
+
+
+          UNDER THE VIOLETS.
+
+Her hands are cold; her face is white;
+No more her pulses come and go;
+Her eyes are shut to life and light;
+Fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
+And lay her where the violets blow.
+
+But not beneath a graven stone,
+To plead for tears with alien eyes;
+A slender cross of wood alone
+Shall say, that here a maiden lies
+In peace beneath the peaceful skies.
+
+And gray old trees of hugest limb
+Shall wheel their circling shadows round
+To make the scorching sunlight dim
+That drinks the greenness from the ground,
+And drop their dead leaves on her mound.
+
+When o'er their boughs the squirrels run,
+And through their leaves the robins call,
+And, ripening in the autumn sun,
+The acorns and the chestnuts fall,
+Doubt not that she will heed them all.
+
+For her the morning choir shall sing
+Its matins from the branches high,
+And every minstrel voice of spring,
+That trills beneath the April sky,
+Shall greet her with its earliest cry.
+
+When, turning round their dial-track,
+Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
+Her little mourners, clad in black,
+The crickets, sliding through the grass,
+Shall pipe for her an evening mass.
+
+At last the rootlets of the trees
+Shall find the prison where she lies,
+And bear the buried dust they seize
+In leaves and blossoms to the skies.
+So may the soul that warmed it rise!
+
+If any, born of kindlier blood,
+Should ask, What maiden lies below?
+Say only this: A tender bud,
+That tried to blossom in the snow,
+Lies withered where the violets blow.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+You will know, perhaps, in the course of half an hour's reading,
+what has been haunting my hours of sleep and waking for months.  I
+cannot tell, of course, whether you are a nervous person or not.
+If, however, you are such a person,--if it is late at night,--if all
+the rest of the household have gone off to bed,--if the wind is
+shaking your windows as if a human hand were rattling the sashes,--
+if your candle or lamp is low and will soon burn out,--let me advise
+you to take up some good quiet sleepy volume, or attack the
+"Critical Notices" of the last Quarterly and leave this to be read
+by daylight, with cheerful voices round, and people near by who
+would hear you, if you slid from your chair and came down in a lump
+on the floor.
+
+I do not say that your heart will beat as mine did, I am willing to
+confess, when I entered the dim chamber.  Did I not tell you that I
+was sensitive and imaginative, and that I had lain awake with
+thinking what were the strange movements and sounds which I heard
+late at night in my little neighbor's apartment?  It had come to
+that pass that I was truly unable to separate what I had really
+heard from what I had dreamed in those nightmares to which I have
+been subject, as before mentioned.  So, when I walked into the room,
+and Bridget, turning back, closed the door and left me alone with
+its tenant, I do believe you could have grated a nutmeg on my skin,
+such a "goose-flesh " shiver ran over it.  It was not fear, but what
+I call nervousness,--unreasoning, but irresistible; as when, for
+instance, one looking at the sun going down says, "I will count
+fifty before it disappears"; and as he goes on and it becomes
+doubtful whether he will reach the number, he gets strangely
+flurried, and his imagination pictures life and death and heaven and
+hell as the issues depending on the completion or non-completion of
+the fifty he is counting.  Extreme curiosity will excite some people
+as much as fear, or what resembles fear, acts on some other less
+impressible natures.
+
+I may find myself in the midst of strange facts in this little
+conjurer's room.  Or, again, there may be nothing in this poor
+invalid's chamber but some old furniture, such as they say came over
+in the Mayflower.  All this is just what I mean to, find out while
+I am looking at the Little Gentleman, who has suddenly become my
+patient.  The simplest things turn out to be unfathomable mysteries;
+the most mysterious appearances prove to be the most commonplace
+objects in disguise.
+
+I wonder whether the boys who live in Roxbury and Dorchester are
+ever moved to tears or filled with silent awe as they look upon the
+rocks and fragments of "puddingstone" abounding in those localities.
+I have my suspicions that those boys "heave a stone" or "fire a
+brickbat," composed of the conglomerate just mentioned, without any
+more tearful or philosophical contemplations than boys of less
+favored regions expend on the same performance.  Yet a lump of
+puddingstone is a thing to look at, to think about, to study over,
+to dream upon, to go crazy with, to beat one's brains out against.
+Look at that pebble in it.  From what cliff was it broken?  On what
+beach rolled by the waves of what ocean?  How and when imbedded in
+soft ooze, which itself became stone, and by-and-by was lifted into
+bald summits and steep cliffs, such as you may see on Meetinghouse-
+Hill any day--yes, and mark the scratches on their faces left when
+the boulder-carrying glaciers planed the surface of the continent
+with such rough tools that the storms have not worn the marks out of
+it with all the polishing of ever so many thousand years?
+
+Or as you pass a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it
+any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time.
+Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are
+fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish.  One
+of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an
+opaque mass in its centre.  And while you are looking, the opaque
+mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like
+a forming planet,--life beginning in the microcosm, as in the great
+worlds of the firmament, with the revolution that turns the surface
+in ceaseless round to the source of life and light.
+
+A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk!  Before you have solved their
+mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified
+slag, or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces.  Mysteries
+are common enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and
+Dorchester think of "brickbats " and the spawn of creatures that
+live in roadside puddles.
+
+But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly
+plain, when we can get at them so as to turn them over.  How many
+ghosts that "thick men's blood with cold" prove to be shirts hung
+out to dry!  How many mermaids have been made out of seals!  How
+many times have horse-mackerels been taken for the sea-serpent!
+
+--Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the
+matter with the patient.  That is what I say to myself, as I draw a
+chair to the bedside.  The bed is an old-fashioned, dark mahogany
+four-poster.  It was never that which made the noise of something
+moving.  It is too heavy to be pushed about the room. --The Little
+Gentleman was sitting, bolstered up by pillows, with his hands
+clasped and their united palms resting on the back of the head, one
+of the three or four positions specially affected by persons whose
+breathing is difficult from disease of the heart or other causes.
+
+Sit down, Sir,--he said,--sit down!  I have come to the hill
+Difficulty, Sir, and am fighting my way up. --His speech was
+laborious and interrupted.
+
+Don't talk,--I said,--except to answer my questions.--And I
+proceeded to "prospect" for the marks of some local mischief, which
+you know is at the bottom of all these attacks, though we do not
+always find it.  I suppose I go to work pretty much like other
+professional folks of my temperament.  Thus:
+
+Wrist, if you please. --I was on his right side, but he presented
+his left wrist, crossing it over the other. --I begin to count,
+holding watch in left hand.  One, two, three, four,--What a handsome
+hand! wonder if that splendid stone is a carbuncle. --One, two,
+three, four, five, six, seven,--Can't see much, it is so dark,
+except one white object. --One, two, three, four,--Hang it!  eighty
+or ninety in the minute, I guess. --Tongue, if you please. --Tongue
+is put out.  Forget to look at it, or, rather, to take any
+particular notice of it;--but what is that white object, with the
+long arm stretching up as if pointing to the sky, just as Vesalius
+and Spigelius and those old fellows used to put their skeletons?  I
+don't think anything of such objects, you know; but what should he
+have it in his chamber for?  As I had found his pulse irregular and
+intermittent, I took out a stethoscope, which is a pocket-spyglass
+for looking into people's chests with your ears, and laid it over
+the place where the heart beats.  I missed the usual beat of the
+organ. --How is this?--I said,--where is your heart gone to?--He
+took the stethoscope and shifted it across to the right side; there
+was a displacement of the organ. --I am ill-packed,--he said;--there
+was no room for my heart in its place as it is with other men. --God
+help him!
+
+It is hard to draw the line between scientific curiosity and the
+desire for the patient's sake to learn all the details of his
+condition.  I must look at this patient's chest, and thump it and
+listen to it.  For this is a case of ectopia cordis, my boy,--
+displacement of the heart; and it is n't every day you get a chance
+to overhaul such an interesting malformation.  And so I managed to
+do my duty and satisfy my curiosity at the same time.  The torso was
+slight and deformed; the right arm attenuated,--the left full,
+round, and of perfect symmetry.  It had run away with the life of
+the other limbs,--a common trick enough of Nature's, as I told you
+before.  If you see a man with legs withered from childhood, keep
+out of the way of his arms, if you have a quarrel with him.  He has
+the strength of four limbs in two; and if he strikes you, it is an
+arm-blow plus a kick administered from the shoulder instead of the
+haunch, where it should have started from.
+
+Still examining him as a patient, I kept my eyes about me to search
+all parts of the chamber and went on with the double process, as
+before. --Heart hits as hard as a fist,--bellows-sound over mitral
+valves (professional terms you need not attend to). --What the deuse
+is that long case for?  Got his witch grandmother mummied in it?
+And three big mahogany presses,--hey?--A diabolical suspicion came
+over me which I had had once before,--that he might be one of our
+modern alchemists,--you understand, make gold, you know, or what
+looks like it, sometimes with the head of a king or queen or of
+Liberty to embellish one side of the piece. --Don't I remember
+hearing him shut a door and lock it once?  What do you think was
+kept under that lock?  Let's have another look at his hand, to see
+if there are any calluses.
+
+One can tell a man's business, if it is a handicraft, very often by
+just taking a look at his open hand.  Ah!  Four calluses at the end
+of the fingers of the right hand.  None on those of the left.  Ah,
+ha!  What do those mean?
+
+All this seems longer in the telling, of course, than it was in
+fact.  While I was making these observations of the objects around
+me, I was also forming my opinion as to the kind of case with which
+I had to deal.
+
+There are three wicks, you know, to the lamp of a man's life: brain,
+blood, and breath.  Press the brain a little, its light goes out,
+followed by both the others.  Stop the heart a minute and out go all
+three of the wicks.  Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently
+the fluid ceases to supply the other centres of flame, and all is
+soon stagnation, cold, and darkness.  The "tripod of life" a French
+physiologist called these three organs.  It is all clear enough
+which leg of the tripod is going to break down here.  I could tell
+you exactly what the difficulty is;--which would be as intelligible
+and amusing as a watchmaker's description of a diseased timekeeper
+to a ploughman.  It is enough to say, that I found just what I
+expected to, and that I think this attack is only the prelude of
+more serious consequences,--which expression means you very well
+know what.
+
+And now the secrets of this life hanging on a thread must surely
+come out.  If I have made a mystery where there was none, my
+suspicions will be shamed, as they have often been before.  If there
+is anything strange, my visits will clear it up.
+
+I sat an hour or two by the side of the Little Gentleman's bed,
+after giving him some henbane to quiet his brain, and some foxglove,
+which an imaginative French professor has called the "Opium of the
+Heart."  Under their influence he gradually fell into an uneasy,
+half-waking slumber, the body fighting hard for every breath, and
+the mind wandering off in strange fancies and old recollections,
+which escaped from his lips in broken sentences.
+
+--The last of 'em,--he said,--the last of 'em all,--thank God!  And
+the grave he lies in will look just as well as if he had been
+straight.  Dig it deep, old Martin, dig it deep,--and let it be as
+long as other folks' graves.  And mind you get the sods flat, old
+man,--flat as ever a straight-backed young fellow was laid under.
+And then, with a good tall slab at the head, and a foot-stone six
+foot away from it, it'll look just as if there was a man underneath.
+
+A man!  Who said he was a man?  No more men of that pattern to bear
+his name! --Used to be a good-looking set enough. --Where 's all the
+manhood and womanhood gone to since his great-grandfather was the
+strongest man that sailed out of the town of Boston, and poor Leah
+there the handsomest woman in Essex, if she was a witch?
+
+--Give me some light,--he said,--more light.  I want to see the
+picture.
+
+He had started either from a dream or a wandering reverie.  I was
+not unwilling to have more light in the apartment, and presently had
+lighted an astral lamp that stood on a table. --He pointed to a
+portrait hanging against the wall. --Look at her,--he said,--look at
+her!  Wasn't that a pretty neck to slip a hangman's noose over?
+
+The portrait was of a young woman, something more than twenty years
+old, perhaps.  There were few pictures of any merit painted in New
+England before the time of Smibert, and I am at a loss to know what
+artist could have taken this half-length, which was evidently from
+life.  It was somewhat stiff and flat, but the grace of the figure
+and the sweetness of the expression reminded me of the angels of the
+early Florentine painters.  She must have been of some
+consideration, for she was dressed in paduasoy and lace with hanging
+sleeves, and the old carved frame showed how the picture had been
+prized by its former owners.  A proud eye she had, with all her
+sweetness. --I think it was that which hanged her, as his strong arm
+hanged Minister George Burroughs;--but it may have been a little
+mole on one cheek, which the artist had just hinted as a beauty
+rather than a deformity.  You know, I suppose, that nursling imps
+addict themselves, after the fashion of young opossums, to these
+little excrescences.  "Witch-marks" were good evidence that a young
+woman was one of the Devil's wet-nurses;--I should like to have seen
+you make fun of them in those days! --Then she had a brooch in her
+bodice, that might have been taken for some devilish amulet or
+other; and she wore a ring upon one of her fingers, with a red stone
+in it, that flamed as if the painter had dipped his pencil in fire;
+--who knows but that it was given her by a midnight suitor fresh
+from that fierce element, and licensed for a season to leave his
+couch of flame to tempt the unsanctified hearts of earthly maidens
+and brand their cheeks with the print of his scorching kisses?
+
+She and I,--he said, as he looked steadfastly at the canvas,--she
+and I are the last of 'em. --She will stay, and I shall go.  They
+never painted me,--except when the boys used to make pictures of me
+with chalk on the board-fences.  They said the doctors would want my
+skeleton when I was dead. --You are my friend, if you are a doctor,
+--a'n't you?
+
+I just gave him my hand.  I had not the heart to speak.
+
+I want to lie still,--he said,--after I am put to bed upon the hill
+yonder.  Can't you have a great stone laid over me, as they did over
+the first settlers in the old burying-ground at Dorchester, so as to
+keep the wolves from digging them up?  I never slept easy over the
+sod;--I should like to lie quiet under it.  And besides,--he said,
+in a kind of scared whisper,--I don't want to have my bones stared
+at, as my body has been.  I don't doubt I was a remarkable case;
+but, for God's sake, oh, for God's sake, don't let 'em make a show
+of the cage I have been shut up in and looked through the bars of
+for so many years.
+
+I have heard it said that the art of healing makes men hard-hearted
+and indifferent to human suffering.  I am willing to own that there
+is often a professional hardness in surgeons, just as there is in
+theologians,--only much less in degree than in these last.  It does
+not commonly improve the sympathies of a man to be in the habit of
+thrusting knives into his fellow-creatures and burning them with
+red-hot irons, any more than it improves them to hold the blinding-
+white cantery of Gehenna by its cool handle and score and crisp
+young souls with it until they are scorched into the belief of--
+Transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception.  And, to say the
+plain truth, I think there are a good many coarse people in both
+callings.  A delicate nature will not commonly choose a pursuit
+which implies the habitual infliction of suffering, so readily as
+some gentler office.  Yet, while I am writing this paragraph, there
+passes by my window, on his daily errand of duty, not seeing me,
+though I catch a glimpse of his manly features through the oval
+glass of his chaise, as he drives by, a surgeon of skill and
+standing, so friendly, so modest, so tenderhearted in all his ways,
+that, if he had not approved himself at once adroit and firm, one
+would have said he was of too kindly a mould to be the minister of
+pain, even if he were saving pain.
+
+You may be sure that some men, even among those who have chosen the
+task of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more
+thoughtful and truly compassionate in the midst of their cruel
+experience.  They become less nervous, but more sympathetic.  They
+have a truer sensibility for others' pain, the more they study pain
+and disease in the light of science.  I have said this without
+claiming any special growth in humanity for myself, though I do hope
+I grow tenderer in my feelings as I grow older.  At any rate, this
+was not a time in which professional habits could keep down certain
+instincts of older date than these.
+
+This poor little man's appeal to my humanity against the supposed
+rapacity of Science, which he feared would have her "specimen," if
+his ghost should walk restlessly a thousand years, waiting for his
+bones to be laid in the dust, touched my heart.  But I felt bound to
+speak cheerily.
+
+--We won't die yet awhile, if we can help it,--I said,--and I trust
+we can help it.  But don't be afraid; if I live longest, I will see
+that your resting place is kept sacred till the dandelions and
+buttercups blow over you.
+
+He seemed to have got his wits together by this time, and to have a
+vague consciousness that he might have been saying more than he
+meant for anybody's ears. --I have been talking a little wild, Sir,
+eh? he said. --There is a great buzzing in my head with those drops
+of yours, and I doubt if my tongue has not been a little looser than
+I would have it, Sir.  But I don't much want to live, Sir; that's
+the truth of the matter, and it does rather please me to think that
+fifty years from now nobody will know that the place where I lie
+does n't hold as stout and straight a man as the best of 'em that
+stretch out as if they were proud of the room they take.  You may
+get me well, if you can, Sir, if you think it worth while to try;
+but I tell you there has been no time for this many a year when the
+smell of fresh earth was not sweeter to me than all the flowers that
+grow out of it.  There's no anodyne like your good clean gravel,
+Sir.  But if you can keep me about awhile, and it amuses you to try,
+you may show your skill upon me, if you like.  There is a pleasure
+or two that I love the daylight for, and I think the night is not
+far off, at best. --I believe I shall sleep now; you may leave me,
+and come, if you like, in the morning.
+
+Before I passed out, I took one more glance round the apartment.
+The beautiful face of the portrait looked at me, as portraits often
+do, with a frightful kind of intelligence in its eyes.  The drapery
+fluttered on the still outstretched arm of the tall object near the
+window;--a crack of this was open, no doubt, and some breath of wind
+stirred the hanging folds.  In my excited state, I seemed to see
+something ominous in that arm pointing to the heavens.  I thought of
+the figures in the Dance of Death at Basle, and that other on the
+panels of the covered Bridge at Lucerne, and it seemed to me that
+the grim mask who mingles with every crowd and glides over every
+threshold was pointing the sick man to his far home, and would soon
+stretch out his bony hand and lead him or drag him on the unmeasured
+journey towards it.
+
+The fancy had possession of me, and I shivered again as when I first
+entered the chamber.  The picture and the shrouded shape; I saw only
+these two objects.  They were enough.  The house was deadly still,
+and the night-wind, blowing through an open window, struck me as
+from a field of ice, at the moment I passed into the creaking
+corridor.  As I turned into the common passage, a white figure,
+holding a lamp, stood full before me.  I thought at first it was one
+of those images made to stand in niches and hold a light in their
+hands.  But the illusion was momentary, and my eyes speedily
+recovered from the shock of the bright flame and snowy drapery to
+see that the figure was a breathing one.  It was Iris, in one of her
+statue-trances.  She had come down, whether sleeping or waking, I
+knew not at first, led by an instinct that told her she was wanted,-
+-or, possibly, having overheard and interpreted the sound of our
+movements,--or, it may be, having learned from the servant that
+there was trouble which might ask for a woman's hand.  I sometimes
+think women have a sixth sense, which tells them that others, whom
+they cannot see or hear, are in suffering.  How surely we find them
+at the bedside of the dying!  How strongly does Nature plead for
+them, that we should draw our first breath in their arms, as we sigh
+away our last upon their faithful breasts!
+
+With white, bare feet, her hair loosely knotted, clad as the
+starlight knew her, and the morning when she rose from slumber, save
+that she had twisted a scarf round her long dress, she stood still
+as a stone before me, holding in one hand a lighted coil of
+waxtaper, and in the other a silver goblet.  I held my own lamp
+close to her, as if she had been a figure of marble, and she did not
+stir.  There was no breach of propriety then, to scare the Poor
+Relation with and breed scandal out of.  She had been "warned in a
+dream," doubtless suggested by her waking knowledge and the sounds
+which had reached her exalted sense.  There was nothing more natural
+than that she should have risen and girdled her waist, and lighted
+her taper, and found the silver goblet with "Ex dono pupillorum" on
+it, from which she had taken her milk and possets through all her
+childish years, and so gone blindly out to find her place at the
+bedside,--a Sister of Charity without the cap and rosary; nay,
+unknowing whither her feet were leading her, and with wide blank
+eyes seeing nothing but the vision that beckoned her along. --Well,
+I must wake her from her slumber or trance. --I called her name, but
+she did not heed my voice.
+
+The Devil put it into my head that I would kiss one handsome young
+girl before I died, and now was my chance.  She never would know it,
+and I should carry the remembrance of it with me into the grave, and
+a rose perhaps grow out of my dust, as a brier did out of Lord
+Lovers, in memory of that immortal moment!  Would it wake her from
+her trance?  and would she see me in the flush of my stolen triumph,
+and hate and despise me ever after?  Or should I carry off my trophy
+undetected, and always from that time say to myself, when I looked
+upon her in the glory of youth and the splendor of beauty, "My lips
+have touched those roses and made their sweetness mine forever"?
+You think my cheek was flushed, perhaps, and my eyes were glittering
+with this midnight flash of opportunity.  On the contrary, I believe
+I was pale, very pale, and I know that I trembled.  Ah, it is the
+pale passions that are the fiercest,--it is the violence of the
+chill that gives the measure of the fever!  The fighting-boy of our
+school always turned white when he went out to a pitched battle with
+the bully of some neighboring village; but we knew what his
+bloodless cheeks meant,--the blood was all in his stout heart,--he
+was a slight boy, and there was not enough to redden his face and
+fill his heart both at once.
+
+Perhaps it is making a good deal of a slight matter, to tell the
+internal conflicts in the heart of a quiet person something more
+than juvenile and something less than senile, as to whether he
+should be guilty of an impropriety, and, if he were, whether he
+would get caught in his indiscretion.  And yet the memory of the
+kiss that Margaret of Scotland gave to Alain Chartier has lasted
+four hundred years, and put it into the head of many an ill-favored
+poet, whether Victoria, or Eugenie, would do as much by him, if she
+happened to pass him when he was asleep.  And have we ever forgotten
+that the fresh cheek of the young John Milton tingled under the lips
+of some high-born Italian beauty, who, I believe, did not think to
+leave her card by the side of the slumbering youth, but has
+bequeathed the memory of her pretty deed to all coming time?  The
+sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo
+lasts a deal longer.
+
+There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of
+mind suffers, as compared with the man of action.  While he is
+taking an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he
+lets his chance slip through his fingers.  Iris woke up, of her own
+accord, before I had made up my mind what I was going to do about
+it.
+
+When I remember how charmingly she looked, I don't blame myself at
+all for being tempted; but if I had been fool enough to yield to the
+impulse, I should certainly have been ashamed to tell of it.  She
+did not know what to make of it, finding herself there alone, in
+such guise, and me staring at her.  She looked down at her white
+robe and bare feet, and colored,--then at the goblet she held in her
+hand, then at the taper; and at last her thoughts seemed to clear
+up.
+
+I know it all,--she said. --He is going to die, and I must go and
+sit by him.  Nobody will care for him as I shall, and I have nobody
+else to care for.
+
+I assured her that nothing was needed for him that night but rest,
+and persuaded her that the excitement of her presence could only do
+harm.  Let him sleep, and he would very probably awake better in the
+morning.  There was nothing to be said, for I spoke with authority;
+and the young girl glided away with noiseless step and sought her
+own chamber.
+
+The tremor passed away from my limbs, and the blood began to burn in
+my cheeks.  The beautiful image which had so bewitched me faded
+gradually from my imagination, and I returned to the still
+perplexing mysteries of my little neighbor's chamber.
+
+All was still there now.  No plaintive sounds, no monotonous
+murmurs, no shutting of windows and doors at strange hours, as if
+something or somebody were coming in or going out, or there was
+something to be hidden in those dark mahogany presses.  Is there an
+inner apartment that I have not seen?  The way in which the house is
+built might admit of it.  As I thought it over, I at once imagined a
+Bluebeard's chamber.  Suppose, for instance, that the narrow
+bookshelves to the right are really only a masked door, such as we
+remember leading to the private study of one of our most
+distinguished townsmen, who loved to steal away from his stately
+library to that little silent cell.  If this were lighted from
+above, a person or persons might pass their days there without
+attracting attention from the household, and wander where they
+pleased at night,--to Copp's-Hill burial-ground, if they liked,--I
+said to myself, laughing, and pulling the bed-clothes over my head.
+There is no logic in superstitious-fancies any more than in dreams.
+A she-ghost wouldn't want an inner chamber to herself.  A live
+woman, with a valuable soprano voice, wouldn't start off at night to
+sprain her ankles over the old graves of the North-End cemetery.
+
+It is all very easy for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this
+page in the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and
+anserine unchristian names, because I had these fancies running
+through my head.  I don't care much for your abuse.  The question is
+not, what it is reasonable for a man to think about, but what he
+actually does think about, in the dark, and when be is alone, and
+his whole body seems but one great nerve of hearing, and he sees the
+phosphorescent flashes of his own eyeballs as they turn suddenly in
+the direction of the last strange noise,--what he actually does
+think about, as he lies and recalls all the wild stories his head is
+full of, his fancy hinting the most alarming conjectures to account
+for the simplest facts about him, his common-sense laughing them to
+scorn the next minute, but his mind still returning to them, under
+one shape or another, until he gets very nervous and foolish, and
+remembers how pleasant it used to be to have his mother come and
+tuck him up and go and sit within call, so that she could hear him
+at any minute, if he got very much scared and wanted her.  Old
+babies that we are!
+
+Daylight will clear up all that lamp-light has left doubtful.  I
+longed for the morning to come, for I was more curious than ever.
+So, between my fancies and anticipations, I had but a poor night of
+it, and came down tired to the breakfast-table.  My visit was not to
+be made until after this morning hour; there was nothing urgent, so
+the servant was ordered to tell me.
+
+It was the first breakfast at which the high chair at the side of
+Iris had been unoccupied. --You might jest as well take away that
+chair,--said our landlady,--he'll never want it again.  He acts like
+a man that 's struck with death, 'n' I don't believe he 'll ever
+come out of his chamber till he 's laid out and brought down a
+corpse. --These good women do put things so plainly!  There were two
+or three words in her short remark that always sober people, and
+suggest silence or brief moral reflections.
+
+--Life is dreadful uncerting,--said the Poor Relation,--and pulled
+in her social tentacles to concentrate her thoughts on this fact of
+human history.
+
+--If there was anything a fellah could do,--said the young man John,
+so called,--a fellah 'd like the chance o' helpin' a little cripple
+like that.  He looks as if he couldn't turn over any handier than a
+turtle that's laid on his back; and I guess there a'n't many people
+that know how to lift better than I do.  Ask him if he don't want
+any watchers.  I don't mind settin' up any more 'n a cat-owl.  I was
+up all night twice last month.
+
+[My private opinion is, that there was no small amount of punch
+absorbed on those two occasions, which I think I heard of at the
+time;--but the offer is a kind one, and it is n't fair to question
+how he would like sitting up without the punch and the company and
+the songs and smoking.  He means what he says, and it would be a
+more considerable achievement for him to sit quietly all night by a
+sick man than for a good many other people.  I tell you this odd
+thing: there are a good many persons, who, through the habit of
+making other folks uncomfortable, by finding fault with all their
+cheerful enjoyments, at last get up a kind of hostility to comfort
+in general, even in their own persons.  The correlative to loving
+our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our
+neighbors.  Look at old misers; first they starve their dependants,
+and then themselves.  So I think it more for a lively young fellow
+to be ready to play nurse than for one of those useful but forlorn
+martyrs who have taken a spite against themselves and love to
+gratify it by fasting and watching.
+
+--The time came at last for me to make my visit.  I found Iris
+sitting by the Little Gentleman's pillow.  To my disappointment, the
+room was darkened.  He did not like the light, and would have the
+shutters kept nearly closed.  It was good enough for me; what
+business had I to be indulging my curiosity, when I had nothing to
+do but to exercise such skill as I possessed for the benefit of my
+patient?  There was not much to be said or done in such a case; but
+I spoke as encouragingly as I could, as I think we are always bound
+to do.  He did not seem to pay any very anxious attention, but the
+poor girl listened as if her own life and more than her own life
+were depending on the words I uttered.  She followed me out of the
+room, when I had got through my visit.
+
+How long?--she said.
+
+Uncertain.  Any time; to-day,--next week, next month,--I answered.
+--One of those cases where the issue is not doubtful, but may be
+sudden or slow.
+
+The women of the house were kind, as women always are in trouble.
+But Iris pretended that nobody could spare the time as well as she,
+and kept her place, hour after hour, until the landlady insisted
+that she'd be killin' herself, if she begun at that rate, 'n' haf to
+give up, if she didn't want to be clean beat out in less 'n a week.
+
+At the table we were graver than common.  The high chair was set
+back against the wall, and a gap left between that of the young girl
+and her nearest neighbor's on the right.  But the next morning, to
+our great surprise, that good-looking young Marylander had very
+quietly moved his own chair to the vacant place.  I thought he was
+creeping down that way, but I was not prepared for a leap spanning
+such a tremendous parenthesis of boarders as this change of position
+included.  There was no denying that the youth and maiden were a
+handsome pair, as they sat side by side.  But whatever the young
+girl may have thought of her new neighbor she never seemed for a
+moment to forget the poor little friend who had been taken from her
+side.  There are women, and even girls, with whom it is of no use to
+talk.  One might as well reason with a bee as to the form of his
+cell, or with an oriole as to the construction of his swinging nest,
+as try to stir these creatures from their own way of doing their own
+work.  It was not a question with Iris, whether she was entitled by
+any special relation or by the fitness of things to play the part of
+a nurse.  She was a wilful creature that must have her way in this
+matter.  And it so proved that it called for much patience and long
+endurance to carry through the duties, say rather the kind offices,
+the painful pleasures, which she had chosen as her share in the
+household where accident had thrown her.  She had that genius of
+ministration which is the special province of certain women, marked
+even among their helpful sisters by a soft, low voice, a quiet
+footfall, a light hand, a cheering smile, and a ready self-surrender
+to the objects of their care, which such trifles as their own food,
+sleep, or habits of any kind never presume to interfere with.
+Day after day, and too often through the long watches of the night,
+she kept her place by the pillow.
+
+That girl will kill herself over me, Sir,--said the poor Little
+Gentleman to me, one day,--she will kill herself, Sir, if you don't
+call in all the resources of your art to get me off as soon as may
+be.  I shall wear her out, Sir, with sitting in this close chamber
+and watching when she ought to be sleeping, if you leave me to the
+care of Nature without dosing me.
+
+This was rather strange pleasantry, under the circumstances.  But
+there are certain persons whose existence is so out of parallel with
+the larger laws in the midst of which it is moving, that life
+becomes to them as death and death as life. --How am I getting
+along?--he said, another morning.  He lifted his shrivelled hand,
+with the death's-head ring on it, and looked at it with a sad sort
+of complacency.  By this one movement, which I have seen repeatedly
+of late, I know that his thoughts have gone before to another
+condition, and that he is, as it were, looking back on the
+infirmities of the body as accidents of the past.  For, when he was
+well, one might see him often looking at the handsome hand with the
+flaming jewel on one of its fingers.  The single well-shaped limb
+was the source of that pleasure which in some form or other Nature
+almost always grants to her least richly endowed children.  Handsome
+hair, eyes, complexion, feature, form, hand, foot, pleasant voice,
+strength, grace, agility, intelligence,--how few there are that have
+not just enough of one at least of these gifts to show them that the
+good Mother, busy with her millions of children, has not quite
+forgotten them!  But now he was thinking of that other state, where,
+free from all mortal impediments, the memory of his sorrowful burden
+should be only as that of the case he has shed to the insect whose
+"deep-damasked wings" beat off the golden dust of the lily-anthers,
+as he flutters in the ecstasy of his new life over their full-blown
+summer glories.
+
+No human being can rest for any time in a state of equilibrium,
+where the desire to live and that to depart just balance each other.
+If one has a house, which he has lived and always means to live in,
+he pleases himself with the thought of all the conveniences it
+offers him, and thinks little of its wants and imperfections.  But
+once having made up his mind to move to a better, every incommodity
+starts out upon him, until the very ground-plan of it seems to have
+changed in his mind, and his thoughts and affections, each one of
+them packing up its little bundle of circumstances, have quitted
+their several chambers and nooks and migrated to the new home, long
+before its apartments are ready to receive their coming tenant.  It
+is so with the body.  Most persons have died before they expire,--
+died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it
+were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.  The
+fact of the tranquillity with which the great majority of dying
+persons await this locking of those gates of life through which its
+airy angels have been going and coming, from the moment of the first
+cry, is familiar to those who have been often called upon to witness
+the last period of life.  Almost always there is a preparation made
+by Nature for unearthing a soul, just as on the smaller scale there
+is for the removal of a milktooth.  The roots which hold human life
+to earth are absorbed before it is lifted from its place.  Some of
+the dying are weary and want rest, the idea of which is almost
+inseparable in the universal mind from death.  Some are in pain, and
+want to be rid of it, even though the anodyne be dropped, as in the
+legend, from the sword of the Death-Angel.  Some are stupid,
+mercifully narcotized that they may go to sleep without long tossing
+about.  And some are strong in faith and hope, so that, as they draw
+near the next world, they would fair hurry toward it, as the caravan
+moves faster over the sands when the foremost travellers send word
+along the file that water is in sight.  Though each little party
+that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water
+to which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less
+has it been true in all ages and for human beings of every creed
+which recognized a future, that those who have fallen worn out by
+their march through the Desert have dreamed at least of a River of
+Life, and thought they heard its murmurs as they lay dying.
+
+The change from the clinging to the present to the welcoming of the
+future comes very soon, for the most part, after all hope of life is
+extinguished, provided this be left in good degree to Nature, and
+not insolently and cruelly forced upon those who are attacked by
+illness, on the strength of that odious foreknowledge often imparted
+by science, before the white fruit whose core is ashes, and which we
+call death, has set beneath the pallid and drooping flower of
+sickness.  There is a singular sagacity very often shown in a
+patient's estimate of his own vital force.  His physician knows the
+state of his material frame well enough, perhaps,--that this or that
+organ is more or less impaired or disintegrated; but the patient has
+a sense that he can hold out so much longer,--sometimes that he must
+and will live for a while, though by the logic of disease he ought
+to die without any delay.
+
+The Little Gentleman continued to fail, until it became plain that
+his remaining days were few.  I told the household what to expect.
+There was a good deal of kind feeling expressed among the boarders,
+in various modes, according to their characters and style of
+sympathy.  The landlady was urgent that he should try a certain
+nostrum which had saved somebody's life in jest sech a case.  The
+Poor Relation wanted me to carry, as from her, a copy of "Allein's
+Alarm," etc.  I objected to the title, reminding her that it
+offended people of old, so that more than twice as many of the book
+were sold when they changed the name to "A Sure Guide to Heaven."
+The good old gentleman whom I have mentioned before has come to the
+time of life when many old men cry easily, and forget their tears as
+children do. --He was a worthy gentleman,--he said,--a very worthy
+gentleman, but unfortunate,--very unfortunate.  Sadly deformed about
+the spine and the feet.  Had an impression that the late Lord Byron
+had some malformation of this kind.  Had heerd there was something
+the matter with the ankle-j'ints of that nobleman, but he was a man
+of talents.  This gentleman seemed to be a man of talents.  Could
+not always agree with his statements,--thought he was a little over-
+partial to this city, and had some free opinions; but was sorry to
+lose him,--and if--there was anything--he--could--.  In the midst of
+these kind expressions, the gentleman with the diamond, the Koh-i-
+noor, as we called him, asked, in a very unpleasant sort of way, how
+the old boy was likely to cut up,--meaning what money our friend was
+going to leave behind.
+
+The young fellow John spoke up, to the effect that this was a
+diabolish snobby question, when a man was dying and not dead. --To
+this the Koh-i-noor replied, by asking if the other meant to insult
+him.  Whereto the young man John rejoined that he had no particul'r
+intentions one way or t'other. -The Kohi-noor then suggested the
+young man's stepping out into the yard, that he, the speaker, might
+"slap his chops." --Let 'em alone, said young Maryland,--it 'll soon
+be over, and they won't hurt each other much. --So they went out.
+
+The Koh-i-noor entertained the very common idea, that, when one
+quarrels with another, the simple thing to do is to knock the man
+down, and there is the end of it.  Now those who have watched such
+encounters are aware of two things: first, that it is not so easy to
+knock a man down as it is to talk about it; secondly, that, if you
+do happen to knock a man down, there is a very good chance that he
+will be angry, and get up and give you a thrashing.
+
+So the Koh-i-noor thought he would begin, as soon as they got into
+the yard, by knocking his man down, and with this intention swung
+his arm round after the fashion of rustics and those unskilled in
+the noble art, expecting the young fellow John to drop when his
+fist, having completed a quarter of a circle, should come in contact
+with the side of that young man's head.  Unfortunately for this
+theory, it happens that a blow struck out straight is as much
+shorter, and therefore as much quicker than the rustic's swinging
+blow, as the radius is shorter than the quarter of a circle.  The
+mathematical and mechanical corollary was, that the Koh-i-noor felt
+something hard bring up suddenly against his right eye, which
+something he could have sworn was a paving-stone, judging by his
+sensations; and as this threw his person somewhat backwards, and the
+young man John jerked his own head back a little, the swinging blow
+had nothing to stop it; and as the Jewel staggered between the hit
+he got and the blow he missed, he tripped and "went to grass," so
+far as the back-yard of our boardinghouse was provided with that
+vegetable.  It was a signal illustration of that fatal mistake, so
+frequent in young and ardent natures with inconspicuous calves and
+negative pectorals, that they can settle most little quarrels on the
+spot by "knocking the man down."
+
+We are in the habit of handling our faces so carefully, that a heavy
+blow, taking effect on that portion of the surface, produces a most
+unpleasant surprise, which is accompanied with odd sensations, as of
+seeing sparks, and a kind of electrical or ozone-like odor, half-
+sulphurous in character, and which has given rise to a very vulgar
+and profane threat sometimes heard from the lips of bullies.  A
+person not used to pugilistic gestures does not instantly recover
+from this surprise.  The Koh-i-noor exasperated by his failure, and
+still a little confused by the smart hit he had received, but
+furious, and confident of victory over a young fellow a good deal
+lighter than himself, made a desperate rush to bear down all before
+him and finish the contest at once.  That is the way all angry
+greenhorns and incompetent persons attempt to settle matters.  It
+does n't do, if the other fellow is only cool, moderately quick, and
+has a very little science.  It didn't do this time; for, as the
+assailant rushed in with his arms flying everywhere, like the vans
+of a windmill, be ran a prominent feature of his face against a fist
+which was travelling in the other direction, and immediately after
+struck the knuckles of the young man's other fist a severe blow with
+the part of his person known as the epigastrium to one branch of
+science and the bread-basket to another.  This second round closed
+the battle.  The Koh-i-noor had got enough, which in such cases is
+more than as good as a feast.  The young fellow asked him if he was
+satisfied, and held out his hand.  But the other sulked, and
+muttered something about revenge. --Jest as ye like,--said the young
+man John. --Clap a slice o' raw beefsteak on to that mouse o' yours
+'n' 't'll take down the swellin'.  (Mouse is a technical term for a
+bluish, oblong, rounded elevation occasioned by running one's
+forehead or eyebrow against another's knuckles.) The young fellow
+was particularly pleased that he had had an opportunity of trying
+his proficiency in the art of self-defence without the gloves.  The
+Koh-i-noor did not favor us with his company for a day or two, being
+confined to his chamber, it was said, by a slight feverish, attack.
+He was chop-fallen always after this, and got negligent in his
+person.  The impression must have been a deep one; for it was
+observed, that, when he came down again, his moustache and whiskers
+had turned visibly white about the roots.  In short, it disgraced
+him, and rendered still more conspicuous a tendency to drinking, of
+which he had been for some time suspected.  This, and the disgust
+which a young lady naturally feels at hearing that her lover has
+been "licked by a fellah not half his size," induced the landlady's
+daughter to take that decided step which produced a change in the
+programme of her career I may hereafter allude to.
+
+I never thought he would come to good, when I heard him attempting
+to sneer at an unoffending city so respectable as Boston.  After a
+man begins to attack the State-House, when he gets bitter about the
+Frog-Pond, you may be sure there is not much left of him.  Poor
+Edgar Poe died in the hospital soon after he got into this way of
+talking; and so sure as you find an unfortunate fellow reduced to
+this pass, you had better begin praying for him, and stop lending
+him money, for he is on his last legs.  Remember poor Edgar!  He is
+dead and gone; but the State-House has its cupola fresh-gilded, and
+the Frog-Pond has got a fountain that squirts up a hundred feet into
+the air and glorifies that humble sheet with a fine display of
+provincial rainbows.
+
+--I cannot fulfil my promise in this number.  I expected to gratify
+your curiosity, if you have become at all interested in these
+puzzles, doubts, fancies, whims, or whatever you choose to call
+them, of mine.  Next month you shall hear all about it.
+
+--It was evening, and I was going to the sick-chamber.  As I paused
+at the door before entering, I heard a sweet voice singing.  It was
+not the wild melody I had sometimes heard at midnight:--no, this was
+the voice of Iris, and I could distinguish every word.  I had seen
+the verses in her book; the melody was new to me.  Let me finish my
+page with them.
+
+
+          HYMN OF TRUST.
+
+O Love Divine, that stooped to share
+Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,
+On Thee we cast each earthborn care,
+We smile at pain while Thou art near!
+
+Though long the weary way we tread,
+And sorrow crown each lingering year,
+No path we shun, no darkness dread,
+Our hearts still whispering, Thou art near!
+
+When drooping pleasure turns to grief,
+And trembling faith is changed to fear,
+The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf
+Shall softly tell us, Thou art near!
+
+On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
+O Love Divine, forever dear,
+Content to suffer, while we know,
+Living and dying, Thou art near!
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+A young fellow, born of good stock, in one of the more thoroughly
+civilized portions of these United States of America, bred in good
+principles, inheriting a social position which makes him at his ease
+everywhere, means sufficient to educate him thoroughly without
+taking away the stimulus to vigorous exertion, and with a good
+opening in some honorable path of labor, is the finest sight our
+private satellite has had the opportunity of inspecting on the
+planet to which she belongs.  In some respects it was better to be a
+young Greek.  If we may trust the old marbles, my friend with his
+arm stretched over my head, above there, (in plaster of Paris,) or
+the discobolus, whom one may see at the principal sculpture gallery
+of this metropolis,--those Greek young men were of supreme beauty.
+Their close curls, their elegantly set heads, column-like necks,
+straight noses, short, curled lips, firm chins, deep chests, light
+flanks, large muscles, small joints, were finer than anything we
+ever see.  It may well be questioned whether the human shape will
+ever present itself again in a race of such perfect symmetry.  But
+the life of the youthful Greek was local, not planetary, like that
+of the young American.  He had a string of legends, in place of our
+Gospels.  He had no printed books, no newspaper, no steam caravans,
+no forks, no soap, none of the thousand cheap conveniences which
+have become matters of necessity to our modern civilization.  Above
+all things, if he aspired to know as well as to enjoy, he found
+knowledge not diffused everywhere about him, so that a day's labor
+would buy him more wisdom than a year could master, but held in
+private hands, hoarded in precious manuscripts, to be sought for
+only as gold is sought in narrow fissures, and in the beds of
+brawling streams.  Never, since man came into this atmosphere of
+oxygen and azote, was there anything like the condition of the young
+American of the nineteenth century.  Having in possession or in
+prospect the best part of half a world, with all its climates and
+soils to choose from; equipped with wings of fire and smoke than fly
+with him day and night, so that he counts his journey not in miles,
+but in degrees, and sees the seasons change as the wild fowl sees
+them in his annual flights; with huge leviathans always ready to
+take him on their broad backs and push behind them with their
+pectoral or caudal fins the waters that seam the continent or
+separate the hemispheres; heir of all old civilizations, founder of
+that new one which, if all the prophecies of the human heart are not
+lies, is to be the noblest, as it is the last; isolated in space
+from the races that are governed by dynasties whose divine right
+grows out of human wrong, yet knit into the most absolute solidarity
+with mankind of all times and places by the one great thought he
+inherits as his national birthright; free to form and express his
+opinions on almost every subject, and assured that he will soon
+acquire the last franchise which men withhold from man,--that of
+stating the laws of his spiritual being and the beliefs he accepts
+without hindrance except from clearer views of truth,--he seems to
+want nothing for a large, wholesome, noble, beneficent life.  In
+fact, the chief danger is that he will think the whole planet is
+made for him, and forget that there are some possibilities left in
+the debris of the old-world civilization which deserve a certain
+respectful consideration at his hands.
+
+The combing and clipping of this shaggy wild continent are in some
+measure done for him by those who have gone before.  Society has
+subdivided itself enough to have a place for every form of talent.
+Thus, if a man show the least sign of ability as a sculptor or a
+painter, for instance, he finds the means of education and a demand
+for his services.  Even a man who knows nothing but science will be
+provided for, if he does not think it necessary to hang about his
+birthplace all his days,--which is a most unAmerican weakness.  The
+apron-strings of an American mother are made of India-rubber.  Her
+boy belongs where he is wanted; and that young Marylander of ours
+spoke for all our young men, when he said that his home was wherever
+the stars and stripes blew over his head.
+
+And that leads me to say a few words of this young gentleman, who
+made that audacious movement lately which I chronicled in my last
+record,--jumping over the seats of I don't know how many boarders to
+put himself in the place which the Little Gentleman's absence had
+left vacant at the side of Iris.  When a young man is found
+habitually at the side of any one given young lady,--when he lingers
+where she stays, and hastens when she leaves,--when his eyes follow
+her as she moves and rest upon her when she is still,--when he
+begins to grow a little timid, he who was so bold, and a little
+pensive, he who was so gay, whenever accident finds them alone,--
+when he thinks very often of the given young lady, and names her
+very seldom,--
+
+What do you say about it, my charming young expert in that sweet
+science in which, perhaps, a long experience is not the first of
+qualifications?
+
+--But we don't know anything about this young man, except that he is
+good-looking, and somewhat high-spirited, and strong-limbed, and has
+a generous style of nature,--all very promising, but by no means
+proving that he is a proper lover for Iris, whose heart we turned
+inside out when we opened that sealed book of hers.
+
+Ah, my dear young friend!  When your mamma then, if you will believe
+it, a very slight young lady, with very pretty hair and figure--came
+and told her mamma that your papa had--had--asked No, no, no! she
+could n't say it; but her mother--oh the depth of maternal sagacity!
+--guessed it all without another word! --When your mother, I say,
+came and told her mother she was engaged, and your grandmother told
+your grandfather, how much did they know of the intimate nature of
+the young gentleman to whom she had pledged her existence?  I will
+not be so hard as to ask how much your respected mamma knew at that
+time of the intimate nature of your respected papa, though, if we
+should compare a young girl's man-as-she-thinks-him with a forty-
+summered matron's man-as-she-finds-him, I have my doubts as to
+whether the second would be a facsimile of the first in most cases.
+
+The idea that in this world each young person is to wait until he or
+she finds that precise counterpart who alone of all creation was
+meant for him or her, and then fall instantly in love with it, is
+pretty enough, only it is not Nature's way.  It is not at all
+essential that all pairs of human beings should be, as we sometimes
+say of particular couples, "born for each other."  Sometimes a man
+or a woman is made a great deal better and happier in the end for
+having had to conquer the faults of the one beloved, and make the
+fitness not found at first, by gradual assimilation.  There is a
+class of good women who have no right to marry perfectly good men,
+because they have the power of saving those who would go to ruin but
+for the guiding providence of a good wife.  I have known many such
+cases.  It is the most momentous question a woman is ever called
+upon to decide, whether the faults of the man she loves are beyond
+remedy and will drag her down, or whether she is competent to be his
+earthly redeemer and lift him to her own level.
+
+A person of genius should marry a person of character.  Genius does
+not herd with genius.  The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never
+found in company.  They don't care for strange scents,--they like
+plain animals better than perfumed ones.  Nay, if you will have the
+kindness to notice, Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the
+personal peculiarity by which her lord is so widely known.
+
+Now when genius allies itself with character, the world is very apt
+to think character has the best of the bargain.  A brilliant woman
+marries a plain, manly fellow, with a simple intellectual
+mechanism;--we have all seen such cases.  The world often stares a
+good deal and wonders.  She should have taken that other, with a far
+more complex mental machinery.  She might have had a watch with the
+philosophical compensation-balance, with the metaphysical index
+which can split a second into tenths, with the musical chime which
+can turn every quarter of an hour into melody.  She has chosen a
+plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all.
+
+Let her alone!  She knows what she is about.  Genius has an
+infinitely deeper reverence for character than character can have
+for genius.  To be sure, genius gets the world's praise, because its
+work is a tangible product, to be bought, or had for nothing.  It
+bribes the common voice to praise it by presents of speeches, poems,
+statues, pictures, or whatever it can please with.  Character
+evolves its best products for home consumption; but, mind you, it
+takes a deal more to feed a family for thirty years than to make a
+holiday feast for our neighbors once or twice in our lives.  You
+talk of the fire of genius.  Many a blessed woman, who dies unsung
+and unremembered, has given out more of the real vital heat that
+keeps the life in human souls, without a spark flitting through her
+humble chimney to tell the world about it, than would set a dozen
+theories smoking, or a hundred odes simmering, in the brains of so
+many men of genius.  It is in latent caloric, if I may borrow a
+philosophical expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out
+the life that warms them.  Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse
+hardly warms her thin fingers,--but she has melted all the ice out
+of the hearts of those young Gracchi, and her lost heat is in the
+blood of her youthful heroes.  We are always valuing the soul's
+temperature by the thermometer of public deed or word.  Yet the
+great sun himself, when he pours his noonday beams upon some vast
+hyaline boulder, rent from the eternal ice-quarries, and floating
+toward the tropics, never warms it a fraction above the thirty-two
+degrees of Fahrenheit that marked the moment when the first drop
+trickled down its side.
+
+How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the
+law that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong,
+to get as low as the earth will let it!  That is genius.  But what
+is this transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and
+the rainbow, to that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the
+same yesterday, to-day, and forever, (if the universe be eternal,)
+--the great outspread hand of God himself, forcing all things down
+into their places, and keeping them there?  Such, in smaller
+proportion, is the force of character to the fitful movements of
+genius, as they are or have been linked to each other in many a
+household, where one name was historic, and the other, let me say
+the nobler, unknown, save by some faint reflected ray, borrowed from
+its lustrous companion.
+
+Oftentimes, as I have lain swinging on the water, in the swell of
+the Chelsea ferry-boats, in that long, sharp-pointed, black cradle
+in which I love to let the great mother rock me, I have seen a tall
+ship glide by against the tide, as if drawn by some invisible
+towline, with a hundred strong arms pulling it.  Her sails hung
+unfilled, her streamers were drooping, she had neither side-wheel
+nor stern-wheel; still she moved on, stately, in serene triumph, as
+if with her own life.  But I knew that on the other side of the
+ship, hidden beneath the great hulk that swam so majestically, there
+was a little toiling steam-tug, with heart of fire and arms of iron,
+that was hugging it close and dragging it bravely on; and I knew,
+that, if the little steam-tug untwined her arms and left the tall
+ship, it would wallow and roll about, and drift hither and thither,
+and go off with the refluent tide, no man knows whither.  And so I
+have known more than one genius, high-decked, full-freighted, wide-
+sailed, gay-pennoned, that, but for the bare toiling arms, and
+brave, warm, beating heart of the faithful little wife, that nestled
+close in his shadow, and clung to him, so that no wind or wave could
+part them, and dragged him on against all the tide of circumstance,
+would soon have gone down the stream and been heard of no more.
+--No, I am too much a lover of genius, I sometimes think, and too
+often get impatient with dull people, so that, in their weak talk,
+where nothing is taken for granted, I look forward to some future
+possible state of development, when a gesture passing between a
+beatified human soul and an archangel shall signify as much as the
+complete history of a planet, from the time when it curdled to the
+time when its sun was burned out.  And yet, when a strong brain is
+weighed with a true heart, it seems to me like balancing a bubble
+against a wedge of gold.
+
+--It takes a very true man to be a fitting companion for a woman of
+genius, but not a very great one.  I am not sure that she will not
+embroider her ideal better on a plain ground than on one with a
+brilliant pattern already worked in its texture.  But as the very
+essence of genius is truthfulness, contact with realities, (which
+are always ideas behind shows of form or language,) nothing is so
+contemptible as falsehood and pretence in its eyes.  Now it is not
+easy to find a perfectly true woman, and it is very hard to find a
+perfectly true man.  And a woman of genius, who has the sagacity to
+choose such a one as her companion, shows more of the divine gift in
+so doing than in her finest talk or her most brilliant work of
+letters or of art.
+
+I have been a good while coming at a secret, for which I wished to
+prepare you before telling it.  I think there is a kindly feeling
+growing up between Iris and our young Marylander.  Not that I
+suppose there is any distinct understanding between them, but that
+the affinity which has drawn him from the remote corner where he sat
+to the side of the young girl is quietly bringing their two natures
+together.  Just now she is all given up to another; but when he no
+longer calls upon her daily thoughts and cares, I warn you not to be
+surprised, if this bud of friendship open like the evening primrose,
+with a sound as of a sudden stolen kiss, and lo! the flower of full-
+blown love lies unfolded before you.
+
+And now the days had come for our little friend, whose whims and
+weaknesses had interested us, perhaps, as much as his better traits,
+to make ready for that long journey which is easier to the cripple
+than to the strong man, and on which none enters so willingly as he
+who has borne the life-long load of infirmity during his earthly
+pilgrimage.  At this point, under most circumstances, I would close
+the doors and draw the veil of privacy before the chamber where the
+birth which we call death, out of life into the unknown world, is
+working its mystery.  But this friend of ours stood alone in the
+world, and, as the last act of his life was mainly in harmony with
+the rest of its drama, I do not here feel the force of the objection
+commonly lying against that death-bed literature which forms the
+staple of a certain portion of the press.  Let me explain what I
+mean, so that my readers may think for themselves a little, before
+they accuse me of hasty expressions.
+
+The Roman Catholic Church has certain formulas for its dying
+children, to which almost all of them attach the greatest
+importance.  There is hardly a criminal so abandoned that he is not
+anxious to receive the "consolations of religion" in his last hours.
+Even if he be senseless, but still living, I think that the form is
+gone through with, just as baptism is administered to the
+unconscious new-born child.  Now we do not quarrel with these forms.
+We look with reverence and affection upon all symbols which give
+peace and comfort to our fellow-creatures.  But the value of the
+new-born child's passive consent to the ceremony is null, as
+testimony to the truth of a doctrine.  The automatic closing of a
+dying man's lips on the consecrated wafer proves nothing in favor of
+the Real Presence, or any other dogma.  And, speaking generally, the
+evidence of dying men in favor of any belief is to be received with
+great caution.
+
+They commonly tell the truth about their present feelings, no doubt.
+A dying man's deposition about anything he knows is good evidence.
+But it is of much less consequence what a man thinks and says when
+he is changed by pain, weakness, apprehension, than what he thinks
+when he is truly and wholly himself.  Most murderers die in a very
+pious frame of mind, expecting to go to glory at once; yet no man
+believes he shall meet a larger average of pirates and cut-throats
+in the streets of the New Jerusalem than of honest folks that died
+in their beds.
+
+Unfortunately, there has been a very great tendency to make capital
+of various kinds out of dying men's speeches.  The lies that have
+been put into their mouths for this purpose are endless.  The prime
+minister, whose last breath was spent in scolding his nurse, dies
+with a magnificent apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter.
+Addison gets up a tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,--or
+somebody makes the posthumous dying epigram for him.  The incoherent
+babble of green fields is translated into the language of stately
+sentiment.  One would think, all that dying men had to do was to say
+the prettiest thing they could,--to make their rhetorical point,--
+and then bow themselves politely out of the world.
+
+Worse than this is the torturing of dying people to get their
+evidence in favor of this or that favorite belief.  The camp-
+followers of proselyting sects have come in at the close of every
+life where they could get in, to strip the languishing soul of its
+thoughts, and carry them off as spoils.  The Roman Catholic or other
+priest who insists on the reception of his formula means kindly, we
+trust, and very commonly succeeds in getting the acquiescence of the
+subject of his spiritual surgery, but do not let us take the
+testimony of people who are in the worst condition to form opinions
+as evidence of the truth or falsehood of that which they accept.  A
+lame man's opinion of dancing is not good for much.  A poor fellow
+who can neither eat nor drink, who is sleepless and full of pains,
+whose flesh has wasted from him, whose blood is like water, who is
+gasping for breath, is not in a condition to judge fairly of human
+life, which in all its main adjustments is intended for men in a
+normal, healthy condition.  It is a remark I have heard from the
+wise Patriarch of the Medical Profession among us, that the moral
+condition of patients with disease above the great breathing-muscle,
+the diaphragm, is much more hopeful than that of patients with
+disease below it, in the digestive organs.  Many an honest ignorant
+man has given us pathology when he thought he was giving us
+psychology.  With this preliminary caution I shall proceed to the
+story of the Little Gentleman's leaving us.
+
+When the divinity-student found that our fellow-boarder was not
+likely to remain long with us, he, being a young man of tender
+conscience and kindly nature, was not a little exercised on his
+behalf.  It was undeniable that on several occasions the Little
+Gentleman had expressed himself with a good deal of freedom on a
+class of subjects which, according to the divinity-student, he had
+no right to form an opinion upon.  He therefore considered his
+future welfare in jeopardy.
+
+The Muggletonian sect have a very odd way of dealing with people.
+If I, the Professor, will only give in to the Muggletonian doctrine,
+there shall be no question through all that persuasion that I am
+competent to judge of that doctrine; nay, I shall be quoted as
+evidence of its truth, while I live, and cited, after I am dead, as
+testimony in its behalf.  But if I utter any ever so slight Anti-
+Muggletonian sentiment, then I become incompetent to form any
+opinion on the matter.  This, you cannot fail to observe, is exactly
+the way the pseudo-sciences go to work, as explained in my Lecture
+on Phrenology.  Now I hold that he whose testimony would be accepted
+in behalf of the Muggletonian doctrine has a right to be heard
+against it.  Whoso offers me any article of belief for my signature
+implies that I am competent to form an opinion upon it; and if my
+positive testimony in its favor is of any value, then my negative
+testimony against it is also of value.
+
+I thought my young friend's attitude was a little too much like that
+of the Muggletonians.  I also remarked a singular timidity on his
+part lest somebody should "unsettle " somebody's faith,--as if faith
+did not require exercise as much as any other living thing, and were
+not all the better for a shaking up now and then.  I don't mean that
+it would be fair to bother Bridget, the wild Irish girl, or Joice
+Heth, the centenarian, or any other intellectual non-combatant; but
+all persons who proclaim a belief which passes judgment on their
+neighbors must be ready to have it "unsettled," that is, questioned,
+at all times and by anybody,--just as those who set up bars across a
+thoroughfare must expect to have them taken down by every one who
+wants to pass, if he is strong enough.
+
+Besides, to think of trying to water-proof the American mind against
+the questions that Heaven rains down upon it shows a misapprehension
+of our new conditions.  If to question everything be unlawful and
+dangerous, we had better undeclare our independence at once; for
+what the Declaration means is the right to question everything, even
+the truth of its own fundamental proposition.
+
+The old-world order of things is an arrangement of locks and canals,
+where everything depends on keeping the gates shut, and so holding
+the upper waters at their level; but the system under which the
+young republican American is born trusts the whole unimpeded tide of
+life to the great elemental influences, as the vast rivers of the
+continent settle their own level in obedience to the laws that
+govern the planet and the spheres that surround it.
+
+The divinity-student was not quite up to the idea of the
+commonwealth, as our young friend the Marylander, for instance,
+understood it.  He could not get rid of that notion of private
+property in truth, with the right to fence it in, and put up a sign-
+board, thus:
+
+               ALL TRESPASSERS ARE WARNED OFF THESE
+                              GROUNDS!
+
+He took the young Marylander to task for going to the Church of the
+Galileans, where he had several times accompanied Iris of late.
+
+I am a Churchman,--the young man said,--by education and habit.  I
+love my old Church for many reasons, but most of all because I think
+it has educated me out of its own forms into the spirit of its
+highest teachings.  I think I belong to the "Broad Church," if any
+of you can tell what that means.
+
+I had the rashness to attempt to answer the question myself. --Some
+say the Broad Church means the collective mass of good people of all
+denominations.  Others say that such a definition is nonsense; that
+a church is an organization, and the scattered good folks are no
+organization at all.  They think that men will eventually come
+together on the basis of one or two or more common articles of
+belief, and form a great unity.  Do they see what this amounts to?
+It means an equal division of intellect!  It is mental agrarianism!
+a thing that never was and never will be until national and
+individual idiosyncrasies have ceased to exist.  The man of thirty-
+nine beliefs holds the man of one belief a pauper; he is not going
+to give up thirty-eight of them for the sake of fraternizing with
+the other in the temple which bears on its front, "Deo erexit
+Voltaire."  A church is a garden, I have heard it said, and the
+illustration was neatly handled.  Yes, and there is no such thing as
+a broad garden.  It must be fenced in, and whatever is fenced in is
+narrow.  You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing together
+in it, except by the forcing system, which is a mighty narrow piece
+of business.  You can't make a village or a parish or a family think
+alike, yet you suppose that you can make a world pinch its beliefs
+or pad them to a single pattern!  Why, the very life of an
+ecclesiastical organization is a life of induction, a state of
+perpetually disturbed equilibrium kept up by another charged body in
+the neighborhood.  If the two bodies touch and share their
+respective charges, down goes the index of the electrometer!
+
+Do you know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to
+himself?  Smith is always a Smithite.  He takes in exactly Smith's-
+worth of knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity.
+And Brown has from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to
+excommunicate him, to anonymous-article him, because he did not take
+in Brown's-worth of knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity.  He cannot
+do it, any more than a pint-pot can hold a quart, or a quart-pot be
+filled by a pint.  Iron is essentially the same everywhere and
+always; but the sulphate of iron is never the same as the carbonate
+of iron.  Truth is invariable; but the Smithate of truth must always
+differ from the Brownate of truth.
+
+The wider the intellect, the larger and simpler the expressions in
+which its knowledge is embodied.  The inferior race, the degraded
+and enslaved people, the small-minded individual, live in the
+details which to larger minds and more advanced tribes of men reduce
+themselves to axioms and laws.  As races and individual minds must
+always differ just as sulphates and carbonates do, I cannot see
+ground for expecting the Broad Church to be founded on any fusion of
+intellectual beliefs, which of course implies that those who hold
+the larger number of doctrines as essential shall come down to those
+who hold the smaller number.  These doctrines are to the negative
+aristocracy what the quarterings of their coats are to the positive
+orders of nobility.
+
+The Broad Church, I think, will never be based on anything that
+requires the use of language. Freemasonry gives an idea of such a
+church, and a brother is known and cared for in a strange land where
+no word of his can be understood.  The apostle of this church may be
+a deaf mute carrying a cup of cold water to a thirsting
+fellow-creature.  The cup of cold water does not require to be
+translated for a foreigner to understand it.  I am afraid the only
+Broad Church possible is one that has its creed in the heart, and
+not in the head,--that we shall know its members by their fruits,
+and not by their words.  If you say this communion of well-doers is
+no church, I can only answer, that all organized bodies have their
+limits of size, and that when we find a man a hundred feet high and
+thirty feet broad across the shoulders, we will look out for an
+organization that shall include all Christendom.
+
+Some of us do practically recognize a Broad Church and a Narrow
+Church, however.  The Narrow Church may be seen in the ship's boats
+of humanity, in the long boat, in the jolly boat, in the captain's
+gig, lying off the poor old vessel, thanking God that they are safe,
+and reckoning how soon the hulk containing the mass of their
+fellow-creatures will go down.  The Broad Church is on board,
+working hard at the pumps, and very slow to believe that the ship
+will be swallowed up with so many poor people in it, fastened down
+under the hatches ever since it floated.
+
+--All this, of course, was nothing but my poor notion about these
+matters. I am simply an "outsider," you know; only it doesn't do
+very well for a nest of Hingham boxes to talk too much about
+outsiders and insiders!
+
+After this talk of ours, I think these two young people went pretty
+regularly to the Church of the Galileans.  Still they could not keep
+away from the sweet harmonies and rhythmic litanies of Saint
+Polycarp on the great Church festival-days; so that, between the
+two, they were so much together, that the boarders began to make
+remarks, and our landlady said to me, one day, that, though it was
+noon of her business, them that had eyes couldn't help seein' that
+there was somethin' goin', on between them two young people; she
+thought the young man was a very likely young man, though jest what
+his prospecs was was unbeknown to her; but she thought he must be
+doing well, and rather guessed he would be able to take care of a
+femily, if he didn't go to takin' a house; for a gentleman and his
+wife could board a great deal cheaper than they could keep house;
+--but then that girl was nothin' but a child, and wouldn't think of
+bein' married this five year.  They was good boarders, both of 'em,
+paid regular, and was as pooty a couple as she ever laid eyes on.
+
+--To come back to what I began to speak of before, -the divinity-
+student was exercised in his mind about the Little Gentleman, and,
+in the kindness of his heart,--for he was a good young man,--and in
+the strength of his convictions,--for he took it for granted that he
+and his crowd were right, and other folks and their crowd were
+wrong,--he determined to bring the Little Gentleman round to his
+faith before he died, if he could.  So he sent word to the sick man,
+that he should be pleased to visit him and have some conversation
+with him; and received for answer that he would be welcome.
+
+The divinity-student made him a visit, therefore and had a somewhat
+remarkable interview with him, which I shall briefly relate, without
+attempting to justify the positions taken by the Little Gentleman.
+He found him weak, but calm.  Iris sat silent by his pillow.
+
+After the usual preliminaries, the divinity-student said; in a kind
+way, that he was sorry to find him in failing health, that he felt
+concerned for his soul, and was anxious to assist him in making
+preparations for the great change awaiting him.
+
+I thank you, Sir,--said the Little Gentleman, permit me to ask you,
+what makes you think I am not ready for it, Sir, and that you can do
+anything to help me, Sir?
+
+I address you only as a fellow-man,--said the divinity-student,--and
+therefore a fellow-sinner.
+
+I am not a man, Sir! --said the Little Gentleman. --I was born into
+this world the wreck of a man, and I shall not be judged with a race
+to which I do not belong.  Look at this! --he said, and held up his
+withered arm. --See there! --and he pointed to his misshapen
+extremities. --Lay your hand here! --and he laid his own on the
+region of his misplaced heart. --I have known nothing of the life of
+your race.  When I first came to my consciousness, I found myself an
+object of pity, or a sight to show.  The first strange child I ever
+remember hid its face and would not come near me.  I was a broken-
+hearted as well as broken-bodied boy.  I grew into the emotions of
+ripening youth, and all that I could have loved shrank from my
+presence.  I became a man in years, and had nothing in common with
+manhood but its longings.  My life is the dying pang of a worn-out
+race, and I shall go down alone into the dust, out of this world of
+men and women, without ever knowing the fellowship of the one or the
+love of the other.  I will not die with a lie rattling in my throat.
+If another state of being has anything worse in store for me, I have
+had a long apprenticeship to give me strength that I may bear it.  I
+don't believe it, Sir!  I have too much faith for that.  God has not
+left me wholly without comfort, even here.  I love this old place
+where I was born;--the heart of the world beats under the three
+hills of Boston, Sir!  I love this great land, with so many tall men
+in it, and so many good, noble women. --His eyes turned to the
+silent figure by his pillow. --I have learned to accept meekly what
+has been allotted to me, but I cannot honestly say that I think my
+sin has been greater than my suffering.  I bear the ignorance and
+the evil-doing of whole generations in my single person.  I never
+drew a breath of air nor took a step that was not a punishment for
+another's fault.  I may have had many wrong thoughts, but I cannot
+have done many wrong deeds,--for my cage has been a narrow one, and
+I have paced it alone.  I have looked through the bars and seen the
+great world of men busy and happy, but I had no part in their
+doings.  I have known what it was to dream of the great passions;
+but since my mother kissed me before she died, no woman's lips have
+pressed my cheek,--nor ever will.
+
+--The young girl's eyes glittered with a sudden film, and almost
+without a thought, but with a warm human instinct that rushed up
+into her face with her heart's blood, she bent over and kissed him.
+It was the sacrament that washed out the memory of long years of
+bitterness, and I should hold it an unworthy thought to defend her.
+The Little Gentleman repaid her with the only tear any of us ever
+saw him shed.
+
+The divinity-student rose from his place, and, turning away from the
+sick man, walked to the other side of the room, where he bowed his
+head and was still.  All the questions he had meant to ask had faded
+from his memory.  The tests he had.  prepared by which to judge of
+his fellow-creature's fitness for heaven seemed to have lost their
+virtue.  He could trust the crippled child of sorrow to the Infinite
+Parent.  The kiss of the fair-haired girl had been like a sign from
+heaven, that angels watched over him whom he was presuming but a
+moment before to summon before the tribunal of his private judgment.
+Shall I pray with you?--he said, after a pause.  A little before he
+would have said, Shall I pray for you?--The Christian religion, as
+taught by its Founder, is full of sentiment.  So we must not blame
+the divinity-student, if he was overcome by those yearnings of human
+sympathy which predominate so much more in the sermons of the Master
+than in the writings of his successors, and which have made the
+parable of the Prodigal Son the consolation of mankind, as it has
+been the stumbling-block of all exclusive doctrines.
+
+Pray! --said the Little Gentleman.
+
+The divinity-student prayed, in low, tender tones,
+
+Iris and the Little Gentleman that God would look on his servant
+lying helpless at the feet of his mercy; that He would remember his
+long years of bondage in the flesh; that He would deal gently with
+the bruised reed.  Thou hast visited the sins of the fathers upon
+this their child.  Oh, turn away from him the penalties of his own
+transgressions!  Thou hast laid upon him, from infancy, the cross
+which thy stronger children are called upon to take up; and now that
+he is fainting under it, be Thou his stay, and do Thou succor him
+that is tempted!  Let his manifold infirmities come between him and
+Thy judgment; in wrath remember mercy!  If his eyes are not opened
+to all Thy truth, let Thy compassion lighten the darkness that rests
+upon him, even as it came through the word of thy Son to blind
+Bartimeus, who sat by the wayside, begging!
+
+Many more petitions he uttered, but all in the same subdued tone of
+tenderness.  In the presence of helpless suffering, and in the fast-
+darkening shadow of the Destroyer, he forgot all but his Christian
+humanity, and cared more about consoling his fellow-man than making
+a proselyte of him.
+
+This was the last prayer to which the Little Gentleman ever
+listened.  Some change was rapidly coming over him during this last
+hour of which I have been speaking.  The excitement of pleading his
+cause before his self-elected spiritual adviser,--the emotion which
+overcame him, when the young girl obeyed the sudden impulse of her
+feelings and pressed her lips to his cheek,--the thoughts that
+mastered him while the divinity-student poured out his soul for him
+in prayer, might well hurry on the inevitable moment.  When the
+divinity-student had uttered his last petition, commending him to
+the Father through his Son's intercession, he turned to look upon
+him before leaving his chamber.  His face was changed. --There is a
+language of the human countenance which we all understand without an
+interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that
+ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect.  By the stillness of
+the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by
+the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the
+contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is
+soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its
+windows and putting out its fires. --Such was the aspect of the face
+upon which the divinity-student looked, after the brief silence
+which followed his prayer.  The change had been rapid, though not
+that abrupt one which is liable to happen at any moment in these
+cases. --The sick man looked towards him. --Farewell,--he said,--I
+thank you.  Leave me alone with her.
+
+When the divinity-student had gone, and the Little Gentleman found
+himself alone with Iris, he lifted his hand to his neck, and took
+from it, suspended by a slender chain, a quaint, antique-looking
+key,--the same key I had once seen him holding.  He gave this to
+her, and pointed to a carved cabinet opposite his bed, one of those
+that had so attracted my curious eyes and set me wondering as to
+what it might contain.
+
+Open it,--he said,--and light the lamp. --The young girl walked to
+the cabinet and unlocked the door.  A deep recess appeared, lined
+with black velvet, against which stood in white relief an ivory
+crucifix.  A silver lamp hung over it.  She lighted the lamp and
+came back to the bedside.  The dying man fixed his eyes upon the
+figure of the dying Saviour. --Give me your hand, he said; and Iris
+placed her right hand in his left.  So they remained, until
+presently his eyes lost their meaning, though they still remained
+vacantly fixed upon the white image.  Yet he held the young girl's
+hand firmly, as if it were leading him through some deep-shadowed
+valley and it was all he could cling to.  But presently an
+involuntary muscular contraction stole over him, and his terrible
+dying grasp held the poor girl as if she were wedged in an engine of
+torture.  She pressed her lips together and sat still.  The
+inexorable hand held her tighter and tighter, until she felt as if
+her own slender fingers would be crushed in its gripe.  It was one
+of the tortures of the Inquisition she was suffering, and she could
+not stir from her place.  Then, in her great anguish, she, too, cast
+her eyes upon that dying figure, and, looking upon its pierced hands
+and feet and side and lacerated forehead, she felt that she also
+must suffer uncomplaining.  In the moment of her sharpest pain she
+did not forget the duties of her under office, but dried the dying
+man's moist forehead with her handkerchief, even while the dews of
+agony were glistening on her own.  How long this lasted she never
+could tell.  Time and thirst are two things you and I talk about;
+but the victims whom holy men and righteous judges used to stretch
+on their engines knew better what they meant than you or I! --What
+is that great bucket of water for?  said the Marchioness de
+Brinvilliers, before she was placed on the rack. --For you to
+drink,--said the torturer to the little woman. --She could not think
+that it would take such a flood to quench the fire in her and so
+keep her alive for her confession.  The torturer knew better than
+she.
+
+After a time not to be counted in minutes, as the clock measures,--
+without any warning,--there came a swift change of his features; his
+face turned white, as the waters whiten when a sudden breath passes
+over their still surface; the muscles instantly relaxed, and Iris,
+released at once from her care for the sufferer and from his
+unconscious grasp, fell senseless, with a feeble cry,--the only
+utterance of her long agony.
+
+Perhaps you sometimes wander in through the iron gates of the Copp's
+Hill burial-ground.  You love to stroll round among the graves that
+crowd each other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit.
+You love to lean on the freestone slab which lies over the bones of
+the Mathers,--to read the epitaph of stout William Clark, "Despiser
+of Sorry Persons and little Actions,"--to stand by the stone grave
+of sturdy Daniel Malcolm and look upon the splintered slab that
+tells the old rebel's story,--to kneel by the triple stone that says
+how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died
+on the same day and lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a
+moving ballad, by the late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen in his
+autobiography, which will explain the secret of the triple
+gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a mistake, unless
+the stone is wrong.
+
+Not very far from that you will find a fair mound, of dimensions fit
+to hold a well-grown man.  I will not tell you the inscription upon
+the stone which stands at its head; for I do not wish you to be sure
+of the resting-place of one who could not bear to think that he
+should be known as a cripple among the dead, after being pointed at
+so long among the living.  There is one sign, it is true, by which,
+if you have been a sagacious reader of these papers, you will at
+once know it; but I fear you read carelessly, and must study them
+more diligently before you will detect the hint to which I allude.
+
+The Little Gentleman lies where he longed to lie, among the old
+names and the old bones of the old Boston people.  At the foot of
+his resting-place is the river, alive with the wings and antennae of
+its colossal water-insects; over opposite are the great war-ships,
+and the heavy guns, which, when they roar, shake the soil in which
+he lies; and in the steeple of Christ Church, hard by, are the sweet
+chimes which are the Boston boy's Ranz des Vaches, whose echoes
+follow him all the world over.
+
+
+                         In Pace!
+
+I, told you a good while ago that the Little Gentleman could not do
+a better thing than to leave all his money, whatever it might be, to
+the young girl who has since that established such a claim upon him.
+He did not, however.  A considerable bequest to one of our public
+institutions keeps his name in grateful remembrance.  The telescope
+through which he was fond of watching the heavenly bodies, and the
+movements of which had been the source of such odd fancies on my
+part, is now the property of a Western College.  You smile as you
+think of my taking it for a fleshless human figure, when I saw its
+tube pointing to the sky, and thought it was an arm, under the white
+drapery thrown over it for protection.  So do I smile now; I belong
+to the numerous class who are prophets after the fact, and hold my
+nightmares very cheap by daylight
+
+I have received many letters of inquiry as to the sound resembling a
+woman's voice, which occasioned me so many perplexities.  Some
+thought there was no question that he had a second apartment, in
+which he had made an asylum for a deranged female relative.  Others
+were of opinion that he was, as I once suggested, a "Bluebeard" with
+patriarchal tendencies, and I have even been censured for
+introducing so Oriental an element into my record of boarding-house
+experience.
+
+Come in and see me, the Professor, some evening when I have nothing
+else to do, and ask me to play you Tartini's Devil's Sonata on that
+extraordinary instrument in my possession, well known to amateurs as
+one of the masterpieces of Joseph Guarnerius.  The vox humana of the
+great Haerlem organ is very lifelike, and the same stop in the organ
+of the Cambridge chapel might be mistaken in some of its tones for a
+human voice; but I think you never heard anything come so near the
+cry of a prima donna as the A string and the E string of this
+instrument.  A single fact will illustrate the resemblance.  I was
+executing some tours de force upon it one evening, when the
+policeman of our district rang the bell sharply, and asked what was
+the matter in the house.  He had heard a woman's screams,--he was
+sure of it.  I had to make the instrument sing before his eyes
+before he could be satisfied that he had not heard the cries of a
+woman.  The instrument was bequeathed to me by the Little Gentleman.
+Whether it had anything to do with the sounds I heard coming from
+his chamber, you can form your own opinion;--I have no other
+conjecture to offer.  It is not true that a second apartment with a
+secret entrance was found; and the story of the veiled lady is the
+invention of one of the Reporters.
+
+Bridget, the housemaid, always insisted that he died a Catholic.
+She had seen the crucifix, and believed that he prayed on his knees
+before it.  The last circumstance is very probably true; indeed,
+there was a spot worn on the carpet just before this cabinet which
+might be thus accounted for.  Why he, whose whole life was a
+crucifixion, should not love to look on that divine image of
+blameless suffering, I cannot see; on the contrary, it seems to me
+the most natural thing in the world that he should.  But there are
+those who want to make private property of everything, and can't
+make up their minds that people who don't think as they do should
+claim any interest in that infinite compassion expressed in the
+central figure of the Christendom which includes us all.
+
+The divinity-student expressed a hope before the boarders that he
+should meet him in heaven. --The question is, whether he'll meet
+you,--said the young fellow John, rather smartly.  The divinity-
+student had n't thought of that.
+
+However, he is a worthy young man, and I trust I have shown him in a
+kindly and respectful light.  He will get a parish by-and-by; and,
+as he is about to marry the sister of an old friend,--the
+Schoolmistress, whom some of us remember,--and as all sorts of
+expensive accidents happen to young married ministers, he will be
+under bonds to the amount of his salary, which means starvation, if
+they are forfeited, to think all his days as he thought when he was
+settled,--unless the majority of his people change with him or in
+advance of him.  A hard ease, to which nothing could reconcile a
+man, except that the faithful discharge of daily duties in his
+personal relations with his parishioners will make him useful enough
+in his way, though as a thinker he may cease to exist before he has
+reached middle age.
+
+--Iris went into mourning for the Little Gentleman.  Although, as I
+have said, he left the bulk of his property, by will, to a public
+institution, he added a codicil, by which he disposed of various
+pieces of property as tokens of kind remembrance.  It was in this
+way I became the possessor of the wonderful instrument I have spoken
+of, which had been purchased for him out of an Italian convent.  The
+landlady was comforted with a small legacy.  The following extract
+relates to Iris : "in consideration of her manifold acts of
+kindness, but only in token of grateful remembrance, and by no means
+as a reward for services which cannot be compensated, a certain
+messuage, with all the land thereto appertaining, situated in ______
+Street, at the North End, so called, of Boston, aforesaid, the same
+being the house in which I was born, but now inhabited by several
+families, and known as 'The Rookery.'" Iris had also the crucifix,
+the portrait, and the red-jewelled ring.  The funeral or death's-
+head ring was buried with him.
+
+It was a good while, after the Little Gentleman was gone, before our
+boarding-house recovered its wonted cheerfulness.  There was a
+flavor in his whims and local prejudices that we liked, even while
+we smiled at them.  It was hard to see the tall chair thrust away
+among useless lumber, to dismantle his room, to take down the
+picture of Leah, the handsome Witch of Essex, to move away the
+massive shelves that held the books he loved, to pack up the tube
+through which he used to study the silent stars, looking down at him
+like the eyes of dumb creatures, with a kind of stupid half-
+consciousness that did not worry him as did the eyes of men and
+women,--and hardest of all to displace that sacred figure to which
+his heart had always turned and found refuge, in the feelings it
+inspired, from all the perplexities of his busy brain.  It was hard,
+but it had to be done.
+
+And by-and-by we grew cheerful again, and the breakfast-table wore
+something of its old look.  The Koh-i-noor, as we named the
+gentleman with the diamond, left us, however, soon after that
+"little mill," as the young fellow John called it, where he came off
+second best.  His departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the
+landlady's daughter, inclosing a lock of purple hair which she "had
+valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the
+vows he had breathed," speedily followed by another, inclosing the
+landlady's bill.  The next morning he was missing, as were his
+limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it.  Three empty bottles of
+Mrs. Allen's celebrated preparation, each of them asserting, on its
+word of honor as a bottle, that its former contents were "not a
+dye," were all that was left to us of the Koh-i-noor.
+
+>From this time forward, the landlady's daughter manifested a decided
+improvement in her style of carrying herself before the boarders.
+She abolished the odious little flat, gummy side-curl.  She left off
+various articles of "jewelry."  She began to help her mother in some
+of her household duties.  She became a regular attendant on the
+ministrations of a very worthy clergyman, having been attracted to
+his meetin' by witnessing a marriage ceremony in which he called a
+man and a woman a "gentleman" and a "lady,"--a stroke of gentility
+which quite overcame her.  She even took a part in what she called a
+Sabbath school, though it was held on Sunday, and by no means on
+Saturday, as the name she intended to utter implied.  All this,
+which was very sincere, as I believe, on her part, and attended with
+a great improvement in her character, ended in her bringing home a
+young man, with straight, sandy hair, brushed so as to stand up
+steeply above his forehead, wearing a pair of green spectacles, and
+dressed in black broadcloth.  His personal aspect, and a certain
+solemnity of countenance, led me to think he must be a clergyman;
+and as Master Benjamin Franklin blurted out before several of us
+boarders, one day, that "Sis had got a beau," I was pleased at the
+prospect of her becoming a minister's wife.  On inquiry, however, I
+found that the somewhat solemn look which I had noticed was indeed a
+professional one, but not clerical.  He was a young undertaker, who
+had just succeeded to a thriving business.  Things, I believe, are
+going on well at this time of writing, and I am glad for the
+landlady's daughter and her mother.  Sextons and undertakers are the
+cheerfullest people in the world at home, as comedians and circus-
+clowns are the most melancholy in their domestic circle.
+
+As our old boarding-house is still in existence, I do not feel at
+liberty to give too minute a statement of the present condition of
+each and all of its inmates.  I am happy to say, however, that they
+are all alive and well, up to this time.  That amiable old gentleman
+who sat opposite to me is growing older, as old men will, but still
+smiles benignantly on all the boarders, and has come to be a kind of
+father to all of them,--so that on his birthday there is always
+something like a family festival.  The Poor Relation, even, has
+warmed into a filial feeling towards him, and on his last birthday
+made him a beautiful present, namely, a very handsomely bound copy
+of Blair's celebrated poem, "The Grave."
+
+The young man John is still, as he says, "in fustrate fettle."  I
+saw him spar, not long since, at a private exhibition, and do
+himself great credit in a set-to with Henry Finnegass, Esq., a
+professional gentleman of celebrity.  I am pleased to say that he
+has been promoted to an upper clerkship, and, in consequence of his
+rise in office, has taken an apartment somewhat lower down than
+number "forty-'leven," as he facetiously called his attic.  Whether
+there is any truth, or not, in the story of his attachment to, and
+favorable reception by, the daughter of the head of an extensive
+wholesale grocer's establishment, I will not venture an opinion; I
+may say, however, that I have met him repeatedly in company with a
+very well-nourished and high-colored young lady, who, I understand,
+is the daughter of the house in question.
+
+Some of the boarders were of opinion that Iris did not return the
+undisguised attentions of the handsome young Marylander.  Instead of
+fixing her eyes steadily on him, as she used to look upon the Little
+Gentleman, she would turn them away, as if to avoid his own.  They
+often went to church together, it is true; but nobody, of course,
+supposes there is any relation between religious sympathy and those
+wretched "sentimental" movements of the human heart upon which it is
+commonly agreed that nothing better is based than society,
+civilization, friendship, the relation of husband and wife, and of
+parent and child, and which many people must think were singularly
+overrated by the Teacher of Nazareth, whose whole life, as I said
+before, was full of sentiment, loving this or that young man,
+pardoning this or that sinner, weeping over the dead, mourning for
+the doomed city, blessing, and perhaps kissing, the little children,
+so that the Gospels are still cried over almost as often as the last
+work of fiction!
+
+But one fine June morning there rumbled up to the door of our
+boarding-house a hack containing a lady inside and a trunk on the
+outside.  It was our friend the lady-patroness of Miss Iris, the
+same who had been called by her admiring pastor "The Model of all
+the Virtues."  Once a week she had written a letter, in a rather
+formal hand, but full of good advice, to her young charge.  And now
+she had come to carry her away, thinking that she had learned all
+she was likely to learn under her present course of teaching.  The
+Model, however, was to stay awhile,--a week, or more,--before they
+should leave together.
+
+Iris was obedient, as she was bound to be.  She was respectful,
+grateful, as a child is with a just, but not tender parent.  Yet
+something was wrong.  She had one of her trances, and became statue-
+like, as before, only the day after the Model's arrival.  She was
+wan and silent, tasted nothing at table, smiled as if by a forced
+effort, and often looked vaguely away from those who were looking at
+her, her eyes just glazed with the shining moisture of a tear that
+must not be allowed to gather and fall.  Was it grief at parting
+from the place where her strange friendship had grown up with the
+Little Gentleman?  Yet she seemed to have become reconciled to his
+loss, and rather to have a deep feeling of gratitude that she had
+been permitted to care for him in his last weary days.
+
+The Sunday after the Model's arrival, that lady had an attack of
+headache, and was obliged to shut herself up in a darkened room
+alone.  Our two young friends took the opportunity to go together to
+the Church of the Galileans.  They said but little going,--
+"collecting their thoughts" for the service, I devoutly hope.  My
+kind good friend the pastor preached that day one of his sermons
+that make us all feel like brothers and sisters, and his text was
+that affectionate one from John, "My little children, let us not
+love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth."  When
+Iris and her friend came out of church, they were both pale, and
+walked a space without speaking.
+
+At last the young man said,--You and I are not little children,
+Iris!
+
+She looked in his face an instant, as if startled, for there was
+something strange in the tone of his voice.  She smiled faintly, but
+spoke never a word.
+
+In deed and in truth, Iris,----
+
+What shall a poor girl say or do, when a strong man falters in his
+speech before her, and can do nothing better than hold out his hand
+to finish his broken sentence?
+
+The poor girl said nothing, but quietly laid her ungloved hand in
+his,--the little soft white hand which had ministered so tenderly
+and suffered so patiently.
+
+The blood came back to the young man's cheeks, as he lifted it to
+his lips, even as they walked there in the street, touched it gently
+with them, and said, "It is mine!"
+
+Iris did not contradict him.
+
+The seasons pass by so rapidly, that I am startled to think how much
+has happened since these events I was describing.  Those two young
+people would insist on having their own way about their own affairs,
+notwithstanding the good lady, so justly called the Model, insisted
+that the age of twenty-five years was as early as any discreet young
+lady should think of incurring the responsibilities, etc., etc.
+Long before Iris had reached that age, she was the wife of a young
+Maryland engineer, directing some of the vast constructions of his
+native State,--where he was growing rich fast enough to be able to
+decline that famous Russian offer which would have made him a kind
+of nabob in a few years.  Iris does not write verse often, nowadays,
+but she sometimes draws.  The last sketch of hers I have seen in my
+Southern visits was of two children, a boy and girl, the youngest
+holding a silver goblet, like the one she held that evening when I--
+I was so struck with her statue-like beauty.  If in the later,
+summer months you find the grass marked with footsteps around that
+grave on Copp's Hill I told you of, and flowers scattered over it,
+you may be sure that Iris is here on her annual visit to the home of
+her childhood and that excellent lady whose only fault was, that
+Nature had written out her list of virtues an ruled paper, and
+forgotten to rub out the lines.
+
+One thing more I must mention.  Being on the Common, last Sunday, I
+was attracted by the cheerful spectacle of a well-dressed and
+somewhat youthful papa wheeling a very elegant little carriage
+containing a stout baby.  A buxom young lady watched them from one
+of the stone seats, with an interest which could be nothing less
+than maternal.  I at once recognized my old friend, the young fellow
+whom we called John.  He was delighted to see me, introduced me to
+"Madam," and would have the lusty infant out of the carriage, and
+hold him up for me to look at.
+
+Now, then,--he said to the two-year-old,--show the gentleman how you
+hit from the shoulder.  Whereupon the little imp pushed his fat fist
+straight into my eye, to his father's intense satisfaction.
+
+Fust-rate little chap,--said the papa. --Chip of the old block.
+Regl'r little Johnny, you know.
+
+I was so much pleased to find the young fellow settled in life, and
+pushing about one of "them little articles" he had seemed to want so
+much, that I took my "punishment" at the hands of the infant
+pugilist with great equanimity. --And how is the old boarding-
+house?--I asked.
+
+A 1,--he answered. --Painted and papered as good as new.  Gabs in
+all the rooms up to the skyparlors.  Old woman's layin' up money,
+they say.  Means to send Ben Franklin to college.  Just then the
+first bell rang for church, and my friend, who, I understand, has
+become a most exemplary member of society, said he must be off to
+get ready for meetin', and told the young one to "shake dada," which
+he did with his closed fist, in a somewhat menacing manner.  And so
+the young man John, as we used to call him, took the pole of the
+miniature carriage, and pushed the small pugilist before him
+homewards, followed, in a somewhat leisurely way, by his pleasant-
+looking lady-companion, and I sent a sigh and a smile after him.
+
+That evening, as soon as it was dark, I could not help going round
+by the old boarding-house.  The "gahs" was lighted, but the
+curtains, or more properly, the painted shades; were not down.  And
+so I stood there and looked in along the table where the boarders
+sat at the evening meal,--our old breakfast-table, which some of us
+feel as if we knew so well.  There were new faces at it, but also
+old and familiar ones. --The landlady, in a wonderfully smart cap,
+looking young, comparatively speaking, and as if half the wrinkles
+had been ironed out of her forehead. --Her daughter, in rather
+dressy half-mourning, with a vast brooch of jet, got up, apparently,
+to match the gentleman next her, who was in black costume and sandy
+hair,--the last rising straight from his forehead, like the marble
+flame one sometimes sees at the top of a funeral urn. --The Poor
+Relation, not in absolute black, but in a stuff with specks of
+white; as much as to say, that, if there were any more Hirams left
+to sigh for her, there were pin-holes in the night of her despair,
+through which a ray of hope might find its way to an adorer.
+--Master Benjamin Franklin, grown taller of late, was in the act of
+splitting his face open with a wedge of pie, so that his features
+were seen to disadvantage for the moment. --The good old gentleman
+was sitting still and thoughtful.  All at once he turned his face
+toward the window where I stood, and, just as if he had seen me,
+smiled his benignant smile.  It was a recollection of some past
+pleasant moment; but it fell upon me like the blessing of a father.
+
+I kissed my hand to them all, unseen as I stood in the outer
+darkness; and as I turned and went my way, the table and all around
+it faded into the realm of twilight shadows and of midnight dreams.
+
+                    ---------------------
+
+And so my year's record is finished. The Professor has talked less
+than his predecessor, but he has heard and seen more.  Thanks to all
+those friends who from time to time have sent their messages of
+kindly recognition and fellow-feeling!  Peace to all such as may
+have been vexed in spirit by any utterance these pages have
+repeated!  They will, doubtless, forget for the moment the
+difference in the hues of truth we look at through our human prisms,
+and join in singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the light
+we all need to lead us, and the warmth which alone can make us all
+brothers.
+
+
+          A SUN-DAY HYMN.
+
+Lord of all being! throned afar,
+Thy glory flames from sun and star,
+Centre and soul of every sphere,
+Yet to each loving heart how near!
+
+Sun of our life, thy quickening ray
+Sheds on our path the glow of day;
+Star of our hope, thy softened light
+Cheers the long watches of the night.
+
+Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn;
+Our noontide is thy gracious dawn;
+Our rainbow arch thy mercy's sign;
+All, save the clouds of sin, are thine!
+
+Lord of all life, below, above,
+Whose light is truth, whose warmth is love,
+Before thy ever-blazing throne
+We ask no lustre of our own.
+
+Grant us thy truth to make us free,
+And kindling hearts that burn for thee,
+Till all thy living altars claim
+One holy light, one heavenly flame.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Professor at the Breakfast Table, by Holmes
+#2 in our series by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet)
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+Title: The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+
+Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet)
+(Not the Jurist O. W. Holmes, Jr.)
+
+Release Date: June, 2001 [Etext #2665]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[Most recently updated: December 6, 2001]
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+Edition: 11
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Professor at the Breakfast Table, by Holmes
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+This etext was produced by David Widger  <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE
+
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.
+
+The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a
+quarter of a century since these papers were written.  Statements
+which were true then are not necessarily true now.  Thus, the speed
+of the trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of
+the year when the fastest time to that date was given must be very
+considerably altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page
+49 of the "Autocrat."  No doubt many other statements and opinions
+might be more or less modified if I were writing today instead of
+having written before the war, when the world and I were both more
+than a score of years younger.
+
+These papers followed close upon the track of the "Autocrat."  They
+had to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected,
+which is a formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest.
+Paradise Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are
+enough to warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his
+arrow of the danger of missing when he looses "his fellow of the
+selfsame flight."
+
+There is good reason why it should be so.  The first juice that runs
+of itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and
+tastes of the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press
+the flow betrays the flavor of the skin.  If there is any freshness
+in the original idea of the work, if there is any individuality in
+the method or style of a new author, or of an old author on a new
+track, it will have lost much of its first effect when repeated.
+Still, there have not been wanting readers who have preferred this
+second series of papers to the first.  The new papers were more
+aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that reason found a
+heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper antagonism
+in others.  It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks they
+called forth.  Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of
+temper at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as
+if they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary.  It required
+the exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.
+
+How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
+line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
+when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant!  One day, in the time
+when I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of "Tom
+Jones," and glance at the title-page.  There was one of those little
+engravings opposite, which bore the familiar name of "T. Uwins," as I
+remember it, and under it the words "Mr. Partridge bore all this
+patiently."  How many times, when, after rough usage from
+ill-mannered critics, my own vocabulary of vituperation was simmering
+in such a lively way that it threatened to boil and lift its lid and
+so boil over, those words have calmed the small internal
+effervescence!  There is very little in them and very little of them;
+and so there is not much in a linchpin considered by itself, but it
+often keeps a wheel from coming off and prevents what might be a
+catastrophe.  The chief trouble in offering such papers as these to
+the readers of to-day is that their heresies have become so familiar
+among intelligent people that they have too commonplace an aspect.
+All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear so differently from
+the way in which they presented themselves when these papers were
+written that it is hard to recognize that we and our fellow-
+passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same
+unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.
+
+But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in these
+papers to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index
+Expurgatorius; and if they are medicated with a few questionable
+dogmas or antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher
+treatments, that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne,
+and the reader may nod over pages which, when they were first
+written, would have waked him into a paroxysm of protest and
+denunciation.
+
+November, 1882.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
+
+This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades,
+and if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten
+years.  The first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps
+apologetic, in the expectation of attacks from various quarters.  If
+the book is in some points in advance of public opinion, it is
+natural that the writer should try to smooth the way to the reception
+of his more or less aggressive ideas.  He wishes to convince, not to
+offend,--to obtain a hearing for his thought, not to stir up angry
+opposition in those who do not accept it.  There is commonly an
+anxious look about a first Preface.  The author thinks he shall be
+misapprehended about this or that matter, that his well-meant
+expressions will probably be invidiously interpreted by those whom he
+looks upon as prejudiced critics, and if he deals with living
+questions that he will be attacked as a destructive by the
+conservatives and reproached for his timidity by the noisier
+radicals.  The first Preface, therefore, is likely to be the weakest
+part of a work containing the thoughts of an honest writer.
+
+After a time the writer has cooled down from his excitement,--has got
+over his apprehensions, is pleased to find that his book is still
+read, and that he must write a new Preface.  He comes smiling to his
+task.  How many things have explained themselves in the ten or twenty
+or thirty years since he came before his untried public in those
+almost plaintive paragraphs in which he introduced himself to his
+readers,--for the Preface writer, no matter how fierce a combatant he
+may prove, comes on to the stage with his shield on his right arm and
+his sword in his left hand.
+
+The Professor at the Breakfast-Table came out in the "Atlantic
+Monthly" and introduced itself without any formal Preface.  A quarter
+of a century later the Preface of 1882, which the reader has just had
+laid before him, was written.  There is no mark of worry, I think, in
+that.  Old opponents had come up and shaken hands with the author
+they had attacked or denounced.  Newspapers which had warned their
+subscribers against him were glad to get him as a contributor to
+their columns.  A great change had come over the community with
+reference to their beliefs.  Christian believers were united as never
+before in the feeling that, after all, their common object was to
+elevate the moral and religious standard of humanity.  But within the
+special compartments of the great Christian fold the marks of
+division have pronounced themselves in the most unmistakable manner.
+As an example we may take the lines of cleavage which have shown
+themselves in the two great churches, the Congregational and the
+Presbyterian, and the very distinct fissure which is manifest in the
+transplanted Anglican church of this country.  Recent circumstances
+have brought out the fact of the great change in the dogmatic
+communities which has been going on silently but surely.  The
+licensing of a missionary, the transfer of a Professor from one
+department to another, the election of a Bishop,--each of these
+movements furnishes evidence that there is no such thing as an air-
+tight reservoir of doctrinal finalities.
+
+The folding-doors are wide open to every Protestant to enter all the
+privileged precincts and private apartments of the various exclusive
+religious organizations.  We may demand the credentials of every
+creed and catechise all the catechisms.  So we may discuss the
+gravest questions unblamed over our morning coffee-cups or our
+evening tea-cups.  There is no rest for the Protestant until he gives
+up his legendary anthropology and all its dogmatic dependencies.
+
+It is only incidentally, however, that the Professor at the
+Breakfast-Table handles matters which are the subjects of religious
+controversy.  The reader who is sensitive about having his fixed
+beliefs dealt with as if they were open to question had better skip
+the pages which look as if they would disturb his complacency.
+"Faith" is the most precious of possessions, and it dislikes being
+meddled with.  It means, of course, self-trust,--that is, a belief in
+the value of our, own opinion of a doctrine, of a church, of a
+religion, of a Being, a belief quite independent of any evidence that
+we can bring to convince a jury of our fellow beings.  Its roots are
+thus inextricably entangled with those of self-love and bleed as
+mandrakes were said to, when pulled up as weeds.  Some persons may
+even at this late day take offence at a few opinions expressed in the
+following pages, but most of these passages will be read without loss
+of temper by those who disagree with them, and by-and-by they may be
+found too timid and conservative for intelligent readers, if they are
+still read by any.
+
+BEVERLY FARM, MASS., June 18, 1891.
+
+O.  W.  H.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                        THE PROFESSOR
+
+                           AT THE
+                       BREAKFAST-TABLE.
+
+
+          What he said, what he heard, and what he saw.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
+statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a
+universal formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table.
+It would have had a grand effect.  For this purpose I fixed my eyes
+on a certain divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few
+phrases, and then forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of
+being.--I will thank you for the sugar,--I said.--Man is a
+dependent creature.
+
+It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed
+the sugar to me.
+
+--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.
+
+The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram
+of the sugar question.
+
+You smile,--I said.--Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of
+great things?
+
+The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back
+with a pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches.--Life is a great
+bundle of great things,--he said.
+
+(NOW, THEN!)  The great end of being, after all, is....
+
+Hold on!--said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be
+John, and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold
+on! the Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.
+
+Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
+pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs
+about the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing
+the bait and hook intended for flounders.  On being drawn from the
+water, it exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a
+surface so full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the
+naturalists have not been able to count them without quarrelling
+about the number, and that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil,
+do not like to touch them, and especially to tread on them, unless
+they happen to have shoes on, to cover the thick white soles of their
+broad black feet.
+
+When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked
+round the table with curiosity to see what it meant.  At the further
+end of it I saw a head, and a--a small portion of a little deformed
+body, mounted on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a
+fair level enough for him to get at his food.  His whole appearance
+was so grotesque, I felt for a minute as if there was a showman
+behind him who would pull him down presently and put up Judy, or the
+hangman, or the Devil, or some other wooden personage of the famous
+spectacle.  I contrived to lose the first of his sentence, but what I
+heard began so:
+
+--by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to
+come down from the tents on section and Independence days with their
+pails to get water to make egg-pop with.  Born in Boston; went to
+school in Boston as long as the boys would let me.--The little man
+groaned, turned, as if to look around, and went on.--Ran away from
+school one day to see Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a
+logger-head.  That was in flip days, when there were always two three
+loggerheads in the fire.  I'm a Boston boy, I tell you,--born at
+North End, and mean to be buried on Copp's Hill, with the good old
+underground people,--the Worthylakes, and the rest of 'em.  Yes,--up
+on the old hill, where they buried Captain Daniel Malcolm in a stone
+grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from the red-coats, in those
+old times when the world was frozen up tight and there was n't but
+one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil all,--and black enough
+it looked, I tell you!  There 's where my bones shall lie, Sir, and
+rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy Yard opposite!  You
+can't make me ashamed of the old place!  Full crooked little
+streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em--
+
+--I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
+"John,"--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but
+thinking in a half-whisper, evidently.--I should think so; and got
+kinked up, turnin' so many corners.--The little man did not hear
+what was said, but went on,--
+
+--full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened,
+and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and
+free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead
+men,--I don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their
+steeples!
+
+--How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black
+whiskers and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too
+massive, and a diamond pin so very large that the most trusting
+nature might confess an inward suggestion,--of course, nothing
+amounting to a suspicion.  For this is a gentleman from a great city,
+and sits next to the landlady's daughter, who evidently believes in
+him, and is the object of his especial attention.
+
+How high?--said the little man.--As high as the first step of the
+stairs that lead to the New Jerusalem.  Is n't that high enough?
+
+It is,--I said.--The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
+order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may
+be so still.  But who shall tune the pitch-pipe?  Quis cus-(On the
+whole, as this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a
+foreign language, might not be familiar to all the boarders, I
+thought I would not finish it.)
+
+--Go to the Bible!--said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp-
+eyed, sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress,
+appearing as if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated
+itself as a bit of economy.
+
+You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
+commentary on what you say.  "He who would bring back the wealth of
+the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies."  What you bring
+away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.-
+Benjamin Franklin!  Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring
+me down the small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will
+find lying under the "Cruden's Concordance." [The boy took a large
+bite, which left a very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-
+butter he held, and departed on his errand, with the portable
+fraction of his breakfast to sustain him on the way.]
+
+--Here it is.  "Go to the Bible.  A Dissertation, etc., etc.  By J.
+J. Flournoy.  Athens, Georgia, 1858."
+
+Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have
+judiciously delivered.  You may be interested, Madam, to know what
+are the conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia,
+has arrived.  You shall hear, Madam.  He has gone to the Bible, and
+he has come back from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing
+social evils, which, if it is the real specific, as it professes to
+be, is of great interest to humanity, and to the female part of
+humanity in particular.  It is what he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the
+marrying of three wives, so that "good old men" may be solaced at
+once by the companionship of the wisdom of maturity, and of those
+less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities which are found at
+an earlier period of life.  He has followed your precept, Madam; I
+hope you accept his conclusions.
+
+The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact,
+"all abroad," after the delivery of this "counter" of mine, that I
+left her to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation,
+which I was beginning to get pretty well in hand.
+
+But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
+effect I had produced.  First, she was a little stunned at having her
+argument knocked over.  Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
+tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion.  Thirdly.
+--I don't like to say what I thought.  Something seemed to have
+pleased her fancy.  Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into
+fashion, there would be three times as many chances to enjoy the
+luxury of saying, "No!" is more than I, can tell you.  I may as well
+mention that B. F. came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet
+for "a lady,"--one of the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a
+secret he wished to be relieved of.
+
+--I continued.--If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in
+the faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the
+end of all reason.  If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for
+truth with its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no
+presumption in favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of
+our inheriting it.  Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair
+chance to become a convert to a better religion.
+
+The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in
+the mind by changing the word which stands for it.
+
+--I don't know what you mean by "depolarizing" an idea,--said the
+divinity-student.
+
+I will tell you,--I said.---When a given symbol which represents a
+thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it
+undergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives
+to iron.  It becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by
+strange forces which did not belong to it.  The word, and
+consequently the idea it represents, is polarized.
+
+The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in
+print, consists entirely of polarized words.  Borrow one of these
+from another language and religion, and you will find it leaves all
+its magnetism behind it.  Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo
+mythology.  Even a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy
+Pundit would shut his ears and run away from you in horror, if you
+should say it aloud.  What do you care for O'm?  If you wanted to get
+the Pundit to look at his religion fairly, you must first depolarize
+this and all similar words for him.  The argument for and against new
+translations of the Bible really turns on this.  Skepticism is afraid
+to trust its truths in depolarized words, and so cries out against a
+new translation.  I think, myself, if every idea our Book contains
+could be shelled out of its old symbol and put into a new, clean,
+unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of reading it as
+philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it,--which we do not
+and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the "Gayatri" as a
+fair man and lover of truth should do.  When society has once fairly
+dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it will
+perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.
+
+I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
+young fellow near me.
+
+A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.
+--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
+observers from two very different points of view.  If you wish to get
+the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two
+observations from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer
+and midwinter, for instance.  To get the parallax of heavenly truths,
+you must take an observation from the position of the laity as well
+as of the clergy.  Teachers and students of theology get a certain
+look, certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a
+professional neckcloth, and habits of mind as professional as their
+externals.  They are scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well
+enough what the "idols of the tribe" are.  Of course they have their
+false gods, as all men that follow one exclusive calling are prone to
+do.--The clergy have played the part of the flywheel in our modern
+civilization.  They have never suffered it to stop.  They have often
+carried on its movement, when other moving powers failed, by the
+momentum stored in their vast body.  Sometimes, too, they have kept
+it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the
+bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that
+yields the bread of life.  But the mainspring of the world's onward
+religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men, let me
+tell you.  It is the people that makes the clergy, and not the clergy
+that makes the people.  Of course, the profession reacts on its
+source with variable energy.--But there never was a guild of dealers
+or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after.
+
+Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time
+since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in
+Harvard College yard.
+
+--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man.--The bonfire when Robert
+Calef's book was burned?
+
+The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
+burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
+President of the College and Minister of the Gospel.  You remember
+the old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef,
+trader of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what
+a set of fools and worse than fools they were-
+
+Remember it?--said the little man.--I don't think I shall forget it,
+as long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what
+it wears.  There was a ring on it.
+
+May I look at it?--I said.
+
+Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it
+falls off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.
+
+He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the
+table, and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being
+only a little above the level of the table, as he stood.  With pain
+and labor, lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his
+sticks, he took a few steps from his place,--his motions and the
+deadbeat of the misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and
+ear the malformation which is called in learned language talipes
+varus, or inverted club-foot.
+
+Stop!  stop!--I said,--let me come to you.
+
+The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with
+an ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair.
+I walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his
+right hand, with the ring upon it.  The ring had been put on long
+ago, and could not pass the misshapen joint.  It was one of those
+funeral rings which used to be given to relatives and friends after
+the decease of persons of any note or importance.  Beneath a round
+fit of glass was a death's head.  Engraved on one side of this, "L.
+B.  AEt.  22,"--on the other, "Ob. 1692"
+
+My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man.--Hanged for a
+witch.  It does n't seem a great while ago.  I knew my grandmother,
+and loved her.  Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief
+Justice Sewall hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.-
+-That was Salem, though, and not Boston.  No, not Boston.  Robert
+Calef, the Boston merchant, it was that blew them all to-
+
+Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was
+getting red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.
+
+This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
+conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.
+
+--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
+its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of
+talking over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are
+plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above
+all, who has found out, by living into the pith and core of life,
+that all of the Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of
+any human book is to the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of
+the hot aortic flood of throbbing human life, of this infinite,
+instantaneous consciousness in which the soul's being consists,--an
+incandescent point in the filament connecting the negative pole of a
+past eternity with the positive pole of an eternity that is to come,-
+-that all of the Deity which any human book can hold is to this
+larger Deity of the working battery of the universe only as the films
+in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams and curdled lumps of
+ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin placers,--Oh!--I was saying
+that a man who lives out-of-doors, among live people, gets some
+things into his head he might not find in the index of his "Body of
+Divinity."
+
+I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
+their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the
+bottom of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street
+Church and look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch
+another such spire across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea,
+I say, is pretty nearly worn out.  Now when a civilization or a
+civilized custom falls into senile dementia, there is commonly a
+judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come, from a breath,--
+as fires come, from a spark.
+
+Here, look at medicine.  Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
+prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long,
+"curing" patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling,
+selling lies at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving
+unfortunate sick people a mess of things either too odious to swallow
+or too acrid to hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.
+
+--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
+country-practitioner?  Then you don't know the history of medicine,--
+and that is not my fault.  But don't expose yourself in any outbreak
+of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded!  I
+did not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the
+old folios in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the
+proprietor, of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin
+reprints by Philadelphia Editors.  Besides, many of the profession
+and I know a little something of each other, and you don't think I am
+such a simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the
+better heads among them would condemn as unfair and untrue?  Now mark
+how the great plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and
+in what form it fell.
+
+A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy
+and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow
+dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous
+fiction (founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy.  I am very
+fair, you see,---you can help yourself to either of these sets of
+phrases.
+
+All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general
+an effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug
+is a good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing,
+as was produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan
+(theorist).  Not that the wiser part of the profession needed him to
+teach them; but the routinists and their employers, the "general
+practitioners," who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their
+drug-consuming customers, had to recognize that people could get
+well, unpoisoned.  These dumb cattle would not learn it of
+themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell on them.
+
+--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
+theology?  I will tell you, then.  It is Spiritualism.  While some
+are crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are
+laughing at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with
+it as a mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism
+is quietly undermining the traditional ideas of the future state
+which have been and are still accepted,--not merely in those who
+believe in it, but in the general sentiment of the community, to a
+larger extent than most good people seem to be aware of.  It need n't
+be true, to do this, any more than Homoeopathy need, to do its work.
+The Spiritualists have some pretty strong instincts to pry over,
+which no doubt have been roughly handled by theologians at different
+times.  And the Nemesis of the pulpit comes, in a shape it little
+thought of, beginning with the snap of a toe-joint, and ending with
+such a crack of old beliefs that the roar of it is heard in all the
+ministers' studies of Christendom?  Sir, you cannot have people of
+cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in common things,
+large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men, men of
+science, professing to be in communication with the spiritual world
+and keeping up constant intercourse with it, without its gradually
+reacting on the whole conception of that other life.  It is the folly
+of the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom.  Not only out
+of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools
+and cheats, we may often get our truest lessons.  For the fool's
+judgment is a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the cheat
+watches the clouds and sets his weathercock by them,--so that one
+shall often see by their pointing which way the winds of heaven are
+blowing, when the slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call
+the Temples of Wisdom are turning to all points of the compass.
+
+--Amen!--said the young fellow called John--Ten minutes by the
+watch.  Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up
+their left foot!
+
+I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty
+seconds.  His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant.
+I think it was simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a
+youthful playfulness, that led him to this outbreak.  I have often
+noticed that even quiet horses, on a sharp November morning, when
+their coats are beginning to get the winter roughness, will give
+little sportive demi-kicks, with slight sudden elevation of the
+subsequent region of the body, and a sharp short whinny,--by no means
+intending to put their heels through the dasher, or to address the
+driver rudely, but feeling, to use a familiar word, frisky.  This, I
+think, is the physiological condition of the young person, John.  I
+noticed, however, what I should call a palpebral spasm, affecting the
+eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if it were intended for the
+facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to suspect a disposition
+to be satirical on his part.
+
+--Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, ex officio, as a
+Professor, a conservative.  For I don't know any fruit that clings to
+its tree so faithfully, not even a "froze-'n'-thaw" winter-apple, as
+a Professor to the bough of which his chair is made.  You can't shake
+him off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off.  Hence, by
+a chain of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism
+generally.
+
+But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once
+find yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop
+your Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher
+than in the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of
+facts and swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you
+are in it.
+
+You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight
+in a profession.  Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in,
+through India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and
+general knowledge will leak in, though a profession were covered with
+twenty thicknesses of sheepskin diplomas.
+
+By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and
+common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the
+people, Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with trip-
+hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with
+a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on
+the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of
+them--like Aaron's calf
+
+[See Holmes poem: "When doctor's take what they would give and
+lawyers give what they would take and strawberries grow larger down
+through the box."   D.W.]
+
+If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up
+and keep all the soul's windows down,--to shut out the sun from the
+east and the wind from the west,--to let the rats run free in the
+cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the
+spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus
+is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or rave
+in its delirium,--I, Sir, am a bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the
+barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative.
+
+--Were you born in Boston, Sir?--said the little man,--looking eager
+and excited.
+
+I was not,--I replied.
+
+It's a pity,--it's a pity,--said the little man;--it 's the place to
+be born in.  But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you can
+come and live here.  Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science
+and the American Union, was n't ashamed to be born here.  Jim Otis,
+the father of American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod
+marshes awhile, but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough.
+Joe Warren, the first bloody ruffed-shirt of the Revolution, was as
+good as born here.  Parson Charming strolled along this way from
+Newport, and stayed here.  Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;--
+we'd have made a man of him,--poor, dear, good old Christian heathen!
+There he lies, as peaceful as a young baby, in the old burying-
+ground!  I've stood on the slab many a time.  Meant well,--meant
+well.  Juggernaut.  Parson Charming put a little oil on one linchpin,
+and slipped it out so softly, the first thing they knew about it was
+the wheel of that side was down.  T' other fellow's at work now, but
+he makes more noise about it.  When the linchpin comes out on his
+side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the
+old cart, and they pretend to say that there are valuable things in
+it which may get hurt.  Hope not,--hope not.  But this is the great
+Macadamizing place,--always cracking up something.
+
+Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the diamond-pin,
+whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.
+
+The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's
+Turk used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if
+it went by cogwheels.--Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and
+foreign vermin included,--said the little man.
+
+This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
+application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if
+the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed.  The little man uttered it with
+the distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to
+exclaim, E-chec! so that it must have been heard.  The party supposed
+to be interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-
+bladeful of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt,
+interfered with the reply he would have made.
+
+--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
+pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
+suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders.  I think
+our small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I
+undertake to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too
+magisterially.  I won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when
+I have been in company with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have
+been guilty of the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly
+justified.  But I maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good
+listener.  If a man can tell me a fact which subtends an appreciable
+angle in the horizon of thought, I am as receptive as the
+contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren.  If, when I
+am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good story,
+I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the
+fifth "says he," and listen like a three-years' child, as the author
+of the "Old Sailor" says.  I had rather hear one of those grand
+elemental laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious names,
+Sir or Madam,) glisten to one of those old playbills of our College
+days, in which "Tom and Jerry" ("Thomas and Jeremiah," as the old
+Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be brought on
+the stage with whole force of the Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no
+such person, of course,) than say the best things I might by any
+chance find myself capable of saying.  Of course, if I come across a
+real thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I
+enjoy the luxury of sitting still for a while as much as another.
+
+Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,--things he did not
+mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
+sometimes.  Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
+thought.  I can't answer for what will turn up.  If I could, it would
+n't be talking, but "speaking my piece."  Better, I think, the hearty
+abandonment of one's self to the suggestions of the moment at the
+risk of an occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it
+escapes, but just one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of
+never saying a foolish thing.
+
+--What shall I do with this little man?--There is only one thing to
+do,--and that is to let him talk when he will.  The day of the
+"Autocrat's" monologues is over.
+
+--My friend,--said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said, the
+boarders call "John,"--My friend,--I said, one morning, after
+breakfast,--can you give me any information respecting the deformed
+person who sits at the other end of the table?
+
+What! the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,--I said,-
+-and double talipes varus,--I beg your pardon,--with two club-feet.
+
+Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?--said the
+young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you
+may have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge,
+when they show how they would punish an adversary, themselves
+protected by this rotating guard,--the middle knuckle, meantime,
+thumb-supported, fiercely prominent, death-threatening.
+
+It is,--said I.--But would you have the kindness to tell me if you
+know anything about this deformed person?
+
+About the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+My good friend,--said I,--I am sure, by your countenance, you would
+not hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by
+Nature to be spared by his fellows.  Even in speaking of him to
+others, I could wish that you might not employ a term which implies
+contempt for what should inspire only pity.
+
+A fellah 's no business to be so crooked,--said the young man called
+John.
+
+Yes, yes,--I said, thoughtfully,--the strong hate the weak.  It's all
+right.  The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to the
+individual.  Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down.
+Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail!--I
+understand the instinct, my friend,--it is cosmic,--it is planetary,-
+-it is a conservative principle in creation.
+
+The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was
+speaking, until it became as blank of vivid significance as the
+countenance of a gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of
+eyes.  He had not taken my meaning.
+
+Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink,
+as he answered,--Jest so.  All right.  A 1.  Put her through.  That's
+the way to talk.  Did you speak to me, Sir?--Here the young man
+struck up that well-known song which I think they used to sing at
+Masonic festivals, beginning, "Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left
+you Chrononhotonthologos?"
+
+I beg your pardon,--I said;--all I meant was, that men, as temporary
+occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved
+or injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a
+natural dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as
+well as of the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon
+the abode spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future
+generations.  This is the final cause of the underlying brute
+instinct which we have in common with the herds.
+
+--The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I
+thought I must try again.--It's a pity that families are kept up,
+where there are such hereditary infirmities.  Still, let us treat
+this poor man fairly, and not call him names.  Do you know what his
+name is?
+
+I know what the rest of 'em call him,--said the young fellow.--They
+call him Little Boston.  There's no harm in that, is there?
+
+It is an honorable term,--I replied.--But why Little Boston, in a
+place where most are Bostonians?
+
+Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,--said the
+young fellow.
+
+"L. B.  Ob. 1692."--Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him.
+The ring he wears labels him well enough.  There is stuff in the
+little man, or he would n't stick so manfully by this crooked,
+crotchety old town.  Give him a chance.--You will drop the Sculpin,
+won't you?--I said to the young fellow.
+
+Drop him?--he answered,--I ha'n't took him up yet.
+
+No, no,--the term,--I said,--the term.  Don't call him so any more,
+if you please.  Call him Little Boston, if you like.
+
+All right,--said the young fellow.--I would n't be hard on the poor
+little-
+
+The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
+grammar.  It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among
+the Romans,--as of those designating a person following the sea, or
+given to rural pursuits.  It is classed by custom among the profane
+words; why, it is hard to say,--but it is largely used in the street
+by those who speak of their fellows in pity or in wrath.
+
+I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended
+fish to the little man from that day forward.
+
+--Here we are, then, at our boarding--house.  First, myself, the
+Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right,
+looking down, where the "Autocrat" used to sit.  At the further end
+sits the Landlady.  At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-
+noor, or the gentleman with the diamond.  Opposite me is a Venerable
+Gentleman with a bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little.
+The Divinity Student is my neighbor on the right,--and further down,
+that Young Fellow of whom I have repeatedly spoken.  The Landlady's
+Daughter sits near the Koh-i-noor, as I said.  The Poor Relation near
+the Landlady.  At the right upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of
+whose name and history I have as yet learned nothing.  Next the
+further left-hand corner, near the lower end of the table, sits the
+deformed person.  The chair at his side, occupying that corner, is
+empty.  I need not specially mention the other boarders, with the
+exception of Benjamin Franklin, the landlady's son, who sits near his
+mother.  We are a tolerably assorted set,--difference enough and
+likeness enough; but still it seems to me there is something wanting.
+The Landlady's Daughter is the prima donna in the way of feminine
+attractions.  I am not quite satisfied with this young lady.  She
+wears more "jewelry," as certain young ladies call their trinkets,
+than I care to see on a person in her position.  Her voice is
+strident, her laugh too much like a giggle, and she has that foolish
+way of dancing and bobbing like a quill-float with a "minnum" biting
+the hook below it, which one sees and weeps over sometimes in persons
+of more pretensions.  I can't help hoping we shall put something into
+that empty chair yet which will add the missing string to our social
+harp.  I hear talk of a rare Miss who is expected.  Something in the
+schoolgirl way, I believe.  We shall see.
+
+--My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution
+which I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit
+of all concerned.
+
+Professor,--said he, one day,--don't you think your brain will run
+dry before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow?
+Let me tell you what happened to me once.  I put a little money into
+a bank, and bought a check-book, so that I might draw it as I wanted,
+in sums to suit.  Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a
+pen was as easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book
+seemed to be a dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all
+the synonymes of happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot.
+A check came back to me at last with these two words on it,--NO
+FUNDS.  My check-book was a volume of waste-paper.
+
+Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank,
+you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's
+currency without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NO
+FUNDS,--and then where will you be, my boy?  These little bits of
+paper mean your gold and your silver and your copper, Professor; and
+you will certainly break up and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to
+your metallic basis.
+
+There is something in that,--said I.--Only I rather think life can
+coin thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words.  What
+if one shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that
+falls of a June evening on the leaves of his garden?  Shall there be
+no more dew on those leaves thereafter?  Marry, yea,--many drops,
+large and round and full of moonlight as those thou shalt have
+absterged!
+
+Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
+plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
+always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April,
+or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against
+books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to
+decrepitude; with a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they
+are, as a limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particuly
+awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps,
+not as yet tanned or ossified, to finger-touch of all outward
+agencies; knowing nothing of the filmy threads of this web of life in
+which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come
+along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his
+finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding
+with the fox oftener than with the stork,--loving better the breadth
+of a fertilizing inundation than the depth of narrow artesian well;
+finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of
+the grammatophora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the movement
+of the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation
+Hercules;--and the question is, whether there is anything left for
+me, the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend
+has had his straw in the bung-hole of the Universe!
+
+A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on,
+whether he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes.
+As to catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,-
+-the gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,--the excretion of mental
+respiration,--that will depend on many things, as, on having a
+favorable intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting
+receptacle.--I sow more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel
+over the desert-sand along which my lonely consciousness paces day
+and night, than I shall throw into soil where it will germinate, in a
+year.  All sorts of bodily and mental perturbations come between us
+and the due projection of our thought.  The pulse-like "fits of easy
+and difficult transmission" seem to reach even the transparent medium
+through which our souls are seen.  We know our humanity by its often
+intercepted rays, as we tell a revolving light from a star or meteor
+by its constantly recurring obscuration.
+
+An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he
+ever delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if
+he had told all he knew.  Braham came forward once to sing one of his
+most famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the
+first line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they
+screamed it at him in a chorus of a thousand voices.  Milton could
+not write to suit himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal
+equinox.  One in the clothing-business, who, there is reason to
+suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great poet's impressible
+temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers one day without
+fitting him with a new garment.  "Ah!" said he to a friend of mine,
+who was standing by, "if it hadn't been for that confounded headache
+of mine this morning, I'd have had a coat on that man, in spite of
+himself, before he left-the store."  A passing throb, only,--but it
+deranged the nice mechanism required to persuade the accidental human
+being, X, into a given piece of broadcloth, A.
+
+We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
+transmission of our ideas with want of ideas.  I suppose that a man's
+mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the
+universe for which it has special elective affinities.  In fact, I
+look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's shop filled with
+the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of
+individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.
+
+When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there
+is an end of his genius as a real solvent.  No more effervescence and
+hissing tumult--as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting
+alkaline unbeliefs!  No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets
+covered with lies!  No more taking up of dull earths, and turning
+them, first into clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!
+
+I, the Professor, am very much like other men: I shall not find out
+when I have used up my affinities.  What a blessed thing it is, that
+Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors,
+contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!  Painful
+as the task is, they never fail to warn the author, in the most
+impressive manner, of the probabilities of failure in what he has
+undertaken.  Sad as the necessity is to their delicate sensibilities,
+they never hesitate to advertise him of the decline of his powers,
+and to press upon him the propriety of retiring before he sinks into
+imbecility.  Trusting to their kind offices, I shall endeavor to
+fulfil-
+
+--Bridget enters and begins clearing the table.
+
+--The following poem is my (The Professor's) only contribution to the
+great department of Ocean-Cable literature.  As all the poets of this
+country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the
+premium offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Burns
+Centenary, (so called, according to our Benjamin Franklin, because
+there will be nary a cent for any of us,) poetry will be very scarce
+and dear.  Consumers may, consequently, be glad to take the present
+article, which, by the aid of a Latin tutor--and a Professor of
+Chemistry, will be found intelligible to the educated classes.
+
+
+
+
+                  DE SAUTY
+
+         AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.
+
+         Professor.       Blue-Nose.
+
+
+PROFESSOR.
+
+Tell me, O Provincial!  speak, Ceruleo-Nasal!
+Lives there one De Sauty extant now among yon,
+Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
+Holding talk with nations?
+
+Is there a De Sauty, ambulant on Tellus,
+Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in night-cap,
+Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
+Three times daily patent?
+
+Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
+Or is he a mythus,--ancient word for "humbug,"--
+Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed
+Romulus and Remus?
+
+Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
+Or a living product of galvanic action,
+Like the status bred in Crosses flint-solution?
+Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!
+
+
+
+BLUE-NOSE.
+
+Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger,
+Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster!
+Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me,
+Thou shalt hear them answered.
+
+When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
+At the polar focus of the wire electric
+Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us
+Called himself "DE SAUTY."
+
+As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
+Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia,
+So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
+Sucking in the current.
+
+When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,
+Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,
+And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
+Said, "All right!  DE SAUTY."
+
+From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading
+Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples
+Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
+Of "All right! DE SAUTY."
+
+When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger,
+Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,
+Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
+Of disintegration.
+
+Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
+Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
+Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
+There was no De Sauty.
+
+Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
+C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor.  Flu.  Sil.  Potassa,
+Calc.  Sod.  Phosph.  Mag.  Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum,(?)
+Such as man is made of.
+
+Born of stream galvanic, with it be had perished!
+There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
+Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
+Cry, "All right!  DE SAUTY."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Back again!--A turtle--which means a tortoise--is fond of his shell;
+but if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out of it.  So the
+boys say.
+
+It is a libel on the turtle.  He grows to his shell, and his shell is
+in his body as much as his body is in his shell.--I don't think
+there is one of our boarders quite so testudineous as I am.  Nothing
+but a combination of motives, more peremptory than the coal on the
+turtle's back, could have got me to leave the shelter of my carapace;
+and after memorable interviews, and kindest hospitalities, and grand
+sights, and huge influx of patriotic pride,--for every American owns
+all America,--
+
+          "Creation's heir,--the world, the world is"
+
+his, if anybody's,--I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey
+might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he were allowed to
+resume his skeleton.
+
+Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent Cleopatra, and Dying
+Warrior, whose classic outlines (reproduced in the calcined mineral
+of Lutetia) crown my loaded shelves!  Welcome, ye triumphs of
+pictorial art (repeated by the magic graver) that look down upon me
+from the walls of my sacred cell!  Vesalius, as Titian drew him,
+high-fronted, still-eyed, thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems
+a gentleman, with book and carelessly-held eyeglass, marking him a
+scholar; thou, too, Jan Kuyper, commonly called Jan Praktiseer, old
+man of a century and seven years besides, father of twenty sons and
+two daughters, cut in copper by Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on
+one of the Paris quais; and ye Three Trees of Rembrandt, black in
+shadow against the blaze of light; and thou Rosy Cottager of Sir
+Joshua, roses hinted by the peppery burin of Bartolozzi; ye, too, of
+lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely for unrenowned, Young Bull
+of Paulus Potter, and sleeping Cat of Cornelius Visscher; welcome
+once more to my eyes!  The old books look out from the shelves, and I
+seem to read on their backs something asides their titles,--a kind of
+solemn greeting.  The crimson carpet flushes warm under my feet.  The
+arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair spins round with me, as if it
+were giddy with pleasure; the vast recumbent fauteuil stretches
+itself out under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine
+stretches in after-dinner laughter.
+
+The boarders were pleased to say that they were glad to get me back.
+One of them ventured a compliment, namely,--that I talked as if I
+believed what I said.--This was apparently considered something
+unusual, by its being mentioned.
+
+One who means to talk with entire sincerity,--I said,--always feels
+himself in danger of two things, namely,--an affectation of
+bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and
+actual rudeness.  What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger,
+is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that
+belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him.  Life is short,
+and conversation apt to run to mere words.  Mr. Hue I think it is,
+who tells us some very good stories about the way in which two
+Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up a long talk without saying a
+word which has any meaning in it.  Something like this is
+occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall.  The best Chinese
+talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time to time.
+Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery
+glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de
+Dantzic; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,--never a wave,
+and never a calm; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or
+a highly-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so
+gracefully, that we find meaning for the music they make as we find
+faces in the coals and fairy palaces in the clouds.  There is
+something very odd, though, about this mechanical talk.
+
+You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine
+was detached a long way from the station you were approaching?  Well,
+you have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if
+the locomotive were drawing them?  Indeed, you would not have
+suspected that you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if
+you had not seen the engine running away from you on a side-track.
+Upon my conscience, I believe some of these pretty women detach their
+minds entirely, sometimes, from their talk,--and, what is more, that
+we never know the difference.  Their lips let off the fluty syllables
+just as their fingers would sprinkle the music-drops from their
+pianos; unconscious habit turns the phrase of thought into words just
+as it does that of music into notes.--Well, they govern the world
+for all that, these sweet-lipped women,--because beauty is the index
+of a larger fact than wisdom.
+
+--The Bombazine wanted an explanation.
+
+Madam,--said I,--wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is
+the promise of the future.
+
+--All this, however, is not what I was going to say.  Here am I,
+suppose, seated--we will say at a dinner-table--alongside of an
+intelligent Englishman.  We look in each other's faces,--we exchange
+a dozen words.  One thing is settled: we mean not to offend each
+other,--to be perfectly courteous,--more than courteous; for we are
+the entertainer and the entertained, and cherish particularly amiable
+feelings, to each other.  The claret is good; and if our blood
+reddens a little with its warm crimson, we are none the less kind for
+it.
+
+I don't think people that talk over their victuals are like to say
+anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with
+strong drink before they begin jabberin'.
+
+The Bombazine uttered this with a sugary sourness, as if the words
+had been steeped in a solution of acetate of lead.--The boys of my
+time used to call a hit like this a "side-winder."
+
+--I must finish this woman.--
+
+Madam,--I said,--the Great Teacher seems to have been fond of talking
+as he sat at meat.  Because this was a good while ago, in a far-off
+place, you forget what the true fact of it was,--that those were real
+dinners, where people were hungry and thirsty, and where you met a
+very miscellaneous company.  Probably there was a great deal of loose
+talk among the guests; at any rate, there was always wine, we may
+believe.
+
+Whatever may be the hygienic advantages or disadvantages of wine,--
+and I for one, except for certain particular ends, believe in water,
+and, I blush to say it, in black tea,--there is no doubt about its
+being the grand specific against dull dinners.  A score of people
+come together in all moods of mind and body.  The problem is, in the
+space of one hour, more or less, to bring them all into the same
+condition of slightly exalted life.  Food alone is enough for one
+person, perhaps,--talk, alone, for another; but the grand equalizer
+and fraternizer, which works up the radiators to their maximum
+radiation, and the absorbents to their maximum receptivity, is now
+just where it was when
+
+          The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed,
+
+--when six great vessels containing water, the whole amounting to
+more than a hogshead-full, were changed into the best of wine.  I
+once wrote a song about wine, in which I spoke so warmly of it, that
+I was afraid some would think it was written inter pocula; whereas it
+was composed in the bosom of my family, under the most tranquillizing
+domestic influences.
+
+--The divinity-student turned towards me, looking mischievous.--Can
+you tell me,--he said,--who wrote a song for a temperance celebration
+once, of which the following is a verse?
+
+     Alas for the loved one, too gentle and fair
+     The joys of the banquet to chasten and share!
+     Her eye lost its light that his goblet might shine,
+     And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his wine!
+
+I did,--I answered.--What are you going to do about it?--I will tell
+you another line I wrote long ago:--
+
+     Don't be "consistent,"--but be simply true.
+
+The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that
+the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with
+many facets answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about
+them; secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to
+grind us down to a single flat surface.  It is hard work to resist
+this grinding-down action.--Now give me a chance.  Better eternal
+and universal abstinence than the brutalities of those days that made
+wives and mothers and daughters and sisters blush for those whom they
+should have honored, as they came reeling home from their debauches!
+Yet better even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon
+all our tables, let us praise it for its color and fragrance and
+social tendency, so far as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the
+closet and pretend not to know the use of a wine-glass at a public
+dinner!  I think you will find that people who honestly mean to be
+true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try
+to be "consistent."  But a great many things we say can be made to
+appear contradictory, simply because they are partial views of a
+truth, and may often look unlike at first, as a front view of a face
+and its profile often do.
+
+Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I
+owe him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he
+has often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend
+the "Autocrat,"--which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by
+omitting the very word which gives it its significance,--the word
+fluid, intended to typify the mobility of the restricted will,--holds
+it up, I say, as if it attacked the reality of the self-determining
+principle, instead of illustrating its limitations by an image.  Now
+I will not explain any farther, still less defend, and least of all
+attack, but simply quote a few lines from one of my friend's poems,
+printed more than ten years ago, and ask the distinguished gentleman
+where he has ever asserted more strongly or absolutely the
+independent will of the "subcreative centre," as my heretical friend
+has elsewhere called man.
+
+    --Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own
+     He rent a pillar from the eternal throne!
+    --Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
+     The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
+    --Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
+     Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!
+
+If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and
+the full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly
+consistent!
+
+Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation
+with the intelligent Englishman.  We begin skirmishing with a few
+light ideas,--testing for thoughts,--as our electro-chemical friend,
+De Sauty, if there were such a person, would test for his current;
+trying a little litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-
+paper for alkalies, as chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging
+the lead, and looking at the shells and sands it brings up to find
+out whether we are like to keep in shallow water, or shall have to
+drop the deep-sea line;--in short, seeing what we have to deal with.
+If the Englishman gets his H's pretty well placed, he comes from one
+of the higher grades of the British social order, and we shall find
+him a good companion.
+
+But, after all, here is a great fact between us.  We belong to two
+different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us,
+we are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall
+to talk through.  Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior
+fellow, incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I
+would let out the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World
+folks.  They are children to us in certain points of view.  They are
+playing with toys we have done with for whole-generations.
+
+--------
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+The more I have observed and reflected, the more limited seems to me
+the field of action of the human will. Every act of choice involves a
+special relation between the ego and the conditions before it.  But
+no man knows what forces are at work in the determination of his ego.
+The bias which decides his choice between two or more motives may
+come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he knows
+nothing at all.  He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of
+reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is self-
+determining.  The Story of Elsie Yenner, written-soon after this book
+was published, illustrates the direction in which my thought was
+moving.  'The imaginary subject of the story obeyed her will, but her
+will Obeyed the mysterious antenatal poisoning influence.
+--------
+
+That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet
+and the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with,
+we have not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and
+constantly than they do.  Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and
+masks, and lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases,
+which we laugh at honestly, without affectation, that are still used
+in the Old-World puppet-shows.  I don't think we on our part ever
+understand the Englishman's concentrated loyalty and specialized
+reverence.  But then we do think more of a man, as such, (barring
+some little difficulties about race and complexion which the
+Englishman will touch us on presently,) than any people that ever
+lived did think of him.  Our reverence is a great deal wider, if it
+is less intense.  We have caste among us, to some extent; it is true;
+but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog such as you
+often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his robust, hearty
+individuality.
+
+This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to
+me; it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans
+swim into each other's laps.  The trouble is, it is so difficult to
+let out the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming
+to take a personal character.  But I never enjoy the Englishman so
+much as when he talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the
+Peruvians.  Then you get the real British flavor, which the
+cosmopolite Englishman loses.
+
+How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren
+interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each
+man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his
+opponent as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!
+
+---My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep.  I
+follow a slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current
+of my own beneath it.  Under both runs obscurely a consciousness
+belonging to a third train of reflections, independent of the two
+others.  I will try to write out a Mental movement in three parts.
+
+A.---First voice, or Mental Soprano,--thought follows a woman
+talking.
+
+B.--Second voice, or Mental Barytone,--my running accompaniment.
+
+C.--Third voice, or Mental Basso,--low grumble of importunate self-
+repeating idea.
+
+A.--White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of apple-
+blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most
+delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers-
+
+B.--Deuse take her!  What a fool she is!  Hear her chatter!  (Look
+out of window just here.--Two pages and a half of description, if it
+were all written out, in one tenth of a second.)--Go ahead, old lady!
+(Eye catches picture over fireplace.) There's that infernal family
+nose!  Came over in the "Mayflower" on the first old fool's face.
+Why don't they wear a ring in it?
+
+C.--You 'll be late at lecture,--late at lecture,--late,--late-
+
+I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt
+through the superincumbent strata, thus:--The usual single or double
+currents shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with
+them, disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,--
+Oh, there!  I knew there was something troubling me,--and the thought
+which had been working through comes up to the surface clear,
+definite, and articulates itself,--a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or
+an unpleasant recollection.
+
+The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in
+this, that they are both brimful.  There is no space between
+consecutive thoughts, or between the never-ending series of actions.
+All pack tight, and mould their surfaces against each other, so that
+in the long run there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms
+of both thoughts and actions, just as you find that cylinders crowded
+all become hexagonal prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed
+into regular polyhedra.
+
+Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and
+no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by
+him.  So, to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the
+layers of thought, we may consider the mind as it moves among
+thoughts or events, like a circus-rider whirling round with a great
+troop of horses.  He can mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more
+or less completely, but he cannot stop it.  So, as I said in another
+way at the beginning, he can stride two or three thoughts at once,
+but not break their steady walk, trot, or gallop.  He can only take
+his foot from the saddle of one thought and put it on that of
+another.
+
+--What is the saddle of a thought?  Why, a word, of course.--Twenty
+years after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to
+you through the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and
+round all that time without a rider.
+
+The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no
+such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving
+thought upon that of another.
+
+--I should like to ask,--said the divinity-student,--since we are
+getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are
+in contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always now to
+something?
+
+--I thought it best not to hear this question.
+
+--I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or
+elsewhere.  One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an
+unfortunate truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,--
+as helpless, apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an
+Egyptian mummy.  He then proceeds, with the air and method of a
+master, to take off the bandages.  Nothing can be neater than the way
+in which he does it.  But as he takes off layer after layer, the
+truth seems to grow smaller and smaller, and some of its outlines
+begin to look like something we have seen before.  At last, when he
+has got them all off, and the truth struts out naked, we recognize it
+as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance whom we have known in the
+streets all our lives.  The fact is, the philosopher has coaxed the
+truth into his study and put all those bandages on; or course it is
+not very hard for him to take them off.  Still, a great many people
+like to watch the process,--he does it so neatly!
+
+Dear!  dear!  I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see
+how those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade
+are abused by my fellow-vertebrates,--perhaps by myself.  How they
+spar for wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!
+
+--The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat
+fighting attitude.--Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!
+--he said,--and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the
+concave palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball.--You
+small boy there, hurry up that "Webster's Unabridged!"
+
+The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked
+the propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three
+words, of which the two last were "Webster's Unabridged," and the
+first was an emphatic monosyllable.--Beg pardon,--he added,--forgot
+myself.  But let us have an English dictionary, if we are to have
+any.  I don't believe in clipping the coin of the realm, Sir!  If I
+put a weathercock on my house, Sir, I want it to tell which way the
+wind blows up aloft,--off from the prairies to the ocean, or off from
+the ocean to the prairies, or any way it wants to blow!  I don't want
+a weathercock with a winch in an old gentleman's study that he can
+take hold of and turn, so that the vane shall point west when the
+great wind overhead is blowing east with all its might, Sir!  Wait
+till we give you a dictionary; Sir!  It takes Boston to do that
+thing, Sir!
+
+--Some folks think water can't run down-hill anywhere out of Boston,
+--remarked the Koh-i-noor.
+
+I don't know what some folks think so well as I know what some fools
+say,--rejoined the Little Gentleman.--If importing most dry goods
+made the best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for
+'em.--Mr. Webster could n't spell, Sir, or would n't spell, Sir,--at
+any rate, he did n't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the
+owners of some copyrights and the dignity of this noble language
+which we have inherited from our English fathers.  Language!--the
+blood of the soul, Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which
+they grow!  We know what a word is worth here in Boston.  Young Sam
+Adams got up on the stage at Commencement, out at Cambridge there,
+with his gown on, the Governor and Council looking on in the name of
+his Majesty, King George the Second, and the girls looking down out
+of the galleries, and taught people how to spell a word that was n't
+in the Colonial dictionaries !  R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e,
+tance, Resistance!  That was in '43, and it was a good many years
+before the Boston boys began spelling it with their muskets;--but
+when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old bedridden
+women in the English almshouses heard every syllable!  Yes, yes,
+yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the
+class so far along that it could spell those two hard words,
+Independence and Union!  I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand
+lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language
+that is worth speaking.  We know what language means too well here in
+Boston to play tricks with it.  We never make a new word til we have
+made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould
+of this continent, we had to make a few.  When, by God's permission,
+we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or
+two.  The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,--
+this thirty-wasted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,--must throw a little
+spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new
+world's destiny!
+
+He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair
+human proportions.  His feet must have been on the upper round of his
+high chair; that was the only way I could account for it.
+
+Puts her through fast-rate,--said the young fellow whom the boarders
+call John.
+
+The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said
+he remembered Sam Adams as Governor.  An old man in a brown coat.
+Saw him take the Chair on Boston Common.  Was a boy then, and
+remembers sitting on the fence in front of the old Hancock house.
+Recollects he had a glazed 'lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking
+down on to the Common.  Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a
+great bunch off from the bushes in the Hancock front-yard.
+
+Them 'lection-buns are no go,--said the young man John, so called.
+--I know the trick.  Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an'
+he downs the whole of it.  In about an hour it swells up in his
+stomach as big as a football, and his feedin' 's spilt for that day.
+That's the way to stop off a young one from eatin' up all the
+'lection dinner.
+
+Salem!  Salem! not Boston,--shouted the little man.
+
+But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy
+Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the
+bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.
+
+The Little Gentleman was holding a fork in his left hand.  He stabbed
+a boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it
+as if it ought to shriek.  It did not,--but he sat as if watching it.
+
+--Language is a solemn thing,--I said.--It grows out of life,--out
+of its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness.  Every
+language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is
+enshrined.  Because time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp
+angles of its cornices, shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time?
+Let me tell you what comes of meddling with things that can take care
+of themselves.--A friend of mine had a watch given him, when he was
+a boy,--a "bull's eye," with a loose silver case that came off like
+an oyster-shell from its contents; you know them,--the cases that you
+hang on your thumb, while the core, or the real watch, lies in your
+hand as naked as a peeled apple.  Well, he began with taking off the
+case, and so on from one liberty to another, until he got it fairly
+open, and there were the works, as good as if they were alive,--
+crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and all the rest.  All right except one
+thing,--there was a confounded little hair had got tangled round the
+balance-wheel.  So my young Solomon got a pair of tweezers, and
+caught hold of the hair very nicely, and pulled it right out, without
+touching any of the wheels,--when,--buzzzZZZ!  and the watch had done
+up twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph time!--The English
+language was wound up to run some thousands of years, I trust; but if
+everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is a hair, our
+grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a hair-
+spring, and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down, as
+so many other dialects have done before it.  I can't stand this
+meddling any better than you, Sir.  But we have a great deal to be
+proud of in the lifelong labors of that old lexicographer, and we
+must n't be ungrateful.  Besides, don't let us deceive ourselves,--
+the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities,
+colleges, and especially of publishers.  After all, it is likely that
+the language will shape itself by larger forces than phonography and
+dictionary-making.  You may spade up the ocean as much as you like,
+and harrow it afterwards, if you can,--but the moon will still lead
+the tides, and the winds will form their surface.
+
+--Do you know Richardson's Dictionary?--I said to my neighbor the
+divinity-student.
+
+Haow?--said the divinity-student.--He colored, as he noticed on my
+face a twitch in one of the muscles which tuck up the corner of the
+mouth, (zygomaticus major,) and which I could not hold back from
+making a little movement on its own account.
+
+It was too late.--A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown
+colt.  Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps,
+better,--but caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his
+earlier ways of life.  Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue
+half their lives, return to the language of their childhood in their
+dying hours.  Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large
+libraries, taken by surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes
+let slip a word they knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken
+since that time,--but it lay there under all their culture.  That is
+one way you may know the country-boys after they have grown rich or
+celebrated; another is by the odd old family names, particularly
+those of the Hebrew prophets, which the good old people have saddled
+them with.
+
+--Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English
+dictionary,--said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as
+sitting at the right upper corner of the table.
+
+I turned and looked him full in the face,--for the pure, manly
+intonations arrested me.  The voice was youthful, but full of
+character.--I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in
+the matter of voice.--Hear this.
+
+Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in
+her father's chaise in a street of this town of Boston.  She
+overheard a little girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken
+with the tones of her voice.  Nothing would satisfy her but she must
+have that little girl come and live in her father's house.  So the
+child came, being then nine years old.  Until her marriage she
+remained under the same roof with the young lady.  Her children
+became successively inmates of the lady's dwelling; and now, seventy
+years, or thereabouts, since the young lady heard the child singing,
+one of that child's children and one of her grandchildren are with
+her in that home, where she, no longer young, except in heart, passes
+her peaceful days.--Three generations linked together by so light a
+breath of accident!
+
+I liked--the sound of this youth's voice, I said, and his look when I
+came to observe him a little more closely.  His complexion had
+something better than the bloom and freshness which had first
+attracted me;--it had that diffused tone which is a sure index of
+wholesome, lusty life.  A fine liberal style of nature seemed to be:
+hair crisped, moustache springing thick and dark, head firmly
+planted, lips finished, as is commonly sees them in gentlemen's
+families, a pupil well contracted, and a mouth that opened frankly
+with a white flash of teeth that looked as if they could serve him as
+they say Ethan Allen's used to serve their owner,--to draw nails
+with.  This is the kind of fellow to walk a frigate's deck and bowl
+his broadsides into the "Gadlant Thudnder-bomb," or any forty-port-
+holed adventurer who would like to exchange a few tons of iron
+compliments.--I don't know what put this into my head, for it was
+not till some time afterward I learned the young fellow had been in
+the naval school at Annapolis.  Something had happened to change his
+plan of life, and he was now studying engineering and architecture in
+Boston.
+
+When the youth made the short remark which drew my attention to him,
+the little deformed gentleman turned round and took a long look at
+him.
+
+Good for the Boston boy!--he said.
+
+I am not a Boston boy,--said the youth, smiling,--I am a Marylander.
+
+I don't care where you come from,--we'll make a Boston man of you,--
+said the little gentleman.  Pray, what part of Maryland did you come
+from, and how shall I call you?
+
+The poor youth had to speak pretty loud, as he was at the right upper
+corner of the table, and the little gentleman next the lower left-
+hand corner.  His face flushed a little, but he answered pleasantly,
+telling who he was, as if the little man's infirmity gave him a right
+to ask any questions he wanted to.
+
+Here is the place for you to sit,--said the little gentleman,
+pointing to the vacant chair next his own, at the corner.
+
+You're go'n' to have a young lady next you, if you wait till to-
+morrow,--said the landlady to him.
+
+He did not reply, but I had a fancy that he changed color.  It can't
+be that he has susceptibilities with reference to a contingent young
+lady!  It can't be that he has had experiences which make him
+sensitive!  Nature could not be quite so cruel as to set a heart
+throbbing in that poor little cage of ribs!  There is no use in
+wasting notes of admiration.  I must ask the landlady about him.
+
+These are some of the facts she furnished.--Has not been long with
+her.  Brought a sight of furniture,--could n't hardly get some of it
+upstairs.  Has n't seemed particularly attentive to the ladies.  The
+Bombazine (whom she calls Cousin something or other) has tried to
+enter into conversation with him, but retired with the impression
+that he was indifferent to ladies' society.  Paid his bill the other
+day without saying a word about it.  Paid it in gold,--had a great
+heap of twenty-dollar pieces.  Hires her best room.  Thinks he is a
+very nice little man, but lives dreadful lonely up in his chamber.
+Wants the care of some capable nuss.  Never pitied anybody more in
+her life--never see a more interestin' person.
+
+--My intention was, when I began making these notes, to let them
+consist principally of conversations between myself and the other
+boarders.  So they will, very probably; but my curiosity is excited
+about this little boarder of ours, and my reader must not be
+disappointed, if I sometimes interrupt a discussion to give an
+account of whatever fact or traits I may discover about him.  It so
+happens that his room is next to mine, and I have the opportunity of
+observing many of his ways without any active movements of curiosity.
+That his room contains heavy furniture, that he is a restless little
+body and is apt to be up late, that he talks to himself, and keeps
+mainly to himself, is nearly all I have yet found out.
+
+One curious circumstance happened lately which I mention without
+drawing an absolute inference.  Being at the studio of a sculptor
+with whom I am acquainted, the other day, I saw a remarkable cast of
+a left arm.  On my asking where the model came from, he said it was
+taken direct from the arm of a deformed person, who had employed one
+of the Italian moulders to make the cast.  It was a curious case, it
+should seem, of one beautiful limb upon a frame otherwise singularly
+imperfect--I have repeatedly noticed this little gentleman's use of
+his left arm.  Can he have furnished the model I saw at the
+sculptor's?
+
+--So we are to have a new boarder to-morrow.  I hope there will be
+something pretty and pleasing about her.  A woman with a creamy
+voice, and finished in alto rilievo, would be a variety in the
+boarding-house,--a little more marrow and a little less sinew than
+our landlady and her daughter and the bombazine-clad female, all of
+whom are of the turkey-drumstick style of organization.  I don't mean
+that these are our only female companions; but the rest being
+conversational non-combatants, mostly still, sad feeders, who take in
+their food as locomotives take in wood and water, and then wither
+away from the table like blossoms that never came to fruit, I have
+not yet referred to them as individuals.
+
+I wonder what kind of young person we shall see in that empty chair
+to-morrow!
+
+--I read this song to the boarders after breakfast the other morning.
+It was written for our fellows;--you know who they are, of course.
+
+
+
+                    THE BOYS.
+
+Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
+If there has, take him out, without making a noise!
+Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
+Old Time is a liar!  We're twenty to-night!
+
+We're twenty!  We're twenty!  Who says we are more?
+He's tipsy,--young jackanapes!--show him the door!--
+"Gray temples at twenty?"--Yes!  white, if we please;
+Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there's nothing can freeze!
+
+Was it snowing I spoke of?  Excuse the mistake!
+Look close,--you will see not a sign of a flake;
+We want some new garlands for those we have shed,
+And these are white roses in place of the red!
+
+We've a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told.
+Of talking (in public) as if we were old;
+That boy we call Doctor, (1) and this we call Judge (2)--
+It's a neat little fiction,--of course it's all fudge.
+
+That fellow's the Speaker, (3)--the one on the right;
+Mr. Mayor, (4) my young one, how are you to-night?
+That's our "Member of Congress,"(5) we say when we chaff;
+There's the "Reverend" (6) What's his name?--don't make me laugh!
+
+That boy with the grave mathematical look(7)
+Made believe he had written a wonderful book,
+And the ROYAL SOCIETY thought it was true!
+So they chose him right in; a good joke it was, too.
+
+There's a boy,--we pretend,--with a three-decker-brain
+That could harness a team with a logical chain:
+When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire,
+We called him "The Justice,"--but now he's "The Squire."(1)
+
+And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith,(2)
+Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith,
+But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,
+--Just read on his medal,--"My country,--of thee!"
+
+You hear that boy laughing?--you think he's all fun,
+But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
+The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
+And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all!(3)
+
+Yes, we're boys,--always playing with tongue or with pen,--
+And I sometimes have asked,--Shall we ever be men?
+Shall we always be youthful and laughing and gay,
+Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?
+
+Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its gray!
+The stars of its Winter, the dews of its May!
+And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
+Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys!
+
+
+1 Francis Thomas.
+2 George Tyler Bigelow.
+3 Francis Boardman Crowninshield.
+4 G. W. Richardson.
+5 George Thomas Davis.
+6 James Freeman Clarke.
+7 Benjamin Peirce.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+[The Professor talks with the Reader.  He tells a
+Young Girl's Story.]
+
+When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of
+mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the
+balance of creation was disturbed.  The materials that go to the
+making of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate
+nature of one man's-worth of masculine constituents.  These combined
+to make our first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the
+previous creation of our common father.  All this, mythically,
+illustratively, and by no means doctrinally or polemically.
+
+The man implies the woman, you will understand.  The excellent
+gentleman whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling
+matter a few weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of
+miracles at the present day.  So do I.  I believe, if you could find
+an uninhabited coral-reef island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
+with plenty of cocoa-palms and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome
+young fellow, like our Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched
+there a year afterwards, you would find him walking under the palm-
+trees arm in arm with a pretty woman.
+
+Where would she come from?
+
+Oh, that 's the miracle!
+
+--I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at
+the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear
+some fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a
+clairvoyant, seeing it all beforehand.
+
+--I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to
+the sun to ripen well.--How some of us fellows remember Joe and
+Harry, Baltimoreans, both!  Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples,
+and his eyes like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the
+whiteness of the flesh of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the
+chandelier-drops rattling overhead, as we sat at our sparkling
+banquets in those gay times!  Harry, champion, by acclamation, of
+the college heavy-weights, broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-
+jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots of pluck, good-
+natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed bison in the
+crack of hand-to-hand battle!  Who forgets the great muster-day, and
+the collision of the classic with the democratic forces?  The huge
+butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten pounds,--good weight,--
+steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant.  No words from Harry, the
+Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first; and do the
+talking, if there is any, afterwards.  No words, but, in the place
+thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a spank
+like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of beeves
+down a sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth, so
+that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of
+those inglorious and inevitable Yankee clinches, followed by a
+general melee, which make our native fistic encounters so different
+from such admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an
+English fair, where everything was done decently and in order; and
+the fight began and ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting
+parson need hardly have hesitated to open it with a devout petition,
+and, after it was over, dismiss the ring with a benediction.
+
+I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day,
+though it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression.  But all of
+us have a little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to
+men, just a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--
+so that we should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first
+heavy-heeled aggressor that came along.  You can tell a portrait from
+an ideal head, I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the
+writer's invention.  See whether this sounds true or not.
+
+Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and
+Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am
+talking of.  With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little
+fellow, in velvet breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise,
+traditionary in English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-
+skinned racers, in great perfection.  After the soldiers had come
+from the muster-field, and some of the companies were on the village-
+common, there was still some skirmishing between a few individuals
+who had not had the fight taken out of them.  The little Yorkshire
+groom thought he must serve out somebody.  So he threw himself into
+an approved scientific attitude, and, in brief, emphatic language,
+expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate any classical young
+gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate for his
+attentions.  I don't suppose there were many of the college boys that
+would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know so
+much more of than Americans, for the most part.  However, one of the
+Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the
+crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there,
+sparring away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow,
+as if it had been with his fist, and knocked him heels over head and
+senseless, so that he had to be carried off from the field.  This
+ugly way of hitting is the great trick of the French gavate, which is
+not commonly thought able to stand its ground against English
+pugilistic science.  These are old recollections, with not much to
+recommend them, except, perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a
+little something.
+
+The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember.  He
+recalled to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you
+of.  Both have been long dead. How often we see these great red-
+flaring flambeaux of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,
+--and the little, single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some
+white-faced and attenuated invalid shades with trembling fingers,
+flickering on while they go out one after another, until its glimmer
+is all that is left to us of the generation to which it belonged!
+
+I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some
+pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and
+match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.
+
+There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as
+accident could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she
+ought, of course, to be sitting.  One of the "positive" blondes, as
+my friend, you may remember, used to call them.  Tawny-haired,
+amber-eyed, full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond.  Looks
+dreamy to me, not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her
+neck sets it off as a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not
+do.  So in her dress, there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an
+artist had run his eye over her and given a hint or two like the
+finishing touch to a picture.  I can't help being struck with her,
+for she is at once rounded and fine in feature, looks calm, as
+blondes are apt to, and as if she might run wild, if she were trifled
+with.  It is just as I knew it would be,--and anybody can see that
+our young Marylander will be dead in love with her in a week.
+
+Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have
+the good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as
+nice as a three-volume novel.
+
+The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement
+of having such a charming neighbor next him.  I judge so mainly by
+his silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if
+he were thinking of something that had happened, or that might
+happen, or that ought to happen,--or how beautiful her young life
+looked, or how hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which
+struck him silent, at any rate.  I made several conversational
+openings for him, but he did not fire up as he often does.  I even
+went so far as to indulge in, a fling at the State House, which, as
+we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less
+ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect.  The little
+man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt.  He said to the young
+lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our
+Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he
+reddened a little,--so I thought.  I don't think it right to watch
+persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all do it.
+
+I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of the
+table, to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort.  A well-
+mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap,--
+pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,--
+features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye
+on the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her
+My record is a blank for some days after this.  In the mean time I
+have contrived to make out the person and the story of our young
+lady, who, according to appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine
+for a boarding-house romance before a year is out.  It is very
+curious that she should prove connected with a person many of us have
+heard of.  Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred times struck
+with the circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly
+striking each other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of
+miles apart pass close to each other in the naked breadth of the
+ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a crack of
+timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a cry
+mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester
+fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name
+of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely
+pillow,--a widow.
+
+Oh, these mysterious meetings!  Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
+spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack
+sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed
+for them in the waters from the beginning of creation!  Not only
+things and events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these
+surprises, that, if there were a reader in my parish who did not
+recognize the familiar occurrence of what I am now going to mention,
+I should think it a case for the missionaries of the Society for the
+Propagation of Intelligence among the Comfortable Classes.
+There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of
+children.  For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or
+come across some idea.  Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact
+or idea strikes you from another quarter.  It seems as if it had
+passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank
+wall that shuts in the world of thought.  Yet no possible connection
+exists between the two channels by which the thought or the fact
+arrived.  Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.
+
+One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
+pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table
+boarders, which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard
+of.  Young fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short,
+in order to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of
+the blank interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the
+cavity of a geode.
+
+               Aphorism by the Professor.
+
+In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food
+of different kinds at short intervals.  If young, it will eat
+anything at any hour of the day or night.  If old, it observes stated
+periods, and you might as well attempt to regulate the time of
+highwater to suit a fishing-party as to change these periods.
+The crucial experiment is this.  Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the
+suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner.  If this is
+eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established.  If
+the subject of the question starts back and expresses surprise and
+incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of
+maturity is no less clear.
+
+
+--Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table.--Young
+fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre
+fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to
+impale a slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the
+fork holding it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-
+time.  The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found
+out the trick at last, and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--
+they knew where to find one, if it was not in its place.--Now the
+odd thing was, that, after waiting so many years to hear of this
+college trick, I should hear it mentioned a second time within the
+same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the present generation.
+Strange, but true.  And so it has happened to me and to every person,
+often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts
+or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.
+
+I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it
+as an unexplained marvel.  I think, however, I will turn over a
+furrow of subsoil in it.--The explanation is, of course, that in a
+great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these
+instantly arrest our attention.  Now we shall probably never have the
+least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through
+our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic
+record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.
+There go more pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body
+than you think for.  Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of
+mine told you there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle.
+How many "swimming glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed,
+rounded disks taking an active part in all your vital processes, part
+and parcel, each one of them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose
+are whirled along, like pebbles in a stream, with the blood which
+warms your frame and colors your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist
+spread out a minute drop of blood, under the microscope, in narrow
+streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a calculation.  The
+counting by the micrometer took him a week.--You have, my full-grown
+friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery,
+running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live,
+sixty-five billions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions.
+Errors excepted.--Did I hear some gentleman say, "Doubted? "--I am
+the Professor.  I sit in my chair with a petard under it that will
+blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I do not know
+what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.
+
+Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads,
+and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you
+had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is
+it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of
+all that I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come?
+Listen, then.  The number of these living elements in our bodies
+illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of
+our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of;
+these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we
+constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the
+presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the
+daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the
+special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections,
+and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl's story,
+which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to
+learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the
+unconscious subject of my brief delineation.
+
+
+
+IRIS.
+
+You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd
+poem written by an old Latin tutor?  He brought up at the verb amo, I
+love, as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living
+dictionary for him at the word filia, a daughter.  The poor man was
+greatly perplexed in choosing a name for her.  Lucretia and Virginia
+were the first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured
+stories of Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying,
+though he had read them a hundred times.
+
+--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one
+friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber.  To them her
+wrongs briefly.  Let them see to the wretch,--she will take care of
+herself.  Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart.
+She slides from her seat, and falls dying.  "Her husband and her
+father cry aloud."--No, not Lucretia.
+
+-Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl.  She engaged
+to a very promising young man.  Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy
+to her,--must have her at any rate.  Hires a lawyer to present the
+arguments in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter.
+There used to be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.--All
+right.   There are two sides to everything.  Audi alteram partem.
+The legal gentleman has no opinion,--he only states the evidence.
+--A doubtful case.  Let the young lady be under the protection of the
+Honorable Decemvir until it can be looked up thoroughly.--Father
+thinks it best, on the whole, to give in.  Will explain the matter,
+if the young lady and her maid will step this way.  That is the
+explanation,--a stab with a butcher's knife, snatched from a stall,
+meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia
+
+The old man thought over the story.  Then he must have one look at
+the original.  So he took down the first volume and read it over.
+When he came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she
+was engaged to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless
+shape and carried it through the street, and how all the women
+followed, wailing, and asking if that was what their daughters were
+coming to,--if that was what they were to get for being good girls,--
+he melted down into his accustomed tears of pity and grief, and,
+through them all, of delight at the charming Latin of the narrative.
+But it was impossible to call his child Virginia.  He could never
+look at her without thinking she had a knife sticking in her bosom.
+
+Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one.  She was a queen, and the
+founder of a great city.  Her story had been immortalized by the
+greatest of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to "Virgilius
+Maro," as he called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his
+memorable journey.  So he took down his Virgil, it was the smooth-
+leafed, open-lettered quarto of Baskerville,--and began reading the
+loves and mishaps of Dido.  It would n't do.  A lady who had not
+learned discretion by experience, and came to an evil end.  He shook
+his head, as he sadly repeated,
+
+    "---misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore;"
+
+but when he came to the lines,
+
+    "Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis
+     Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,"
+
+he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording
+angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone
+hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.
+
+"Iris shall be her name!"--he said.  So her name was Iris.
+
+--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation.  It is only
+a question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries.
+These all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in
+brick or stone and iron.  I don't mean that you will see in the
+registry of deaths that this or that particular tutor died of well-
+marked, uncomplicated starvation.  They may, even, in extreme cases,
+be carried off by a thin, watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very
+well in the returns, but means little to those who know that it is
+only debility settling on the head.  Generally, however, they fade
+and waste away under various pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia,
+consumption, and so on, to put a decent appearance upon the case and
+keep up the credit of the family and the institution where they have
+passed through the successive stages of inanition.
+
+In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the
+process in question.  You see they do get food and clothes and fuel,
+in appreciable quantities, such as they are.  You will even notice
+rows of books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look
+as if they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the water
+of crystallization to scholars, and you can never get them away till
+the poor fellows effloresce into dust.  Do not be deceived.  The
+tutor breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcorated with milk
+watered to the verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and
+elastic, up to the moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless;
+his coal is a sullen, sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes,
+rather than burns, in the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too
+thin for winter and too thick for summer.  The greedy lungs of fifty
+hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from the air he breathes in his
+recitation-room.  In short, he undergoes a process of gentle and
+gradual starvation.
+
+--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the
+old story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus.  Her blood-name,
+which she gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain
+old English one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as
+recalling the mother of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well
+from the initial letter forwards and from the terminal letter
+backwards.  The poor lady, seated with her companion at the
+chessboard of matrimony, had but just pushed forward her one little
+white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black Knight, that cares
+nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down upon her and
+swept her from the larger board of life.
+
+The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late
+companion, with her name and age and Eheu!  upon it,--a smaller one
+at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and
+snowed on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have
+cherished tenderly.
+
+About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of
+water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved
+into a slight cough.  Then he began to draw the buckle of his black
+trousers a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-
+ample waistcoat.  His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts
+of color in his cheeks more vivid than of old.  After a while his
+walks fatigued him, and he was tired, and breathed hard after going
+up a flight or two of stairs.  Then came on other marks of inward
+trouble and general waste, which he spoke of to his physician as
+peculiar, and doubtless owing to accidental causes; to all which the
+doctor listened with deference, as if it had not been the old story
+that one in five or six of mankind in temperate climates tells, or
+has told for him, as if it were something new.  As the doctor went
+out, he said to himself,--"On the rail at last.  Accommodation train.
+A good many stops, but will get to the station by and by."  So the
+doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of Jupiter before
+it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader, as you will
+see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed, saying he
+would look in occasionally.  After this, the Latin tutor began the
+usual course of "getting better," until he got so much better that
+his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines
+showed at each side of his lips, and when he spoke; it was in a
+muffled whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the
+purest porcelain,--so much better, that he hoped--by spring--he----
+might be able--to--attend------to his class again.--But he was
+recommended not to expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and
+occasionally, not having anything to do, his bed.  The unmarried
+sister with whom he lived took care of him; and the child, now old
+enough to be manageable and even useful in trifling offices, sat in
+the chamber, or played, about.
+
+Things could not go on so forever, of course.  One morning his face
+was sunken and his hands were very, very cold.  He was "better," he
+whispered, but sadly and faintly.  After a while he grew restless and
+seemed a little wandering.  His mind ran on his classics, and fell
+back on the Latin grammar.
+
+"Iris!" he said,--"filiola mea!"--The child knew this meant my
+dear little daughter as well as if it had been English.--"Rainbow!
+"for he would translate her name at times,--"come to me,--veni"--and
+his lips went on automatically, and murmured," vel venito!"--The
+child came and sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could
+not warm, but which shot its rays of cold all through her slender
+frame.  But there she sat, looking steadily at him.  Presently he
+opened his lips feebly, and whispered, "Moribundus."  She did not
+know what that meant, but she saw that there was something new and
+sad.  So she began to cry; but presently remembering an old book that
+seemed to comfort him at times, got up and brought a Bible in the
+Latin version, called the Vulgate.  "Open it," he said,--"I will
+read, segnius irritant,--don't put the light out,--ah!  hoeret
+lateri,--I am going,--vale, vale, vale, goodbye, good-bye,--the Lord
+take care of my child!  Domine, audi--vel audito!" His face whitened
+suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes and mouth.  He had taken
+his last degree.
+
+--Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very
+brilliant rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view.  A limited
+wardrobe of man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good
+books, principally classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of
+the Pantheon, with some pieces of furniture which had seen service,--
+these, and a child's heart full of tearful recollections and strange
+doubts and questions, alternating with the cheap pleasures which are
+the anodynes of childish grief; such were the treasures she
+inherited.--No,--I forgot.  With that kindly sentiment which all of
+us feel for old men's first children,--frost-flowers of the early
+winter season, the old tutor's students had remembered him at a time
+when he was laughing and crying with his new parental emotions, and
+running to the side of the plain crib in which his alter egg, as he
+used to say, was swinging, to hang over the little heap of stirring
+clothes, from which looked the minute, red, downy, still, round face,
+with unfixed eyes and working lips,--in that unearthly gravity which
+has never yet been broken by a smile, and which gives to the earliest
+moon-year or two of an infant's life the character of a first old
+age, to counterpoise that second childhood which there is one chance
+in a dozen it may reach by and by.  The boys had remembered the old
+man and young father at that tender period of his hard, dry life.
+There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with classical
+figures, and bearing on a shield the graver words, Ex dono
+pupillorum.  The handle on its side showed what use the boys had
+meant it for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of
+feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its
+destination.  Out of this silver vessel, after a long, desperate,
+strangling cry, which marked her first great lesson in the realities
+of life, the child took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and their
+children get, tempered with water, and sweetened a little, so as to
+bring it nearer the standard established by the touching indulgence
+and partiality of Nature,--who had mingled an extra allowance of
+sugar in the blameless food of the child at its mother's breast, as
+compared with that of its infant brothers and sisters of the bovine
+race.
+
+But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rainwater.  An air-
+plant will grow by feeding on the winds.  Nay, those huge forests
+that overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from
+the air-currents with which they are always battling.  The oak is but
+a foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that
+holds the future vegetable world in solution.  The storm that tears
+its leaves has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the
+tornado clad in the spoils of a hundred hurricanes.
+
+Poor little Iris!  What had she in common with the great oak in the
+shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like
+that,--this was all.  The blue milk ran into her veins and filled
+them with thin, pure blood.  Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge,
+such as the white rosebud shows before it opens.  The doctor who had
+attended her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to
+"raise " her,--"delicate child,"--hoped she was not consumptive,--
+thought there was a fair chance she would take after her father.
+
+A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white
+neckcloth, sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two
+years and eleven months, after having fully indorsed all the
+doctrines of the particular persuasion to which he not only belonged
+himself, but thought it very shameful that everybody else did not
+belong.  What with foreboding looks and dreary death-bed stories, it
+was a wonder the child made out to live through it.  It saddened her
+early years, of course,--it distressed her tender soul with thoughts
+which, as they cannot be fully taken in, should be sparingly used as
+instruments of torture to break down the natural cheerfulness of a
+healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse, to cheat a dying one out
+of the kind illusions with which the Father of All has strewed its
+downward path.
+
+The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might
+have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have
+been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with
+the best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the
+curious students of science.
+
+Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late
+Latin tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the
+future mother of his child.  The deceased tutoress was a tranquil,
+smooth woman, easily nourished, as such people are,--a quality which
+is inestimable in a tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the
+daughter inherited enough vitality from the mother to live through
+childhood and infancy and fight her way towards womanhood, in spite
+of the tendencies she derived from her other parent.
+
+--Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary
+descent of qualities.  Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five.
+It seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at
+another blended,--that occasionally, the force of two natures is
+represented in the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than
+either original line of living movement,--that sometimes there is a
+loss of vitality hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward
+impulse of variable intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.
+
+So it was with this child.  She had glanced off from her parental
+probabilities at an unexpected angle.  Instead of taking to classical
+learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties
+like her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the
+direction of Art.  As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to
+sketch outlines of objects round her with a certain air and spirit.
+Very extraordinary horses, but their legs looked as if they could
+move.  Birds unknown to Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush.
+Men with impossible legs, which did yet seem to have a vital
+connection with their most improbable bodies.  By-and-by the doctor,
+on his beast,--an old man with a face looking as if Time had kneaded
+it like dough with his knuckles, with a rhubarb tint and flavor
+pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all their appurtenances.
+A dreadful old man!  Be sure she did not forget those saddle-bags
+that held the detestable bottles out of which he used to shake those
+loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that find heaven
+in strawberries and peaches, are--Well, I suppose I had better stop.
+Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him coming.
+On the next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat and
+white cravat, as he looked when he came and entertained her with
+stories concerning the death of various little children about her
+age, to encourage her, as that wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting
+Admiral Byng.   Then she would take her pencil, and with a few
+scratches there would be the outline of a child, in which you might
+notice how one sudden sweep gave the chubby cheek, and two dots
+darted at the paper looked like real eyes.
+
+By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on the
+leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her
+companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy,
+with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and
+children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and
+heads thrown back in ecstasy.  This was at about twelve years old, as
+the dates of these drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years
+before she came among us.  Soon after this time, the ideal figures
+began to take the place of portraits and caricatures, and a new
+feature appeared in her drawing-books in the form of fragments of
+verse and short poems.
+
+It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an
+old spinster and go to a village school.  Her books bore testimony to
+this; for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a
+sense of weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of
+blessedness or other, which began to be painful.  She might have gone
+through this flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided
+into a sober, human berry, but for the intervention of friendly
+assistance and counsel.
+
+In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition,
+somewhat past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of
+cultivated tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character,
+and of more than common accomplishments.  The gentleman in black
+broadcloth and white neckerchief only echoed the common voice about
+her, when he called her, after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof,
+an excellent cup of tea, with certain elegancies and luxuries he was.
+unaccustomed to, "The Model of all the Virtues."
+
+She deserved this title as well as almost any woman.  She did really
+bristle with moral excellences.  Mention any good thing she had not
+done; I should like to see you try!  There was no handle of weakness
+to take hold of her by; she was as unseizable, except in her
+totality, as a billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial
+table, where she had been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue
+of Fortune, she glanced from every human contact, and "caromed" from
+one relation to another, and rebounded from the stuffed cushion of
+temptation, with such exact and perfect angular movements, that the
+Enemy's corps of Reporters had long given up taking notes of her
+conduct, as there was no chance for their master.
+
+What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a
+slightly self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius
+running like a glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her
+virgin nature!  One of the lady-patroness's peculiar virtues was
+calmness.  She was resolute and strenuous, but still.  You could
+depend on her for every duty; she was as true as steel.  She was
+kind-hearted and serviceable in all the relations of life.  She had
+more sense, more knowledge, more conversation, as well as more
+goodness, than all the partners you have waltzed with this winter put
+together.
+
+Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered
+himself to her in marriage.  It was a great wonder.  I am very
+anxious to vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of
+Nature by accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.
+
+You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of
+presenting to the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand.  There
+are states of mind in which a contact of this kind has a depressing
+effect on the vital powers that makes us insensible to all the
+virtues and graces of the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing
+organs.  When they touch us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as
+if our electricity had been drained by a powerful negative battery,
+carried about by an overgrown human torpedo.
+
+"The Model of all the Virtues" had a pair of searching eyes as clear
+as Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry.
+Her features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-
+smile, but never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the
+riotous tumult of a laugh,--which, I take it, is the mob-law of the
+features;--and propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act.  She
+carried the brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious,
+steady hand, and an eye always on them, to see that they did not
+spill.  Then she was an admirable judge of character.  Her mind was a
+perfect laboratory of tests and reagents; every syllable you put into
+breath went into her intellectual eudiometer, and all your thoughts
+were recorded on litmus-paper.  I think there has rarely been a more
+admirable woman.  Of course, Miss Iris was immensely and passionately
+attached to her.--Well,--these are two highly oxygenated adverbs,--
+grateful,--suppose we say,--yes,--grateful, dutiful, obedient to her
+wishes for the most part,--perhaps not quite up to the concert pitch
+of such a perfect orchestra of the virtues.
+
+We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it
+much.  People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than
+is good for them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable
+subjects for biographies.  But we don't always care most for those
+flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium.
+
+This immaculate woman,--why could n't she have a fault or two?
+Is n't there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome
+aureole of saintly perfection?  Does n't she carry a lump of opium in
+her pocket?  Is n't her cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its
+legitimate use would require?  It would be such a comfort!
+
+Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such
+words escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind.  Whether at
+the bottom of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive
+presence, it is hard to say, until we know more about her.  Iris sits
+between the Little Gentleman and the "Model of all the Virtues," as
+the black-coated personage called her.--I will watch them all.
+
+--Here I stop for the present.  What the Professor said has had to
+make way this time for what he saw and heard.
+
+-And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle
+souls who love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with
+something like a smile upon the reader's lips, at a meeting where
+these musical friends had gathered.  Whether they were written with
+smiles or not, you can guess better after you have read them.
+
+
+               THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.
+
+In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen
+With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,
+At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right,
+Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night.
+
+Ah me! how I remember the evening when it came!
+What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame,
+When the wondrous boa was opened that had come from over seas,
+With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of ivory keys!
+
+Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy,
+For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy,
+Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal way,
+But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, "Now, Mary, play."
+
+For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm;
+She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm,
+In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills,
+Or caroling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.
+
+So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please,
+Sat down to the new "Clementi," and struck the glittering keys.
+Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye grew dim,
+As, floating from lip and finger, arose the "Vesper Hymn."
+
+--Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red,
+(Wedded since, and a widow,--something like ten years dead,)
+Hearing a gush of music such as none before,
+Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door.
+
+Just as the "Jubilate " in threaded whisper dies,
+--"Open it! open it, lady!" the little maiden cries,
+(For she thought't was a singing creature caged in a box she heard,)
+"Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the bird!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+I don't know whether our literary or professional people are more
+amiable than they are in other places, but certainly quarrelling is
+out of fashion among them.  This could never be, if they were in the
+habit of secret anonymous puffing of each other.  That is the kind of
+underground machinery which manufactures false reputations and
+genuine hatreds.  On the other hand, I should like to know if we are
+not at liberty to have a good time together, and say the pleasantest
+things we can think of to each other, when any of us reaches his
+thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth or eightieth birthday.
+
+We don't have "scenes," I warrant you, on these occasions.  No
+"surprise" parties!  You understand these, of course.  In the rural
+districts, where scenic tragedy and melodrama cannot be had, as in
+the city, at the expense of a quarter and a white pocket-
+handkerchief, emotional excitement has to be sought in the dramas of
+real life.  Christenings, weddings, and funerals, especially the
+latter, are the main dependence; but babies, brides, and deceased
+citizens cannot be had at a day's notice.  Now, then, for a surprise-
+party!
+
+A bag of flour, a barrel of potatoes, some strings of onions, a
+basket of apples, a big cake and many little cakes, a jug of
+lemonade, a purse stuffed with bills of the more modest
+denominations, may, perhaps, do well enough for the properties in one
+of these private theatrical exhibitions.  The minister of the parish,
+a tender-hearted, quiet, hard-working man, living on a small salary,
+with many children, sometimes pinched to feed and clothe them,
+praying fervently every day to be blest in his "basket and store,"
+but sometimes fearing he asks amiss, to judge by the small returns,
+has the first role,--not, however, by his own choice, but forced upon
+him.  The minister's wife, a sharp-eyed, unsentimental body, is first
+lady; the remaining parts by the rest of the family.  If they only
+had a playbill, it would run thus:
+
+
+                     ON TUESDAY NEXT
+                    WILL BE PRESENTED
+                   THE AFFECTING SCENE
+                         CALLED
+
+                   THE SURPRISE-PARTY
+
+                           OR
+
+                  THE OVERCOME FAMILY;
+
+
+WITH THE FOLLOWING STRONG CAST OF CHARACTERS.
+
+The Rev.  Mr. Overcome, by the Clergyman of this Parish.
+Mrs.  Overcome, by his estimable lady.
+Masters Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Overcome,
+Misses Dorcas, Tabitha, Rachel, and Hannah, Overcome, by their
+interesting children.
+Peggy, by the female help.
+
+The poor man is really grateful;--it is a most welcome and unexpected
+relief.  He tries to express his thanks,--his voice falters,--he
+chokes,--and bursts into tears.  That is the great effect of the
+evening.  The sharp-sighted lady cries a little with one eye, and
+counts the strings of onions, and the rest of the things, with the
+other.  The children stand ready for a spring at the apples.  The
+female help weeps after the noisy fashion of untutored handmaids.
+
+Now this is all very well as charity, but do let the kind visitors
+remember they get their money's worth.  If you pay a quarter for dry
+crying, done by a second-rate actor, how much ought you to pay for
+real hot, wet tears, out of the honest eyes of a gentleman who is not
+acting, but sobbing in earnest?
+
+All I meant to say, when I began, was, that this was not a surprise-
+party where I read these few lines that follow:
+
+We will not speak of years to-night;
+For what have years to bring,
+But larger floods of love and light
+And sweeter songs to sing?
+
+We will not drown in wordy praise
+The kindly thoughts that rise;
+If friendship owns one tender phrase,
+He reads it in our eyes.
+
+We need not waste our schoolboy art
+To gild this notch of time;
+Forgive me, if my wayward heart
+Has throbbed in artless rhyme.
+
+Enough for him the silent grasp
+That knits us hand in hand,
+And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
+That locks our circling band.
+
+Strength to his hours of manly toil!
+Peace to his starlit dreams!
+Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
+The music-haunted streams!
+
+Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
+The sunshine on his lips,
+And faith, that sees the ring of light
+Round Nature's last eclipse!
+
+
+--One of our boarders has been talking in such strong language that I
+am almost afraid to report it.  However, as he seems to be really
+honest and is so very sincere in his local prejudices, I don't
+believe anybody will be very angry with him.
+
+It is here, Sir!  right here!--said the little deformed gentleman,--
+in this old new city of Boston,--this remote provincial corner of a
+provincial nation, that the Battle of the Standard is fighting, and
+was fighting before we were born, and will be fighting when we are
+dead and gone,--please God!  The battle goes on everywhere throughout
+civilization; but here, here, here is the broad white flag flying
+which proclaims, first of all, peace and good-will to men, and, next
+to that, the absolute, unconditional spiritual liberty of each
+individual immortal soul!  The three-hilled city against the seven-
+hilled city!  That is it, Sir,--nothing less than that; and if you
+know what that means, I don't think you'll ask for anything more.  I
+swear to you, Sir, I believe that these two centres of civilization
+are just exactly the two points that close the circuit in the battery
+of our planetary intelligence!  And I believe there are spiritual
+eyes looking out from Uranus and unseen Neptune,--ay, Sir, from the
+systems of Sirius and Arcturus and Aldebaran, and as far as that
+faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent in the distance that we
+call the nebula of Orion,--looking on, Sir, with what organs I know
+not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery fusion, the
+accidents and hindrances of humanity or man himself, Sir,--the
+stupendous abortion, the illustrious failure that he is, if the
+three-hilled city does not ride down and trample out the seven-hilled
+city!
+
+--Steam 's up!--said the young man John, so called, in a low tone.
+--Three hundred and sixty-five tons to the square inch.  Let him blow
+her off, or he'll bu'st his b'iler.
+
+The divinity-student took it calmly, only whispering that he thought
+there was a little confusion of images between a galvanic battery and
+a charge of cavalry.
+
+But the Koh-i-noor--the gentleman, you remember, with a very large
+diamond in his shirt-front laughed his scornful laugh, and made as if
+to speak.
+
+Sail in, Metropolis!--said that same young man John, by name.  And
+then, in a lower lane, not meaning to be heard,--Now, then, Ma'am
+Allen!
+
+But he was heard,--and the Koh-i-noor's face turned so white with
+rage, that his blue-black moustache and beard looked fearful, seen
+against it.  He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he
+would have thrown it or its contents at the speaker.  The young
+Marylander fixed his clear, steady eye upon him, and laid his hand on
+his arm, carelessly almost, but the Jewel found it was held so that
+he could not move it.  It was of no use.  The youth was his master in
+muscle, and in that deadly Indian hug in which men wrestle with their
+eyes;--over in five seconds, but breaks one of their two backs, and
+is good for threescore years and ten;--one trial enough,--settles the
+whole matter,--just as when two feathered songsters of the barnyard,
+game and dunghill, come together,-after a jump or two at each other,
+and a few sharp kicks, there is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous,
+Monsieur, with the beaten party in all the social relations for all
+the rest of his days.
+
+I cannot philosophically account for the Koh-i-noor's wrath.  For
+though a cosmetic is sold, bearing the name of the lady to whom
+reference was made by the young person John, yet, as it is publicly
+asserted in respectable prints that this cosmetic is not a dye, I see
+no reason why he should have felt offended by any suggestion that he
+was indebted to it or its authoress.
+
+I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to
+which the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural.  Nature is
+fertile in variety.  I saw an albiness in London once, for sixpence,
+(including the inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked
+as if she had been boiled in milk.  A young Hottentot of my
+acquaintance had his hair all in little pellets of the size of
+marrow-fat peas.  One of my own classmates has undergone a singular
+change of late years,--his hair losing its original tint, and getting
+a remarkable discolored look; and another has ceased to cultivate any
+hair at all over the vertex or crown of the head.  So I am perfectly
+willing to believe that the purple-black of the Koh-i-noor's
+moustache and whiskers is constitutional and not pigmentary.  But I
+can't think why he got so angry.
+
+The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
+threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it
+was all over by the time the other end of the table found out there
+was a disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be
+seen resting on his axe at the instant you hear the last blow he
+struck.  So you will please to observe that the Little Gentleman was
+not, interrupted during the time implied by these ex-post-facto
+remarks of mine, but for some ten or fifteen seconds only.
+
+He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started
+again.  The "Sir" of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself
+more than anybody else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he
+were talking with some imaginary opponent.
+
+--America, Sir,--he exclaimed,--is the only place where man is full-
+grown!
+
+He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round of
+his high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his
+little figure to the view of the boarders.
+
+It was next to impossible to keep from laughing.  The commentary was
+so strange an illustration of the text!  I thought it was time to put
+in a word; for I have lived in foreign parts, and am more or less
+cosmopolitan.
+
+I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have
+in England,---I said.--An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion
+and politics.  Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr.
+Channing did, and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.
+
+Sir,--said he,--it is n't what a man thinks or says; but when and
+where and to whom he thinks and says it.  A man with a flint and
+steel striking sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking
+them over a tinder-box is another.  The free Englishman is born under
+protest; he lives and dies under protest,--a tolerated, but not a
+welcome fact.  Is not freethinker a term of reproach in England?  The
+same idea in the soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and
+still holds it antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to
+whom it is congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except
+as an element blended with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like
+the drawing of his breath or the beating of his heart, is a very
+different thing.  You may teach a quadruped to walk on his hind legs,
+but he is always wanting to be on all fours.  Nothing that can be
+taught a growing youth is like the atmospheric knowledge he breathes
+from his infancy upwards.  The American baby sucks in freedom with
+the milk of the breast at which he hangs.
+
+--That's a good joke,--said the young fellow John,--considerin' it
+commonly belongs to a female Paddy.
+
+I thought--I will not be certain--that the Little Gentleman winked,
+as if he had been hit somewhere--as I have no doubt Dr. Darwin did
+when the wooden-spoon suggestion upset his theory about why, etc.  If
+he winked, however, he did not dodge.
+
+A lively comment!--he said.--But Rome, in her great founder, sucked
+the blood of empire out of the dugs of a brute, Sir!  The Milesian
+wet-nurse is only a convenient vessel through which the American
+infant gets the life-blood of this virgin soil, Sir, that is making
+man over again, on the sunset pattern!  You don't think what we are
+doing and going to do here.  Why, Sir, while commentators are
+bothering themselves with interpretation of prophecies, we have got
+the new heavens and the new earth over us and under us!  Was there
+ever anything in Italy, I should like to know, like a Boston sunset?
+
+--This time there was a laugh, and the little man himself almost
+smiled.
+
+Yes,--Boston sunsets;--perhaps they're as good in some other places,
+but I know 'em best here.  Anyhow, the American skies are different
+from anything they see in the Old World.  Yes, and the rocks are
+different, and the soil is different, and everything that comes out
+of the soil, from grass up to Indians, is different.  And now that
+the provisional races are dying out-
+
+--What do you mean by the provisional races, Sir?--said the divinity-
+student, interrupting him.
+
+Why, the aboriginal bipeds, to be sure,--he answered,--the red-crayon
+sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colors for the real
+manhood were ready.
+
+I hope they will come to something yet,--said the divinity-student.
+
+Irreclaimable, Sir,--irreclaimable!--said the Little Gentleman.
+--Cheaper to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones.
+When you can get the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can
+make an enlightened commonwealth of Indians.  A provisional race,
+Sir,--nothing more.  Exhaled carbonic acid for the use of vegetation,
+kept down the bears and catamounts, enjoyed themselves in scalping
+and being scalped, and then passed away or are passing away,
+according to the programme.
+
+Well, Sir, these races dying out, the white man has to acclimate
+himself.  It takes him a good while; but he will come all right by-
+and-by, Sir,--as sound as a woodchuck,--as sound as a musquash!
+
+A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of
+'em for wash-basins!  A new race, and a whole new world for the new-
+born human soul to work in!  And Boston is the brain of it, and has
+been any time these hundred years!  That's all I claim for Boston,--
+that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the
+planet.
+
+--And the grand emporium of modesty,--said the divinity-student, a
+little mischievously.
+
+Oh, don't talk to me of modesty!--answered the Little Gentleman,--I
+'m past that!  There is n't a thing that was ever said or done in
+Boston, from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical
+lie it tore into tatters and flung into the dock, that was n't
+thought very indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the
+entrails of commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into
+colics as often as this revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of
+thinking come over it.--No, Sir,--show me any other place that is,
+or was since the megalosaurus has died out, where wealth and social
+influence are so fairly divided between the stationary and the
+progressive classes!  Show me any other place where every other
+drawing-room is not a chamber of the Inquisition, with papas and
+mammas for inquisitors,--and the cold shoulder, instead of the "dry
+pan and the gradual fire," the punishment of "heresy"!
+
+--We think Baltimore is a pretty civilized kind of a village,--said
+the young Marylander, good-naturedly.--But I suppose you can't
+forgive it for always keeping a little ahead of Boston in point of
+numbers,--tell the truth now.  Are we not the centre of something?
+
+Ah, indeed, to be sure you are.  You are the gastronomic metropolis
+of the Union.  Why don't you put a canvas-back-duck on the top of the
+Washington column?  Why don't you get that lady off from Battle
+Monument and plant a terrapin in her place?  Why will you ask for
+other glories when you have soft crabs?  No, Sir,--you live too well
+to think as hard as we do in Boston.  Logic comes to us with the
+salt-fish of Cape Ann; rhetoric is born of the beans of Beverly; but
+you--if you open your mouths to speak, Nature stops them with a fat
+oyster, or offers a slice of the breast of your divine bird, and
+silences all your aspirations.
+
+And what of Philadelphia?--said the Marylander.
+
+Oh, Philadelphia?--Waterworks,--killed by the Croton and Cochituate;-
+-Ben Franklin,--borrowed from Boston;--David Rittenhouse,--made an
+orrery;--Benjamin Rush,--made a medical system;--both interesting to
+antiquarians;--great Red-river raft of medical students,--spontaneous
+generation of professors to match;--more widely known through the
+Moyamensing hose-company, and the Wistar parties;-for geological
+section of social strata, go to The Club.--Good place to live in,
+--first-rate market,--tip-top peaches.--What do we know about
+Philadelphia, except that the engine-companies are always shooting
+each other?
+
+And what do you say to New York?--asked the Koh-i-noor.
+
+A great city, Sir,--replied the Little Gentleman,--a very opulent,
+splendid city.  A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and of
+permanence for much that is respectable.  A great money-centre.  San
+Francisco with the mines above-ground,--and some of 'em under the
+sidewalks.  I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York,
+in all our cities.  It makes 'em all look paltry and petty.  Has many
+elements of civilization.  May stop where Venice did, though, for
+aught we know.--The order of its development is just this:--Wealth;
+architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture.  Printing, as a
+mechanical art,--just as Nicholas Jepson and the Aldi, who were
+scholars too, made Venice renowned for it.  Journalism, which is the
+accident of business and crowded populations, in great perfection.
+Venice got as far as Titian and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto,--great
+colorists, mark you, magnificent on the flesh-and-blood side of Art,-
+-but look over to Florence and see who lie in Santa Crocea, and ask
+out of whose loins Dante sprung!
+
+Oh, yes, to be sure, Venice built her Ducal Palace, and her Church of
+St. Mark, and her Casa d' Or, and the rest of her golden houses; and
+Venice had great pictures and good music; and Venice had a Golden
+Book, in which all the large tax-payers had their names written;--but
+all that did not make Venice the brain of Italy.
+
+I tell you what, Sir,--with all these magnificent appliances of
+civilization, it is time we began to hear something from the djinnis
+donee whose names are on the Golden Book of our sumptuous, splendid,
+marble-placed Venice,--something in the higher walks of literature,--
+something in the councils of the nation.  Plenty of Art, I grant you,
+Sir; now, then, for vast libraries, and for mighty scholars and
+thinkers and statesmen,--five for every Boston one, as the population
+is to ours,--ten to one more properly, in virtue of centralizing
+attraction as the alleged metropolis, and not call our people
+provincials, and have to come begging to us to write the lives of
+Hendrik Hudson and Gouverneur Morris!
+
+--The Little Gentleman was on his hobby, exalting his own city at the
+expense of every other place.  I have my doubts if he had been in
+either of the cities he had been talking about.  I was just going to
+say something to sober him down, if I could, when the young
+Marylander spoke up.
+
+Come, now,--he said,--what's the use of these comparisons?  Did n't I
+hear this gentleman saying, the other day, that every American owns
+all America?  If you have really got more brains in Boston than other
+folks, as you seem to think, who hates you for it, except a pack of
+scribbling fools?  If I like Broadway better than Washington Street,
+what then?  I own them both, as much as anybody owns either. I am an
+American,--and wherever I look up and see the stars and stripes
+overhead, that is home to me!
+
+He spoke, and looked up as if he heard the emblazoned folds crackling
+over him in the breeze.  We all looked up involuntarily, as if we
+should see the national flag by so doing.  The sight of the dingy
+ceiling and the gas-fixture depending therefrom dispelled the
+illusion.
+
+Bravo!  bravo!--said the venerable gentleman on the other side of the
+table.--Those are the sentiments of Washington's Farewell Address.
+Nothing better than that since the last chapter in Revelations.
+Five-and-forty years ago there used to be Washington societies, and
+little boys used to walk in processions, each little boy having a
+copy of the Address, bound in red, hung round his neck by a ribbon.
+Why don't they now?  Why don't they now?  I saw enough of hating each
+other in the old Federal times; now let's love each other, I say,--
+let's love each other, and not try to make it out that there is n't
+any place fit to live in except the one we happen to be born in.
+
+It dwarfs the mind, I think,--said I,--to feed it on any localism.
+The full stature of manhood is shrivelled--
+
+The color burst up into my cheeks.  What was I saying,--I, who would
+not for the world have pained our unfortunate little boarder by an
+allusion?
+
+I will go,--he said,--and made a movement with his left arm to let
+himself down from his high chair.
+
+No,--no,--he does n't mean it,--you must not go,--said a kind voice
+next him; and a soft, white hand was laid upon his arm.
+
+Iris, my dear!--exclaimed another voice, as of a female, in accents
+that might be considered a strong atmospheric solution of duty with
+very little flavor of grace.
+
+She did not move for this address, and there was a tableau that
+lasted some seconds.  For the young girl, in the glory of half-blown
+womanhood, and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature
+covered with Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's
+eyes.
+
+Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his
+life.  Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that
+reached into her soul as these did.  It was not that they were in
+themselves supernaturally bright,--but there was the sad fire in them
+that flames up from the soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman
+without hope, but, alas! not without emotion.  To him it seemed as if
+those amber gates had been translucent as the brown water of a
+mountain brook, and through them he had seen dimly into a virgin
+wilderness, only waiting for the sunrise of a great passion for all
+its buds to blow and all its bowers to ring with melody.
+
+That is my image, of course,--not his.  It was not a simile that was
+in his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,--it was a pang of
+wordless passion, and then a silent, inward moan.
+
+A lady's wish,--he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,--makes
+slaves of us all.--And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and
+never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures
+without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor
+ragged pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his
+sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts
+that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common
+Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly
+well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common
+Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,--misty, fragmentary, vague,
+half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his
+inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:--John
+Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in England--saying, that with half-an-
+hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in
+any woman's good graces; Cadenus--old and savage--leading captive
+Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a
+winning tongue had he,"--as much as to say, it is n't looks, after
+all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over,--just as of old when
+it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to
+listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.
+
+Ah, dear me!  We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club,
+subjugating man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of
+it, and the second by our handling of it,--we rehearse it, I say, by
+our own hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the
+exercise is easy.  But when we come to real life, the poker is in the
+fore, and, ten to one, if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to
+hold;--lucky for us, if it is not white-hot, and we do not have to
+leave the skin of our hands sticking to it when we fling it down or
+drop it with a loud or silent cry!
+
+--I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human
+character and feeling I am winding.  I meant to tell my thoughts, and
+to throw in a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured
+themselves for me from day to day.  Chance has thrown together at the
+table with me a number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean
+not only to look on them, but, if I can, through them.  You can get
+any man's or woman's secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your
+own, if you will only look patiently on them long enough.  Nature is
+always applying her reagents to character, if you will take the pains
+to watch her.  Our studies of character, to change the image, are
+very much like the surveyor's triangulation of a geographical
+province.  We get a base-line in organization, always; then we get an
+angle by sighting some distant object to which the passions or
+aspirations of the subject of our observation are tending; then
+another;--and so we construct our first triangle.  Once fix a man's
+ideals, and for the most part the rest is easy.  A wants to die worth
+half a million.  Good.  B (female) wants to catch him,--and outlive
+him.  All right.  Minor details at our leisure.
+
+What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all
+your misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of
+acts of consciousness which make up your past life?  What should you
+most dislike to tell your nearest friend?--Be so good as to pause for
+a brief space, and shut the volume you hold with your finger between
+the pages.--Oh, that is it!
+
+What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my
+soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants
+came back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy
+bills!
+
+At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of
+those stately upright cabinet desks and cases of drawers which were
+not rare in prosperous families during the last century.  It had held
+the clothes and the books and the papers of generation after
+generation.  The hands that opened its drawers had grown withered,
+shrivelled, and at last been folded in death.  The children that
+played with the lower handles had got tall enough to open the desk,
+to reach the upper shelves behind the folding-doors,--grown bent
+after a while,--and then followed those who had gone before, and left
+the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new generation.
+
+A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being
+a quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for
+by the smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk.
+Prying about with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a
+spring, on pressing which, a secret drawer flew from its hiding-
+place.  It had never been opened but by the maker.  The mahogany
+shavings and dust were lying in it as when the artisan closed it,--
+and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if that day finished.
+
+Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which
+no hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you
+seem to have suspected?  What does it hold?--A sin?--I hope not.
+What a strange thing an old dead sin laid away in a secret drawer of
+the soul is!  Must it some time or other be moistened with tears,
+until it comes to life again and begins to stir in our
+consciousness,--as the dry wheel-animalcule, looking like a grain of
+dust, becomes alive, if it is wet with a drop of water?
+
+Or is it a passion?  There are plenty of withered men and women
+walking about the streets who have the secret drawer in their hearts,
+which, if it were opened, would show as fresh as it was when they
+were in the flush of youth and its first trembling emotions.
+
+What it held will, perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and
+gone, and same curious eye lights on an old yellow letter with the
+fossil footprints of the extinct passion trodden thick all over it.
+
+There is not a boarder at our table, I firmly believe, excepting the
+young girl, who has not a story of the heart to tell, if one could
+only get the secret drawer open.  Even this arid female, whose armor
+of black bombazine looks stronger against the shafts of love than any
+cuirass of triple brass, has had her sentimental history, if I am not
+mistaken.  I will tell you my reason for suspecting it.
+
+Like many other old women, she shows a great nervousness and
+restlessness whenever I venture to express any opinion upon a class
+of subjects which can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of
+men as their strictly private property,--not even to the clergy, or
+the newspapers commonly called "religious."  Now, although it would
+be a great luxury to me to obtain my opinions by contract, ready-
+made, from a professional man, and although I have a constitutional
+kindly feeling to all sorts of good people which would make me happy
+to agree with all their beliefs, if that were possible, still I must
+have an idea, now and then, as to the meaning of life; and though the
+only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at
+least, not to express them, with reference to such subjects, I can't
+afford to pay quite so much as that even for peace.
+
+I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on
+the shores of Sir Isaac Newton's Ocean of Truth, that salt, fish,
+which have been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and
+dried, are the only proper and allowable food for reasonable people.
+I maintain, on the other hand, that there are a number of live fish
+still swimming in it, and that every one of us has a right to see if
+he cannot catch some of them.  Sometimes I please myself with the
+idea that I have landed an actual living fish, small, perhaps, but
+with rosy gills and silvery scales.  Then I find the consumers of
+nothing but the salted and dried article insist that it is poisonous,
+simply because it is alive, and cry out to people not to touch it.  I
+have not found, however, that people mind them much.
+
+The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer.  I try every
+questionable proposition on her.  If she winces, I must be prepared
+for an outcry from the other old women.  I frightened her, the other
+day, by saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-
+reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is
+not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first.  So she sent me a
+book to read which was to cure me of that error.  It was an old book,
+and looked as if it had not been opened for a long time.  What should
+drop out of it, one day, but a small heart-shaped paper, containing a
+lock of that straight, coarse, brown hair which sets off the sharp
+faces of so many thin-flanked, large-handed bumpkins!  I read upon
+the paper the name "Hiram."--Love! love! love!--everywhere!
+everywhere!--under diamonds and housemaids' "jewelry,"--lifting the
+marrowy camel's-hair, and rustling even the black bombazine!--No,
+no,--I think she never was pretty, but she was young once, and wore
+bright ginghams, and, perhaps, gay merinos.  We shall find that the
+poor little crooked man has been in love, or is in love, or will be
+in love before we have done with him, for aught that I know!
+
+Romance!  Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the
+seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background,
+where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some
+upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-
+out passions?  You look on the black bombazine and high-necked
+decorum of your neighbor, and no more think of the real life that
+underlies this despoiled and dismantled womanhood than you think of a
+stone trilobite as having once been full of the juices and the
+nervous thrills of throbbing and self-conscious being.  There is a
+wild creature under that long yellow pin which serves as brooch for
+the bombazine cuirass,--a wild creature, which I venture to say would
+leap in his cage, if I should stir him, quiet as you think him.  A
+heart which has been domesticated by matrimony and maternity is as
+tranquil as a tame bullfinch; but a wild heart which has never been
+fairly broken in flutters fiercely long after you think time has
+tamed it down,--like that purple finch I had the other day, which
+could not be approached without such palpitations and frantic flings
+against the bars of his cage, that I had to send him back and get a
+little orthodox canary which had learned to be quiet and never mind
+the wires or his keeper's handling.  I will tell you my wicked, but
+half involuntary experiment on the wild heart under the faded
+bombazine.
+
+Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special
+weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not
+touch the infirm spot?  I confess the most frightful tendency to do
+just this thing.  If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself
+imitating it.  If another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that,
+go before him, limping.
+
+I could never meet an Irish gentleman--if it had been the Duke of
+Wellington himself--without stumbling upon the word "Paddy,"--which I
+use rarely in my common talk.
+
+I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate
+depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing
+instinct, which, under different circumstances, might have made a
+Fijian anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I
+was not answerable.  It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact
+like endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted.  A thin film
+of politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of
+thought from the stream of conversation.  After a time one begins to
+soak through and mingle with the other.
+
+We were talking about names, one day.--Was there ever anything,--I
+said,--like the Yankee for inventing the most uncouth, pretentious,
+detestable appellations,--inventing or finding them,--since the time
+of Praise-God Barebones?  I heard a country-boy once talking of
+another whom he called Elpit, as I understood him.  Elbridge is
+common enough, but this sounded oddly.  It seems the boy was
+christened Lord Pitt,--and called for convenience, as above.  I have
+heard a charming little girl, belonging to an intelligent family in
+the country, called Anges invariably; doubtless intended for Agnes.
+Names are cheap.  How can a man name an innocent new-born child, that
+never did him any harm, Hiram?--The poor relation, or whatever she
+is, in bombazine, turned toward me, but I was stupid, and went on.--
+To think of a man going through life saddled with such an abominable
+name as that!--The poor relation grew very uneasy.--I continued;
+for I never thought of all this till afterwards.--I knew one young
+fellow, a good many years ago, by the name of Hiram--What's got
+into you, Cousin,--said our landlady,--to look so?--There! you 've
+upset your teacup!
+
+It suddenly occurred to me what I had been doing, and I saw the poor
+woman had her hand at her throat; she was half-choking with the
+"hysteric ball,"--a very odd symptom, as you know, which nervous
+women often complain of.  What business had I to be trying
+experiments on this forlorn old soul?  I had a great deal better be
+watching that young girl.
+
+Ah, the young girl!  I am sure that she can hide nothing from me.
+Her skin is so transparent that one can almost count her heart-beats
+by the flushes they send into her cheeks.  She does not seem to be
+shy, either.  I think she does not know enough of danger to be timid.
+She seems to me like one of those birds that travellers tell of,
+found in remote, uninhabited islands, who, having never received any
+wrong at the hand of man, show no alarm at and hardly any particular
+consciousness of his presence.
+
+The first thing will be to see how she and our little deformed
+gentleman get along together; for, as I have told you, they sit side
+by side.  The next thing will be to keep an eye on the duenna,--the
+"Model" and so forth, as the white-neck-cloth called her.  The
+intention of that estimable lady is, I understand, to launch her and
+leave her.  I suppose there is no help for it, and I don't doubt this
+young lady knows how to take care of herself, but I do not like to
+see young girls turned loose in boarding-houses.  Look here now!
+There is that jewel of his race, whom I have called for convenience
+the Koh-i-noor, (you understand it is quite out of the question for
+me to use the family names of our boarders, unless I want to get into
+trouble,)--I say, the gentleman with the diamond is looking very
+often and very intently, it seems to me, down toward the farther
+corner of the table, where sits our amber-eyed blonde.  The
+landlady's daughter does not look pleased, it seems to me, at this,
+nor at those other attentions which the gentleman referred to has, as
+I have learned, pressed upon the newly-arrived young person.  The
+landlady made a communication to me, within a few days after the
+arrival of Miss Iris, which I will repeat to the best of my
+remembrance.
+
+He, (the person I have been speaking of,)--she said,--seemed to be
+kinder hankerin' round after that young woman.  It had hurt her
+daughter's feelin's a good deal, that the gentleman she was a-keepin'
+company with should be offerin' tickets and tryin' to send presents
+to them that he'd never know'd till jest a little spell ago,--and he
+as good as merried, so fur as solemn promises went, to as respectable
+a young lady, if she did say so, as any there was round, whosomever
+they might be.
+
+Tickets!  presents!--said I.--What tickets, what presents has he had
+the impertinence to be offering to that young lady?
+
+Tickets to the Museum,--said the landlady.  There is them that's glad
+enough to go to the Museum, when tickets is given 'em; but some of
+'em ha'n't had a ticket sence Cenderilla was played,--and now he must
+be offerin' 'em to this ridiculous young paintress, or whatever she
+is, that's come to make more mischief than her board's worth.  But it
+a'n't her fault,--said the landlady, relenting;--and that aunt of
+hers, or whatever she is, served him right enough.
+
+Why, what did she do?
+
+Do?  Why, she took it up in the tongs and dropped it out o' winder.
+
+Dropped?  dropped what?--I said.
+
+Why, the soap,--said the landlady.
+
+It appeared that the Koh-i-noor, to ingratiate himself, had sent an
+elegant package of perfumed soap, directed to Miss Iris, as a
+delicate expression of a lively sentiment of admiration, and that,
+after having met with the unfortunate treatment referred to, it was
+picked up by Master Benjamin Franklin, who appropriated it,
+rejoicing, and indulged in most unheard-of and inordinate ablutions
+in consequence, so that his hands were a frequent subject of maternal
+congratulation, and he smelt like a civet-cat for weeks after his
+great acquisition.
+
+After watching daily for a time, I think I can see clearly into the
+relation which is growing up between the little gentleman and the
+young lady.  She shows a tenderness to him that I can't help being
+interested in.  If he was her crippled child, instead of being more
+than old enough to be her father, she could not treat him more
+kindly.  The landlady's daughter said, the other day, she believed
+that girl was settin' her cap for the Little Gentleman.
+
+Some of them young folks is very artful,--said her mother,--and there
+is them that would merry Lazarus, if he'd only picked up crumbs
+enough.  I don't think, though, this is one of that sort; she's
+kinder childlike,--said the landlady,--and maybe never had any dolls
+to play with; for they say her folks was poor before Ma'am undertook
+to see to her teachin' and board her and clothe her.
+
+I could not help overhearing this conversation.  "Board her and
+clothe her!"--speaking of such a young creature!  Oh, dear!--Yes,--
+she must be fed,--just like Bridget, maid-of-all-work at this
+establishment.  Somebody must pay for it.  Somebody has a right to
+watch her and see how much it takes to "keep" her, and growl at her,
+if she has too good an appetite.  Somebody has a right to keep an eye
+on her and take care that she does not dress too prettily.  No mother
+to see her own youth over again in these fresh features and rising
+reliefs of half-sculptured womanhood, and, seeing its loveliness,
+forget her lessons of neutral-tinted propriety, and open the cases
+that hold her own ornaments to find for her a necklace or a bracelet
+or a pair of ear-rings,--those golden lamps that light up the deep,
+shadowy dimples on the cheeks of young beauties,--swinging in a semi-
+barbaric splendor that carries the wild fancy to Abyssinian queens
+and musky Odalisques!  I don't believe any woman has utterly given up
+the great firm of Mundus & Co., so long as she wears ear-rings.
+
+I think Iris loves to hear the Little Gentleman talk.  She smiles
+sometimes at his vehement statements, but never laughs at him.  When
+he speaks to her, she keeps her eye always steadily upon him.  This
+may be only natural good-breeding, so to speak, but it is worth
+noticing.  I have often observed that vulgar persons, and public
+audiences of inferior collective intelligence, have this in common:
+the least thing draws off their minds, when you are speaking to them.
+I love this young creature's rapt attention to her diminutive
+neighbor while he is speaking.
+
+He is evidently pleased with it.  For a day or two after she came, he
+was silent and seemed nervous and excited.  Now he is fond of getting
+the talk into his own hands, and is obviously conscious that he has
+at least one interested listener.  Once or twice I have seen marks of
+special attention to personal adornment, a ruffled shirt-bosom, one
+day, and a diamond pin in it,--not so very large as the Koh-i-noor's,
+but more lustrous.  I mentioned the death's-head ring he wears on his
+right hand.  I was attracted by a very handsome red stone, a ruby or
+carbuncle or something of the sort, to notice his left hand, the
+other day.  It is a handsome hand, and confirms my suspicion that the
+cast mentioned was taken from his arm.  After all, this is just what
+I should expect.  It is not very uncommon to see the upper limbs, or
+one of them, running away with the whole strength, and, therefore,
+with the whole beauty, which we should never have noticed, if it had
+been divided equally between all four extremities.  If it is so, of
+course he is proud of his one strong and beautiful arm; that is human
+nature.  I am afraid he can hardly help betraying his favoritism, as
+people who have any one showy point are apt to do,--especially
+dentists with handsome teeth, who always smile back to their last
+molars.
+
+Sitting, as he does, next to the young girl, and next but one to the
+calm lady who has her in charge, he cannot help seeing their
+relations to each other.
+
+That is an admirable woman, Sir,--he said to me one day, as we sat
+alone at the table after breakfast,--an admirable woman, Sir,--and I
+hate her.
+
+Of course, I begged an explanation.
+
+An admirable woman, Sir, because she does good things, and even kind
+things,--takes care of this--this--young lady--we have here, talks
+like a sensible person, and always looks as if she was doing her duty
+with all her might.  I hate her because her voice sounds as if it
+never trembled and her eyes look as if she never knew what it was to
+cry.  Besides, she looks at me, Sir, stares at me, as if she wanted
+to get an image of me for some gallery in her brain,--and we don't
+love to be looked at in this way, we that have--I hate her,--I hate
+her,--her eyes kill me,--it is like being stabbed with icicles to be
+looked at so,--the sooner she goes home, the better.  I don't want a
+woman to weigh me in a balance; there are men enough for that sort of
+work.  The judicial character is n't captivating in females, Sir.  A
+woman fascinates a man quite as often by what she overlooks as by
+what she sees.  Love prefers twilight to daylight; and a man doesn't
+think much of, nor care much for, a woman outside of his household,
+unless he can couple the idea of love, past, present, or future, with
+her.  I don't believe the Devil would give half as much for the
+services of a sinner as he would for those of one of these folks that
+are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make them unpleasing.
+--That young girl wants a tender nature to cherish her and give her a
+chance to put out her leaves,--sunshine, and not east winds.
+
+He was silent,--and sat looking at his handsome left hand with the
+red stone ring upon it.--Is he going to fall in love with Iris?
+
+Here are some lines I read to the boarders the other day:--
+
+      THE CROOKED FOOTPATH
+
+Ah, here it is! the sliding rail
+That marks the old remembered spot,--
+The gap that struck our schoolboy trail,--
+The crooked path across the lot.
+
+It left the road by school and church,
+A pencilled shadow, nothing more,
+That parted from the silver birch
+And ended at the farmhouse door.
+
+No line or compass traced its plan;
+With frequent bends to left or right,
+In aimless, wayward curves it ran,
+But always kept the door in sight.
+
+The gabled porch, with woodbine green,--
+The broken millstone at the sill,--
+Though many a rood might stretch between,
+The truant child could see them still.
+
+No rocks, across the pathway lie,--
+No fallen trunk is o'er it thrown,--
+And yet it winds, we know not why,
+And turns as if for tree or stone.
+
+Perhaps some lover trod the way
+With shaking knees and leaping heart,--
+And so it often runs astray
+With sinuous sweep or sudden start.
+
+Or one, perchance, with clouded brain
+From some unholy banquet reeled,--
+And since, our devious steps maintain
+His track across the trodden field.
+
+Nay, deem not thus,--no earthborn will
+Could ever trace a faultless line;
+Our truest steps are human still,--
+To walk unswerving were divine!
+
+Truants from love, we dream of wrath;--
+Oh, rather let us trust the more!
+Through all the wanderings of the path,
+We still can see our Father's door!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Professor finds a Fly in his Teacup.
+
+I have a long theological talk to relate, which must be dull reading
+to some of my young and vivacious friends.  I don't know, however,
+that any of them have entered into a contract to read all that I
+write, or that I have promised always to write to please them.  What
+if I should sometimes write to please myself?
+
+Now you must know that there are a great many things which interest
+me, to some of which this or that particular class of readers may be
+totally indifferent.  I love Nature, and human nature, its thoughts,
+affections, dreams, aspirations, delusions,--Art in all its forms,--
+virtu in all its eccentricities,--old stories from black-letter
+volumes and yellow manuscripts, and new projects out of hot brains
+not yet imbedded in the snows of age.  I love the generous impulses
+of the reformer; but not less does my imagination feed itself upon
+the old litanies, so often warmed by the human breath upon which they
+were wafted to Heaven that they glow through our frames like our own
+heart's blood.  I hope I love good men and women; I know that they
+never speak a word to me, even if it be of question or blame, that I
+do not take pleasantly, if it is expressed with a reasonable amount
+of human kindness.
+
+I have before me at this time a beautiful and affecting letter, which
+I have hesitated to answer, though the postmark upon it gave its
+direction, and the name is one which is known to all, in some of its
+representatives.  It contains no reproach, only a delicately-hinted
+fear.  Speak gently, as this dear lady has spoken, and there is no
+heart so insensible that it does not answer to the appeal, no
+intellect so virile that it does not own a certain deference to the
+claims of age, of childhood, of sensitive and timid natures, when
+they plead with it not to look at those sacred things by the broad
+daylight which they see in mystic shadow.  How grateful would it be
+to make perpetual peace with these pleading saints and their
+confessors, by the simple act that silences all complainings!  Sleep,
+sleep, sleep!  says the Arch-Enchantress of them all,--and pours her
+dark and potent anodyne, distilled over the fires that consumed her
+foes,--its large, round drops changing, as we look, into the beads of
+her convert's rosary!  Silence! the pride of reason! cries another,
+whose whole life is spent in reasoning down reason.
+
+I hope I love good people, not for their sake, but for my own.  And
+most assuredly, if any deed of wrong or word of bitterness led me
+into an act of disrespect towards that enlightened and excellent
+class of men who make it their calling to teach goodness and their
+duty to practise it, I should feel that I had done myself an injury
+rather than them.  Go and talk with any professional man holding any
+of the medieval creeds, choosing one who wears upon his features the
+mark of inward and outward health, who looks cheerful, intelligent,
+and kindly, and see how all your prejudices melt away in his
+presence!  It is impossible to come into intimate relations with a
+large, sweet nature, such as you may often find in this class,
+without longing to be at one with it in all its modes of being and
+believing.  But does it not occur to you that one may love truth as
+he sees it, and his race as he views it, better than even the
+sympathy and approbation of many good men whom he honors,--better
+than sleeping to the sound of the Miserere or listening to the
+repetition of an effete Confession of Faith?
+
+The three learned professions have but recently emerged from a state
+of quasi-barbarism.  None of them like too well to be told of it, but
+it must be sounded in their ears whenever they put on airs.  When a
+man has taken an overdose of laudanum, the doctors tell us to place
+him between two persons who shall make him walk up and down
+incessantly; and if he still cannot be kept from going to sleep, they
+say that a lash or two over his back is of great assistance.
+
+So we must keep the doctors awake by telling them that they have not
+yet shaken off astrology and the doctrine of signatures, as is shown
+by the form of their prescriptions, and their use of nitrate of
+silver, which turns epileptics into Ethiopians.  If that is not
+enough, they must be given over to the scourgers, who like their task
+and get good fees for it.  A few score years ago, sick people were
+made to swallow burnt toads and powdered earthworms and the expressed
+juice of wood-lice.  The physician of Charles I. and II. prescribed
+abominations not to be named.  Barbarism, as bad as that of Congo or
+Ashantee.  Traces of this barbarism linger even in the greatly
+improved medical science of our century.  So while the solemn farce
+of over-drugging is going on, the world over, the harlequin pseudo-
+science jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with half-a-dozen
+somersets, and begins laying about him.
+
+In 1817, perhaps you remember, the law of wager by battle was
+unrepealed, and the rascally murderous, and worse than murderous,
+clown, Abraham Thornton, put on his gauntlet in open court and defied
+the appellant to lift the other which he threw down.  It was not
+until the reign of George II. that the statutes against witchcraft
+were repealed.  As for the English Court of Chancery, we know that
+its antiquated abuses form one of the staples of common proverbs and
+popular literature.  So the laws and the lawyers have to be watched
+perpetually by public opinion as much as the doctors do.
+
+I don't think the other profession is an exception.  When the
+Reverend Mr. Cauvin and his associates burned my distinguished
+scientific brother,--he was burned with green fagots, which made it
+rather slow and painful,--it appears to me they were in a state of
+religious barbarism.  The dogmas of such people about the Father of
+Mankind and his creatures are of no more account in my opinion than
+those of a council of Aztecs.  If a man picks your pocket, do you not
+consider him thereby disqualified to pronounce any authoritative
+opinion on matters of ethics?  If a man hangs my ancient female
+relatives for sorcery, as they did in this neighborhood a little
+while ago, or burns my instructor for not believing as he does, I
+care no more for his religious edicts than I should for those of any
+other barbarian.
+
+Of course, a barbarian may hold many true opinions; but when the
+ideas of the healing art, of the administration of justice, of
+Christian love, could not exclude systematic poisoning, judicial
+duelling, and murder for opinion's sake, I do not see how we can
+trust the verdict of that time relating to any subject which involves
+the primal instincts violated in these abominations and absurdities.
+--What if we are even now in a state of semi-barbarism?
+
+
+[This physician believes we "are even now in a state of semi-
+barbarism": invasive procedures for the prolongation of death rather
+than prolongation of life; "faith",as slimly based as medieval faith
+in minute differences between control and treated groups; statistical
+manipulation to prove a prejudice.  Medicine has a good deal to
+answer for!  D.W.]
+
+
+Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table about such things.
+--I am not so sure of that.  Religion and government appear to me the
+two subjects which of all others should belong to the common talk of
+people who enjoy the blessings of freedom.  Think, one moment.  The
+earth is a great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its
+axis, receives fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same
+number worked up more or less completely.  There must be somewhere a
+population of two hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred
+times as many, earth-born intelligences.  Life, as we call it, is
+nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where it
+comes on soundings.  In this view, I do not see anything so fit to
+talk about, or half so interesting, as that which relates to the
+innumerable majority of our fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who
+are hundreds of thousands to one of the live-living, and with whom we
+all potentially belong, though we have got tangled for the present in
+some parcels of fibrine, albumen, and phosphates, that keep us on the
+minority side of the house.  In point of fact, it is one of the many
+results of Spiritualism to make the permanent destiny of the race a
+matter of common reflection and discourse, and a vehicle for the
+prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age doctrines on the subject.  I
+cannot help thinking, when I remember how many conversations my
+friend and myself have sported, that it would be very extraordinary,
+if there were no mention of that class of subjects which involves all
+that we have and all that we hope, not merely for ourselves, but for
+the dear people whom we love best,--noble men, pure and lovely women,
+ingenuous children, about the destiny of nine tenths of whom you know
+the opinions that would have been taught by those old man-roasting,
+woman-strangling dogmatists.--However, I fought this matter with one
+of our boarders the other day, and I am going to report the
+conversation.
+
+The divinity-student came down, one morning, looking rather more
+serious than usual.  He said little at breakfast-time, but lingered
+after the others, so that I, who am apt to be long at the table,
+found myself alone with him.
+
+When the rest were all gone, he turned his chair round towards mine,
+and began.
+
+I am afraid,--he said,--you express yourself a little too freely on a
+most important class of subjects.  Is there not danger in introducing
+discussions or allusions relating to matters of religion into common
+discourse?
+
+Danger to what?--I asked.
+
+Danger to truth,--he replied, after a slight pause.
+
+I didn't know Truth was such an invalid,' I said.--How long is it
+since she could only take the air in a close carriage, with a
+gentleman in a black coat on the box?  Let me tell you a story,
+adapted to young persons, but which won't hurt older ones.
+
+--There was a very little boy who had one of those balloons you may
+have seen, which are filled with light gas, and are held by a string
+to keep them from running off in aeronautic voyages on their own
+account.  This little boy had a naughty brother, who said to him, one
+day,--Brother, pull down your balloon, so that I can look at it and
+take hold of it.  Then the little boy pulled it down.  Now the
+naughty brother had a sharp pin in his hand, and he thrust it into
+the balloon, and all the gas oozed out, so that there was nothing
+left but a shrivelled skin.
+
+One evening, the little boy's father called him to the window to see
+the moon, which pleased him very much; but presently he said,--
+Father, do not pull the string and bring down the moon, for my
+naughty brother will prick it, and then it will all shrivel up and we
+shall not see it any more.
+
+Then his father laughed, and told him how the moon had been shining a
+good while, and would shine a good while longer, and that all we
+could do was to keep our windows clean, never letting the dust get
+too thick on them, and especially to keep our eyes open, but that we
+could not pull the moon down with a string, nor prick it with a pin.
+--Mind you this, too, the moon is no man's private property, but is
+seen from a good many parlor-windows.
+
+--Truth is tough.  It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay,
+you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round
+and full at evening.  Does not Mr. Bryant say, that Truth gets well
+if she is run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if
+she scratches her finger?  [Would that this was so:--error,
+superstition, mysticism, authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a
+tenacity that survives inexplicably.  D.W.]  I never heard that a
+mathematician was alarmed for the safety of a demonstrated
+proposition.  I think, generally, that fear of open discussion
+implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great sensitiveness to
+the expression of individual opinion is a mark of weakness.
+
+--I am not so much afraid for truth,--said the divinity-student,--as
+for the conceptions of truth in the minds of persons not accustomed
+to judge wisely the opinions uttered before them.
+
+Would you, then, banish all allusions to matters of this nature from
+the society of people who come together habitually?
+
+I would be very careful in introducing them,--said the divinity-
+student.
+
+Yes, but friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be
+picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of
+doctrines these people do not approve.  Some of your friends stop
+little children in the street, and give them books, which their
+parents, who have had them baptized into the Christian fold and give
+them what they consider proper religious instruction, do not think
+fit for them.  One would say it was fair enough to talk about matters
+thus forced upon people's attention.
+
+The divinity-student could not deny that this was what might be
+called opening the subject to the discussion of intelligent people.
+
+But,--he said,--the greatest objection is this, that persons who have
+not made a professional study of theology are not competent to speak
+on such subjects.  Suppose a minister were to undertake to express
+opinions on medical subjects, for instance, would you not think he
+was going beyond his province?
+
+I laughed,--for I remembered John Wesley's "sulphur and
+supplication," and so many other cases where ministers had meddled
+with medicine,--sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general
+rule, with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose
+way of admitting evidence,--that I could not help being amused.
+
+I beg your pardon,--I said,--I do not wish to be impolite, but I was
+thinking of their certificates to patent medicines.  Let us look at
+this matter.
+
+If a minister had attended lectures on the theory and practice of
+medicine, delivered by those who had studied it most deeply, for
+thirty or forty years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a
+year,--if he had been constantly reading and hearing read the most
+approved text-books on the subject,--if he had seen medicine actually
+practised according to different methods, daily, for the same length
+of time,--I should think, that if a person of average understanding,
+he was entitled to express an opinion on the subject of medicine, or
+else that his instructors were a set of ignorant and incompetent
+charlatans.
+
+If, before a medical practitioner would allow me to enjoy the full
+privileges of the healing art, he expected me to affirm my belief in
+a considerable number of medical doctrines, drugs, and formulae, I
+should think that he thereby implied my right to discuss the same,
+and my ability to do so, if I knew how to express myself in English.
+
+Suppose, for instance, the Medical Society should refuse to give us
+an opiate, or to set a broken limb, until we had signed our belief in
+a certain number of propositions,--of which we will say this is the
+first:
+
+I.  All men's teeth are naturally in a state of total decay or
+caries, and, therefore, no man can bite until every one of them is
+extracted and a new set is inserted according to the principles of
+dentistry adopted by this Society.
+
+I, for one, should want to discuss that before signing my name to it,
+and I should say this:--Why, no, that is n't true.  There are a good
+many bad teeth, we all know, but a great many more good ones.  You
+must n't trust the dentists; they are all the time looking at the
+people who have bad teeth, and such as are suffering from toothache.
+The idea that you must pull out every one of every nice young man and
+young woman's natural teeth!  Poh, poh!  Nobody believes that.  This
+tooth must be straightened, that must be filled with gold, and this
+other perhaps extracted, but it must be a very rare case, if they are
+all so bad as to require extraction; and if they are, don't blame the
+poor soul for it!  Don't tell us, as some old dentists used to, that
+everybody not only always has every tooth in his head good for
+nothing, but that he ought to have his head cut off as a punishment
+for that misfortune!  No, I can't sign Number One.  Give us Number
+Two.
+
+II.  We hold that no man can be well who does not agree with our
+views of the efficacy of calomel, and who does not take the doses of
+it prescribed in our tables, as there directed.
+
+To which I demur, questioning why it should be so, and get for answer
+the two following:
+
+III.  Every man who does not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed
+by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of
+disease from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is
+simultaneously affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia,
+and Atrophy; with Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with
+Cachexia, Carcinoma, and Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet,
+to Xerophthahnia and Zona, with all possible and incompatible
+diseases which are necessary to make up a totally morbid state; and
+he will certainly die, if he does not take freely of our prepared
+calomel, to be obtained only of one of our authorized agents.
+
+IV.  No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does
+not give in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named
+and the following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his
+mouth to certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry,
+to examine whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set
+inserted according to our regulations.
+
+Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha'n't have any
+rhubarb, if we don't sign their articles, and that, if, after signing
+them, we express doubts (in public), about any of them, they will cut
+us off from our jalap and squills,--but then to ask a fellow not to
+discuss the propositions before he signs them is what I should call
+boiling it down a little too strong!
+
+If we understand them, why can't we discuss them?  If we can't
+understand them, because we have n't taken a medical degree, what the
+Father of Lies do they ask us to sign them for?
+
+Just so with the graver profession.  Every now and then some of its
+members seem to lose common sense and common humanity.  The laymen
+have to keep setting the divines right constantly.  Science, for
+instance,--in other words, knowledge,--is not the enemy of religion;
+for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance: But it is often the
+antagonist of school-divinity.
+
+Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines.
+Come down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant
+prelate, tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-
+third of October, four thousand and four years before the birth of
+Christ.  Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-
+eight years B. C.  Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the
+elephant on a tortoise.  One statement is as near the truth as the
+other.
+
+Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral
+surgery.  I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more
+picture to his four stages of Cruelty.  Those wretched fools,
+reverend divines and others, who were strangling men and women for
+imaginary crimes a little more than a century ago among us, were set
+right by a layman, and very angry it made them to have him meddle.
+
+The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their
+clergyman,--a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain
+mechanical processes as Babbage's calculating machine.  The
+commentary of the laymen on the preaching and practising of Jonathan
+Edwards was, that, after twenty-three years of endurance, they turned
+him out by a vote of twenty to one, and passed a resolve that he
+should never preach for them again.  A man's logical and analytical
+adjustments are of little consequence, compared to his primary
+relations with Nature and truth: and people have sense enough to find
+it out in the long ran; they know what "logic" is worth.
+
+In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and
+Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many
+men can do this.  But common sense and common humanity were
+unfortunately left out from their premises, and a layman had to
+supply them.  A hundred more years and many of the barbarisms still
+lingering among us will, of course, have disappeared like witch-
+hanging.  But people are sensitive now, as they were then.  You will
+see by this extract that the Rev. Cotton Mather did not like
+intermeddling with his business very well.
+
+"Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions," he
+says, "and God will smite thro' the loins of those that rise up
+against them.  I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds
+among us know to be true.  The Godly Minister of a certain Town in
+Connecticut, when he had occasion to be absent on a Lord's Day from
+his Flock, employ'd an honest Neighbour of some small Talents for a
+Mechanick, to read a Sermon out of some good Book unto 'em.  This
+Honest, whom they ever counted also a Pious Man, had so much conceit
+of his Talents, that instead of Reading a Sermon appointed, he to the
+Surprize of the People, fell to preaching one of his own.  For his
+Text he took these Words, 'Despise not Prophecyings'; and in his
+Preachment he betook himself to bewail the Envy of the Clergy in the
+Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord's People to be Prophets,
+and call forth Private Brethren publickly to prophesie.  While he was
+thus in the midst of his Exercise, God smote him with horrible
+Madness; he was taken ravingly distracted; the People were forc'd
+with violent Hands to carry him home.  I will not mention his Name:
+He was reputed a Pious Man."--This is one of Cotton Mather's
+"Remarkable Judgments of God, on Several Sorts of Offenders,"--and
+the next cases referred to are the Judgments on the "Abominable
+Sacrilege" of not paying the Ministers' Salaries.
+
+This sort of thing does n't do here and now, you see, my young
+friend!  We talk about our free institutions;--they are nothing but a
+coarse outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought.
+The President of the United States is only the engine driver of our
+broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a
+seat in the first-class cars behind him.
+
+--There is something in what you say,--replied the divinity-student;-
+-and yet it seems to me there are places and times where disputed
+doctrines of religion should not be introduced.  You would not attack
+a church dogma--say Total Depravity--in a lyceum-lecture, for
+instance?
+
+Certainly not; I should choose another place,--I answered.--But,
+mind you, at this table I think it is very different.  I shall
+express my ideas on any subject I like.  The laws of the lecture-
+room, to which my friends and myself are always amenable, do not hold
+here.  I shall not often give arguments, but frequently opinions,--I
+trust with courtesy and propriety, but, at any rate, with such
+natural forms of expression as it has pleased the Almighty to bestow
+upon me.
+
+A man's opinions, look you, are generally of much more value than his
+arguments.  These last are made by his brain, and perhaps he does not
+believe the proposition they tend to prove,--as is often the case
+with paid lawyers; but opinions are formed by our whole nature,--
+brain, heart, instinct, brute life, everything all our experience has
+shaped for us by contact with the whole circle of our being.
+
+--There is one thing more,--said the divinity-student,--that I wished
+to speak of; I mean that idea of yours, expressed some time since, of
+depolarizing the text of sacred books in order to judge them fairly.
+May I ask why you do not try the experiment yourself?
+
+Certainly,--I replied,--if it gives you any pleasure to ask foolish
+questions.  I think the ocean telegraph-wire ought to be laid and
+will be laid, but I don't know that you have any right to ask me to
+go and lay it.  But, for that matter, I have heard a good deal of
+Scripture depolarized in and out of the pulpit.  I heard the Rev.
+Mr. F. once depolarize the story of the Prodigal Son in Park-Street
+Church.  Many years afterwards, I heard him repeat the same or a
+similar depolarized version in Rome, New York.  I heard an admirable
+depolarization of the story of the young man who "had great
+possessions" from the Rev.  Mr. H.  in another pulpit, and felt that
+I had never half understood it before.  All paraphrases are more or
+less perfect depolarizations.  But I tell you this: the faith of our
+Christian community is not robust enough to bear the turning of our
+most sacred language into its depolarized equivalents.  You have only
+to look back to Dr. Channing's famous Baltimore discourse and
+remember the shrieks of blasphemy with which it was greeted, to
+satisfy yourself on this point.  Time, time only, can gradually wean
+us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas
+of the thing signified.  Man is an idolater or symbol-worshipper by
+nature, which, of course, is no fault of his; but sooner or later all
+his local and temporary symbols must be ground to powder, like the
+golden calf,--word-images as well as metal and wooden ones.  Rough
+work, iconoclasm,--but the only way to get at truth.  It is, indeed,
+as that quaint and rare old discourse, "A Summons for Sleepers," hath
+it, "no doubt a thankless office, and a verie unthriftie occupation;
+veritas odium parit, truth never goeth without a scratcht face; he
+that will be busie with voe vobis, let him looke shortly for coram
+nobas."
+
+The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may
+think what we like and say what we think.
+
+--Think what we like!--said the divinity-student;--think what we
+like!  What! against all human and divine authority?
+
+Against all human versions of its own or any other authority.  At our
+own peril always, if we do not like the right,--but not at the risk
+of being hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on
+green fagots for ecclesiastical treason!  Nay, we have got so far,
+that the very word heresy has fallen into comparative disuse among
+us.
+
+And now, my young friend, let-us shake hands and stop our discussion,
+which we will not make a quarrel.  I trust you know, or will learn, a
+great many things in your profession which we common scholars do not
+know; but mark this: when the common people of New England stop
+talking politics and theology, it will be because they have got an
+Emperor to teach them the one, and a Pope to teach them the other!
+
+That was the end of my long conference with the divinity-student.
+The next morning we got talking a little on the same subject, very
+good-naturedly, as people return to a matter they have talked out.
+
+You must look to yourself,--said the divinity-student,--if your
+democratic notions get into print.  You will be fired into from all
+quarters.
+
+If it were only a bullet, with the marksman's name on it!--I said.
+--I can't stop to pick out the peep-shot of the anonymous scribblers.
+
+Right, Sir!  right!--said the Little Gentleman.  The scamps!  I know
+the fellows.  They can't give fifty cents to one of the Antipodes,
+but they must have it jingled along through everybody's palms all the
+way, till it reaches him,--and forty cents of it gets spilt, like the
+water out of the fire-buckets passed along a "lane" at a fire;--but
+when it comes to anonymous defamation, putting lies into people's
+mouths, and then advertising those people through the country as the
+authors of them,--oh, then it is that they let not their left hand
+know what their right hand doeth!
+
+I don't like Ehud's style of doing business, Sir.  He comes along
+with a very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his "secret errand unto
+thee," and his "message from God unto thee," and then pulls out his
+hidden knife with that unsuspected hand of his,---(the Little
+Gentleman lifted his clenched left hand with the blood-red jewel on
+the ring-finger,)--and runs it, blade and haft, into a man's stomach!
+Don't meddle with these fellows, Sir.  They are read mostly by
+persons whom you would not reach, if you were to write ever so much.
+Let 'em alone.  A man whose opinions are not attacked is beneath
+contempt.
+
+I hope so,--I said.--I got three pamphlets and innumerable squibs
+flung at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in former
+years.  When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the
+professional public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance
+of poison from one young mother's chamber to another's,--for doing
+which humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though
+nothing else good should ever come of my life,--I had to bear the
+sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe,
+have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women
+stir among the ruins.--What would you do, if the folks without names
+kept at you, trying to get a San Benito on to your shoulders that
+would fit you?--Would you stand still in fly-time, or would you give
+a kick now and then?
+
+Let 'em bite!--said the Little Gentleman,--let 'em bite!  It makes
+'em hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as
+ever and twice as savage.  Do you know what meddling with the folks
+without names, as you call 'em, is like?--It is like riding at the
+quintaan.  You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a
+pivot, with a bag of sand on an arm that balances it.  The board
+gives way as soon as you touch it; and before you have got by, the
+bag of sand comes round whack on the back of your neck.  "Ananias,"
+for instance, pitches into your lecture, we will say, in some paper
+taken by the people in your kitchen.  Your servants get saucy and
+negligent.  If their newspaper calls you names, they need not be so
+particular about shutting doors softly or boiling potatoes.  So you
+lose your temper, and come out in an article which you think is going
+to finish "Ananias," proving him a booby who doesn't know enough to
+understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells lies.
+Now you think you 've got him!  Not so fast.  "Ananias" keeps still
+and winks to "Shimei," and "Shimei" comes out in the paper which they
+take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow.
+If you meddle with "Shimei," he steps out, and next week appears
+"Rab-shakeh," an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out
+what good sense there was in Hezekiah's "Answer him not."--No, no,--
+keep your temper.--So saying, the Little Gentleman doubled his left
+fist and looked at it as if he should like to hit something or
+somebody a most pernicious punch with it.
+
+Good!--said I.--Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at,
+after seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.
+
+--Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious
+sects, about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to
+deal and to live with.
+
+--There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among
+the men, in every denomination.
+
+--The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:
+
+1.  The comfortably rich.
+2.  The decently comfortable.
+3.  The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.
+4.  The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.
+
+--The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't
+clinch.
+
+--The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute
+were two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.
+
+--Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people.
+
+--Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a
+greater.  A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the
+belief of a large one.
+
+The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth
+while all this was going on.  She broke out in speech at this point.
+
+I hate to hear folks talk so.  I don't see that you are any better
+than a heathen.
+
+I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,--I said.
+--Dying for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than
+scolding for it; and the history of heathen races is full of
+instances where men have laid down their lives for the love of their
+kind, of their country, of truth, nay, even for simple manhood's
+sake, or to show their obedience or fidelity.  What would not such
+beings have done for the souls of men, for the Christian
+commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had lived in days of
+larger light?  Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates drinking
+his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's camp, or that old New
+England divine sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling over
+his conceit of certain poor women, who had been burned to death in
+his own town, going "roaring out of one fire into another"?
+
+I don't believe he said any such thing,--replied the Poor Relation.
+
+It is hard to believe,--said I,--but it is true for all that.  In
+another hundred years it will be as incredible that men talked as we
+sometimes hear them now.
+
+Pectus est quod facit theologum.  The heart makes the theologian.
+Every race, every civilization, either has a new revelation of its
+own or a new interpretation of an old one.  Democratic America, has a
+different humanity from feudal Europe, and so must have a new
+divinity.  See, for one moment, how intelligence reacts on our
+faiths.  The Bible was a divining-book to our ancestors, and is so
+still in the hands of some of the vulgar.  The Puritans went to the
+Old Testament for their laws; the Mormons go to it for their
+patriarchal institution.  Every generation dissolves something new
+and precipitates something once held in solution from that great
+storehouse of temporary and permanent truths.
+
+You may observe this: that the conversation of intelligent men of the
+stricter sects is strangely in advance of the formula that belong to
+their organizations.  So true is this, that I have doubts whether a
+large proportion of them would not have been rather pleased than
+offended, if they could have overheard our, talk.  For, look you, I
+think there is hardly a professional teacher who will not in private
+conversation allow a large part of what we have said, though it may
+frighten him in print; and I know well what an under-current of
+secret sympathy gives vitality to those poor words of mine which
+sometimes get a hearing.
+
+I don't mind the exclamation of any old stager who drinks Madeira
+worth from two to six Bibles a bottle, and burns, according to his
+own premises, a dozen souls a year in the cigars with which he
+muddles his brains.  But as for the good and true and intelligent men
+whom we see all around us, laborious, self-denying, hopeful,
+helpful,--men who know that the active mind of the century is tending
+more and more to the two poles, Rome and Reason, the sovereign church
+or the free soul, authority or personality, God in us or God in our
+masters, and that, though a man may by accident stand half-way
+between these two points, he must look one way or the other,--I don't
+believe they would take offence at anything I have reported of our
+late conversation.
+
+But supposing any one do take offence at first sight, let him look
+over these notes again, and see whether he is quite sure he does not
+agree with most of these things that were said amongst us.  If he
+agrees with most of them, let him be patient with an opinion he does
+not accept, or an expression or illustration a little too vivacious.
+I don't know that I shall report any more conversations on these
+topics; but I do insist on the right to express a civil opinion on
+this class of subjects without giving offence, just when and where I
+please,---unless, as in the lecture-room, there is an implied
+contract to keep clear of doubtful matters.  You did n't think a man
+could sit at a breakfast-table doing nothing but making puns every
+morning for a year or two, and never give a thought to the two
+thousand of his fellow-creatures who are passing into another state
+during every hour that he sits talking and laughing.  Of course, the
+one matter that a real human being cares for is what is going to
+become of them and of him.  And the plain truth is, that a good many
+people are saying one thing about it and believing another.
+
+--How do I know that?  Why, I have known and loved to talk with good
+people, all the way from Rome to Geneva in doctrine, as long as I can
+remember.  Besides, the real religion of the world comes from women
+much more than from men,--from mothers most of all, who carry the key
+of our souls in their bosoms.  It is in their hearts that the
+"sentimental" religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its
+source.  The sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the
+sentiment of the paramount obligation of the parent to the child as
+having called it into existence, enhanced just in proportion to the
+power and knowledge of the one and the weakness and ignorance of the
+other,--these are the "sentiments" that have kept our soulless
+systems from driving men off to die in holes like those that riddle
+the sides of the hill opposite the Monastery of St. Saba, where the
+miserable victims of a falsely-interpreted religion starved and
+withered in their delusion.
+
+I have looked on the face of a saintly woman this very day, whose
+creed many dread and hate, but whose life is lovely and noble beyond
+all praise.  When I remember the bitter words I have heard spoken
+against her faith, by men who have an Inquisition which
+excommunicates those who ask to leave their communion in peace, and
+an Index Expurgatorius on which this article may possibly have the
+honor of figuring,--and, far worse than these, the reluctant,
+pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps be possible that one
+who so believed should be accepted of the Creator,--and then recall
+the sweet peace and love that show through all her looks, the price
+of untold sacrifices and labors, and again recollect how thousands of
+women, filled with the same spirit, die, without a murmur, to earthly
+life, die to their own names even, that they may know nothing but
+their holy duties,--while men are torturing and denouncing their
+fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the
+hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus,"
+to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human
+nature,--I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new
+revelation, and the name of its Messiah is WOMAN!
+
+--I should be sorry,--I remarked, a day or two afterwards, to the
+divinity-student,--if anything I said tended in any way to foster any
+jealousy between the professions, or to throw disrespect upon that
+one on whose counsel and sympathies almost all of us lean in our
+moments of trial.  But we are false to our new conditions of life, if
+we do not resolutely maintain our religious as well as our political
+freedom, in the face of any and all supposed monopolies.  Certain men
+will, of course, say two things, if we do not take their views:
+first, that we don't know anything about these matters; and,
+secondly, that we are not so good as they are.  They have a polarized
+phraseology for saying these things, but it comes to precisely that.
+To which it may be answered, in the first place, that we have good
+authority for saying that even babes and sucklings know something;
+and, in the second, that, if there is a mote or so to be removed from
+our premises, the courts and councils of the last few years have
+found beams enough in some other quarters to build a church that
+would hold all the good people in Boston and have sticks enough left
+to make a bonfire for all the heretics.
+
+As to that terrible depolarizing process of mine, of which we were
+talking the other day, I will give you a specimen of one way of
+managing it, if you like.  I don't believe it will hurt you or
+anybody.  Besides, I had a great deal rather finish our talk with
+pleasant images and gentle words than with sharp sayings, which will
+only afford a text, if anybody repeats them, for endless relays of
+attacks from Messrs.  Ananias, Shimei, and Rabshakeh.
+
+[I must leave such gentry, if any of them show themselves, in the
+hands of my clerical friends, many of whom are ready to stand up for
+the rights of the laity,--and to those blessed souls, the good women,
+to whom this version of the story of a mother's hidden hopes and
+tender anxieties is dedicated by their peaceful and loving servant.]
+
+
+
+          A MOTHER'S SECRET.
+
+How sweet the sacred legend--if unblamed
+In my slight verse such holy things are named--
+Of Mary's secret hours of hidden joy,
+Silent, but pondering on her wondrous boy!
+Ave, Maria!  Pardon, if I wrong
+Those heavenly words that shame my earthly song!
+
+The choral host had closed the angel's strain
+Sung to the midnight watch on Bethlehem's plain;
+And now the shepherds, hastening on their way,
+Sought the still hamlet where the Infant lay.
+They passed the fields that gleaning Ruth toiled O'er,
+They saw afar the ruined threshing-floor
+Where Moab's daughter, homeless and forlorn,
+Found Boaz slumbering by his heaps of corn;
+And some remembered how the holy scribe,
+Skilled in the lore of every jealous tribe,
+Traced the warm blood of Jesse's royal son
+To that fair alien, bravely wooed and won.
+So fared they on to seek the promised sign
+That marked the anointed heir of David's line.
+
+At last, by forms of earthly semblance led,
+They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed.
+No pomp was there, no glory shone around
+On the coarse straw that strewed the reeking ground;
+One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed,
+In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid!
+
+The wondering shepherds told their breathless tale
+Of the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale;
+Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed;
+Told how the shining multitude proclaimed
+"Joy, joy to earth!  Behold the hallowed morn!
+In David's city Christ the Lord is born!
+'Glory to God!' let angels shout on high,
+'Good-will to men!' the listening Earth reply!"
+
+They spoke with hurried words and accents wild;
+Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child.
+No trembling word the mother's joy revealed,
+One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed;
+Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart,
+But kept their words to ponder in her heart.
+
+Twelve years had passed; the boy was fair and tall,
+Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all.
+The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fill
+Their balanced urns beside the mountain-rill,
+The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun,
+Spoke in soft words of Joseph's quiet son.
+No voice had reached the Galilean vale
+Of star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds' tale;
+In the meek, studious child they only saw
+The future Rabbi, learned in Israel's law.
+
+So grew the boy; and now the feast was near,
+When at the holy place the tribes appear.
+Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen
+Beyond the hills that girt the village-green,
+Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands,
+Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering bands,
+A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast,
+Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering West.
+
+Then Joseph spake: "Thy boy hath largely grown;
+Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown;
+Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest
+Goes he not with us to the holy feast?"
+
+And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white;
+Till eve she spun; she spun till morning light.
+The thread was twined; its parting meshes through
+From hand to hand her restless shuttle flew,
+Till the full web was wound upon the beam,
+Love's curious toil,--a vest without a seam!
+
+They reach the holy place, fulfil the days
+To solemn feasting given, and grateful praise.
+At last they turn, and far Moriah's height
+Melts in the southern sky and fades from sight.
+All day the dusky caravan has flowed
+In devious trails along the winding road,
+(For many a step their homeward path attends,
+And all the sons of Abraham are as friends.)
+Evening has come,--the hour of rest and joy;
+Hush! hush!--that whisper,-"Where is Mary's boy?"
+
+O weary hour!  O aching days that passed
+Filled with strange fears, each wilder than the last:
+The soldier's lance,--the fierce centurion's sword,
+The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman lord,
+The midnight crypt that suck's the captive's breath,
+The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death!
+
+Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light,
+Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night,
+Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth,
+Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.
+
+At last, in desperate mood, they sought once more
+The Temple's porches, searched in vain before;
+They found him seated with the ancient men,
+The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen,
+Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near;
+Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear,
+Lost in half-envious wonder and surprise
+That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.
+
+And Mary said,--as one who, tried too long,
+Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong,
+"What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast done?
+Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son!"
+Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone,
+Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown;
+Then turned with them and left the holy hill,
+To all their mild commands obedient still.
+
+The tale was told to Nazareth's sober men,
+And Nazareth's matrons told it oft again;
+The maids retold it at the fountain's side;
+The youthful shepherds doubted or denied;
+It passed around among the listening friends,
+With all that fancy adds and fiction fends,
+Till newer marvels dimmed the young renown
+Of Joseph's son, who talked the Rabbis down.
+
+But Mary, faithful to its lightest word,
+Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard,
+Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil,
+And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.
+
+Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall;
+A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back.
+Bloated some, I expect.
+
+This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which
+the Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.
+
+Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part
+to continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and
+particularly unpleasant world.  This is so much a matter of course,
+that I was surprised to see the divinity-student change color.  He
+took a look at a small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting
+forward over the chapped sideboard.  The image it returned to him had
+the color of a very young pea somewhat overboiled.  The scenery of a
+long tragic drama flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-
+train whishes by a station: the gradual dismantling process of
+disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over
+their own stomachs of iron and lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive,
+but calculating their crop, and thinking how soon it will be ripe, so
+that they can go to your neighbor, who is good for a year or so
+longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental shake, as
+they go out of your door, which throws off your particular grief as a
+duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but
+happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks
+for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who puts your name on
+the slab which has been waiting for you ever since the birds or
+beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and
+the dandelions and the buttercups,----Earth saying to the mortal
+body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom, but you
+are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness
+without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an
+upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size,
+so far as it could be said to have any size at all, wandering about
+and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned
+solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist,--in fact, having
+neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the sitting
+posture.
+
+And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen
+images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian
+were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the
+formless and position to the placeless.  Neither did his thoughts
+spread themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them.
+They came confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--
+sometimes a part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes
+connected fragments, and sometimes only single severed stones.
+
+They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance.
+On the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I
+have said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass
+turned him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to
+him as if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut
+not yet half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground
+archives.  He coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the
+direction in which his downward path was tending.  It was an honest
+little cough enough, so far as appearances went.  But coughs are
+ungrateful things.  You find one out in the cold, take it up and
+nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give it all
+sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in your
+bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog.  And by-and-by its little
+bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing!--you find it
+is a wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in the
+breast where he has been nestling so long.--The Poor Relation said
+that somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a
+bad way.--The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by cherry-
+pictorial.
+
+Whiskey's the fellah,--said the young man John.--Make it into punch,
+cold at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time.  I'll come up 'n' show you
+how to mix it.  Have n't any of you seen the wonderful fat man
+exhibitin' down in Hanover Street?
+
+Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy
+exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place
+where the fat man was exhibitin'.  Tried to get in at half-price, but
+the man at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten
+year old.
+
+It is n't two years,--said the young man John, since that fat fellah
+was exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton.  Whiskey--that's what did
+it,--real Burbon's the stuff.  Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little
+shavin' of lemon-skin in it,--skin, mind you, none o' your juice;
+take it off thin,--shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls
+wear on the sides of their foreheads.
+
+But I am a teetotaller,--said the divinity-student in a subdued
+tone;--not noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young
+fellow had just drawn.
+
+He took up his hat and went out.
+
+I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,--I said.
+--I don't believe he will jump off one of the bridges, for he has too
+much principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for
+he looks as if his mind were made up to something.
+
+I followed him at a reasonable distance.  He walked doggedly along,
+looking neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street,
+and made for a well-known Life-Insurance Office.  Luckily, the doctor
+was there and overhauled him on the spot.  There was nothing the
+matter with him, he said, and he could have his life insured as a
+sound one.  He came out in good spirits, and told me this soon after.
+
+This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of
+well-bred and ill-bred people.
+
+I began,--The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not
+like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable.
+Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.  Every look, movement, tone,
+expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is
+habitually excluded from conversational intercourse.  This is the
+reason why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than
+others.
+
+--I thought you were a great champion of equality,--said the discreet
+and severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin
+Tutor's daughter.
+
+I go politically for equality,--I said,--and socially for the
+quality.
+
+Who are the "quality,"--said the Model, etc., in a community like
+ours?
+
+I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,--I said.
+--Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which
+exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define.  The
+great gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters
+and mistresses; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a
+republic; mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex-
+presidents are nothing to them.  How well we know this, and how
+seldom it finds a distinct expression!  Now I tell you truly, I
+believe in man as man, and I disbelieve in all distinctions except
+such as follow the natural lines of cleavage in a society which has
+crystallized according to its own true laws.  But the essence of
+equality is to be able to say the truth; and there is nothing more
+curious than these truths relating to the stratification of society.
+
+Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality,
+there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this
+of social position,--as you see by the circumstances that the core of
+all the great social orders the world has seen has been, and is
+still, for the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies
+arranged in a regular scale of precedence among themselves, but
+superior as a body to all else.
+
+Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting
+farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can prevent
+this subdivision of society into classes from taking place
+everywhere,--in the great centres of our republic as much as in old
+European monarchies.  Only there position is more absolutely
+hereditary,--here it is more completely elective.
+
+--Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and
+who are the electors?--said the Model.
+
+Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken; there never is a formal
+vote.  The women settle it mostly; and they know wonderfully well
+what is presentable, and what can't stand the blaze of the
+chandeliers and the critical eye and ear of people trained to know a
+staring shade in a ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an ill-bred
+tone, an angular movement, everything that betrays a coarse fibre and
+cheap training.  As a general thing, you do not get elegance short of
+two or three removes from the soil, out of which our best blood
+doubtless comes,--quite as good, no doubt, as if it came from those
+old prize-fighters with iron pots on their heads, to whom some great
+people are so fond of tracing their descent through a line of small
+artisans and petty shopkeepers whose veins have held "base" fluid
+enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima!
+
+Does not money go everywhere?--said the Model.
+
+Almost.  And with good reason.  For though there are numerous
+exceptions, rich people are, as I said, commonly altogether the most
+agreeable companions.  The influence of a fine house, graceful
+furniture, good libraries, well-ordered tables, trim servants, and,
+above all, a position so secure that one becomes unconscious of it,
+gives a harmony and refinement to the character and manners which we
+feel, if we cannot explain their charm.  Yet we can get at the reason
+of it by thinking a little.
+
+All these appliances are to shield the sensibility from disagreeable
+contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial
+influences.  In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow
+delicate, just as the hands grow white and soft when saved from toil
+and incased in soft gloves.  The whole nature becomes subdued into
+suavity.  I confess I like the quality ladies better than the common
+kind even of literary ones.  They have n't read the last book,
+perhaps, but they attend better to you when you are talking to them.
+If they are never learned, they make up for it in tact and elegance.
+Besides, I think, on the whole, there is less self-assertion in
+diamonds than in dogmas.  I don't know where you will find a sweeter
+portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor play-girl of King
+Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when she went before
+her lord.  I have no doubt she was a more gracious and agreeable
+person than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story of
+Sisera.  The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something
+that you know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
+
+Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality.  The
+highest fashion is intensely alive,--not alive necessarily to the
+truest and best things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in
+all its extremities and to the farthest point of its surface, so
+that the feather in its bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a
+fighting-cock, and the rosette on its slipper as clean-cut and
+pimpant (pronounce it English fashion,--it is a good word) as a
+dahlia.  As a general rule, that society where flattery is acted is
+much more agreeable than that where it is spoken.  Don't you see
+why?  Attention and deference don't require you to make fine
+speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness (lies) and returning
+all the compliments paid you.  This is one reason.
+
+--A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,--said the
+Model.
+
+[My reflection.  Oh! oh! no wonder you did n't get married.  Served
+you right.]  My remark.  Surely, Madam,--if you mean by flattery
+telling people boldly to their faces that they are this or that,
+which they are not.  But a woman who does not carry about with her
+wherever she goes a halo of good feeling and desire to make
+everybody contented,--an atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of
+at least six feet radius, which wraps every human being upon whom
+she voluntarily bestows her presence, and so flatters him with the
+comfortable thought that she is rather glad he is alive than
+otherwise, isn't worth the trouble of talking to, as a woman; she
+may do well enough to hold discussions with.
+
+--I don't think the Model exactly liked this.  She said,--a little
+spitefully, I thought,--that a sensible man might stand a little
+praise, but would of course soon get sick of it, if he were in the
+habit of getting much.
+
+Oh, yes,--I replied,--just as men get sick of tobacco.  It is
+notorious how apt they are to get tired of that vegetable.
+
+--That 's so!--said the young fellow John,--I've got tired of my
+cigars and burnt 'em all up.
+
+I am heartily glad to hear it,--said the Model,--I wish they were
+all disposed of in the same way.
+
+So do I,--said the young fellow John.
+
+Can't you get your friends to unite with you in committing those
+odious instruments of debauchery to the flames in which you have
+consumed your own?
+
+I wish I could,--said the young fellow John.
+
+It would be a noble sacrifice,--said the Model, and every American
+woman would be grateful to you.  Let us burn them all in a heap out
+in the yard.
+
+That a'n't my way,--said the young fellow John;--I burn 'em one 't'
+time,--little end in my mouth and big end outside.
+
+--I watched for the effect of this sudden change of programme, when
+it should reach the calm stillness of the Model's interior
+apprehension, as a boy watches for the splash of a stone which he
+has dropped into a well.  But before it had fairly reached the
+water, poor Iris, who had followed the conversation with a certain
+interest until it turned this sharp corner, (for she seems rather to
+fancy the young fellow John,) laughed out such a clear, loud laugh,
+that it started us all off, as the locust-cry of some full-throated
+soprano drags a multitudinous chorus after it.  It was plain that
+some dam or other had broken in the soul of this young girl, and she
+was squaring up old scores of laughter, out of which she had been
+cheated, with a grand flood of merriment that swept all before it.
+So we had a great laugh all round, in which the Model--who, if she
+had as many virtues as there are spokes to a wheel, all compacted
+with a personality as round and complete as its tire, yet wanted
+that one little addition of grace, which seems so small, and is as
+important as the linchpin in trundling over the rough ways of life--
+had not the tact to join.  She seemed to be "stuffy" about it, as
+the young fellow John said.  In fact, I was afraid the joke would
+have cost us both our new lady-boarders.  It had no effect, however,
+except, perhaps, to hasten the departure of the elder of the two,
+who could, on the whole, be spared.
+
+--I had meant to make this note of our conversation a text for a few
+axioms on the matter of breeding.  But it so happened, that, exactly
+at this point of my record, a very distinguished philosopher, whom
+several of our boarders and myself go to hear, and whom no doubt
+many of my readers follow habitually, treated this matter of
+manners.  Up to this point, if I have been so fortunate as to
+coincide with him in opinion, and so unfortunate as to try to
+express what he has more felicitously said, nobody is to blame; for
+what has been given thus far was all written before the lecture was
+delivered.  But what shall I do now?  He told us it was childish to
+lay down rules for deportment,--but he could not help laying down a
+few.
+
+Thus,--Nothing so vulgar as to be in a hurry.  True, but hard of
+application.  People with short legs step quickly, because legs are
+pendulums, and swing more times in a minute the shorter they are.
+Generally a natural rhythm runs through the whole organization:
+quick pulse, fast breathing, hasty speech, rapid trains of thought,
+excitable temper.  Stillness of person and steadiness of features
+are signal marks of good-breeding.  Vulgar persons can't sit still,
+or, at least, they must work their limbs or features.
+
+Talking of one's own ails and grievances.--Bad enough, but not so
+bad as insulting the person you talk with by remarking on his ill-
+looks, or appealing to notice any of his personal peculiarities.
+
+Apologizing.--A very desperate habit,--one that is rarely cured.
+Apology is only egotism wrong side out.  Nine times out of ten, the
+first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his
+apology.  It is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your
+small failures of so much consequence that you must make a talk
+about them.
+
+Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait,
+and eyes that do not wander,--shyness of personalities, except in
+certain intimate communions,--to be light in hand in conversation,
+to have ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without
+them,--to belong to the company you are in, and not to yourself,--to
+have nothing in your dress or furniture so fine that you cannot
+afford to spoil it and get another like it, yet to preserve the
+harmonies, throughout your person and--dwelling: I should say that
+this was a fair capital of manners to begin with.
+
+Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an
+overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our
+generic humanity.  It is just here that the very highest society
+asserts its superior breeding.  Among truly elegant people of the
+highest ton, you will find more real equality in social intercourse
+than in a country village.  As nuns drop their birth-names and
+become Sister Margaret and Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop
+their personal distinctions and become brothers and sisters of
+conversational charity.  Nor are fashionable people without their
+heroism.  I believe there are men who have shown as much self-
+devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to the supper-table as
+ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized his name.  There
+are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing can hold
+back from their errands of mercy.  They find out the red-handed,
+gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his
+corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the
+green herb.  They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary
+apparition saddens the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-
+room.  I have known one of these angels ask, of her own accord, that
+a desolate middle-aged man, whom nobody seemed to know, should be
+presented to her by the hostess.  He wore no shirt-collar,--he had
+on black gloves,--and was flourishing a red bandanna handkerchief!
+Match me this, ye proud children of poverty, who boast of your
+paltry sacrifices for each other!  Virtue in humble life!  What is
+that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in pearls and
+diamonds?  As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before the
+social mendicant,--the white billows of her beauty heaving under the
+foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them,--I should have
+wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private
+demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness
+and vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.
+
+I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which
+political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of
+our fellow-citizens.  It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
+knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always
+been what might be called in general terms a gentleman.  But what if
+at some future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on
+whom that lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be
+bestowed?  This may happen,--how soon the future only knows.  Think
+of this miserable man of coming political possibilities,--an
+unpresentable boor sucked into office by one of those eddies in the
+flow of popular sentiment which carry straws and chips into the
+public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of the monarchs of the
+forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf of political
+oblivion!  Think of him, I say, and of the concentrated gaze of good
+society through its thousand eyes, all confluent, as it were, in one
+great burning-glass of ice that shrivels its wretched object in
+fiery torture, itself cold as the glacier of an unsunned cavern!
+No,--there will be angels of good-breeding then as now, to shield
+the victim of free institutions from himself and from his torturers.
+I can fancy a lovely woman playfully withdrawing the knife which he
+would abuse by making it an instrument for the conveyance of food,--
+or, failing in this kind artifice, sacrificing herself by imitating
+his use of that implement; how much harder than to plunge it into
+her bosom, like Lucretia!  I can see her studying in his provincial
+dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western
+or Southern barbarisms.  She has learned that haow means what; that
+think-in' is the same thing as thinking, or she has found out the
+meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no single-tongued
+phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson
+and at its embouchure, and elsewhere,--what they say when they think
+they say first, (fe-eest,--fe as in the French le),--or that cheer
+means chair,--or that urritation means irritation,--and so of other
+enormities.  Nothing surprises her.  The highest breeding, you know,
+comes round to the Indian standard,--to take everything coolly,--nil
+admirari,--if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for
+the same thing.
+
+If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to
+foot to see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not
+grown a little older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice,
+or if your complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then
+convey the fact to you, in the style in which the Poor Relation
+addressed the divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like.
+I hate the sight of the wretches.  Don't for mercy's sake think I
+hate them; the distinction is one my friend or I drew long ago.  No
+matter where you find such people; they are clowns.
+
+The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a
+lady as her Irish servant, whose pretty "saving your presence," when
+she has to say something which offends her natural sense of good
+manners, has a hint in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood
+of old Milesian kings, which very likely runs in her veins,--thinned
+by two hundred years of potato, which, being an underground fruit,
+tends to drag down the generations that are made of it to the earth
+from which it came, and, filling their veins with starch, turn them
+into a kind of human vegetable.
+
+I say, if you like such people, go with them.  But I am going to
+make a practical application of the example at the beginning of this
+particular record, which some young people who are going to choose
+professional advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for.  If
+you are making choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if
+possible, with a cheerful and serene countenance.  A physician is
+not--at least, ought not to be--an executioner; and a sentence of
+death on his face is as bad as a warrant for execution signed by the
+Governor.  As a general rule, no man has a right to tell another by
+word or look that he is going to die.  It may be necessary in some
+extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last extreme of impertinence
+which one human being can offer to another.  "You have killed me,"
+said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told him he was
+incurable.  He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead in
+six' weeks.  If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone,
+persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought
+to know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of
+hope of recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long
+as life is comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of
+heaven, or at least of rest, when life has become a burden which the
+bearer is ready to let fall.
+
+Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death.  The
+chance of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a
+certain time is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse
+people.  As you go down the social scale, you reach a point at
+length where the common talk in sick rooms is of churchyards and
+sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual vivisection is forever carried
+on, upon the person of the miserable sufferer.
+
+And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer
+the one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body.  If you
+can get along with people who carry a certificate in their faces
+that their goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your
+children cannot.  And whatever offends one of these little ones
+cannot be right in the eyes of Him who loved them so well.
+
+After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably
+select gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then
+all will be right.
+
+This repetition of the above words,--gentleman and lady,--which
+could not be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are
+made of them by those who ought to know what they mean.  Thus, at a
+marriage ceremony, once, of two very excellent persons who had been
+at service, instead of, Do you take this man, etc.?  and, Do you
+take this woman?  how do you think the officiating clergyman put the
+questions?  It was, Do you, Miss So and So, take this GENTLEMAN?
+and, Do you, Mr. This or That, take this LADY?!  What would any
+English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England herself, have thought,
+if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her and her bridegroom
+anything but plain woman and man at such a time?
+
+I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she
+happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered
+these monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the
+ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt,
+that seized upon many of the persons who were present,--had guessed
+what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the
+pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain
+social layers,--so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the
+holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,--the
+good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that
+superb and full-blown vulgarism.  Any persons whom it could please
+could have no better notion of what the words referred to signify
+than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.
+
+MAN!  Sir!  WOMAN!  Sir!  Gentility is a fine thing, not to be
+undervalued, as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes
+before that.
+
+         "When Adam delved and Eve span,
+          Who was then the gentleman?"
+
+The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from
+the finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat
+is below a certain level.  Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and
+all the graceful ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the
+surface, the elegances and suavities of life die out one by one as
+we sink through the social scale.  Fortunately, the virtues are more
+tenacious of life, and last pretty well until we get down to the mud
+of absolute pauperism, where they do not flourish greatly.
+
+--I had almost forgotten about our boarders.  As the Model of all
+the Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is
+the reason we are not all very sorry.  Surely we all like good
+persons.  She is a good person.  Therefore we like her.--Only we
+don't.
+
+This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the
+principle which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit
+and embodied in the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably
+immortal, this syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had
+occasion to construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as
+I have done for the Model.  "Pious and painefull."  Why has that
+excellent old phrase gone out of use?  Simply because these good
+painefull or painstaking persons proved to be such nuisances in the
+long run, that the word "painefull" came, before people thought of
+it, to mean pain-giving instead of painstaking.
+
+--So, the old fellah's off to-morrah,--said the young man John.
+
+Old fellow?--said I,--whom do you mean?
+
+Why, the one that came with our little beauty, the old fellah in
+petticoats.
+
+--Now that means something,--said I to myself.--These rough young
+rascals very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with
+their eyes shut.  A real woman does a great many things without
+knowing why she does them; but these pattern machines mix up their
+intellects with everything they do, just like men.  They can't help
+it, no doubt; but we can't help getting sick of them, either.
+Intellect is to a woman's nature what her watch-spring skirt is to
+her dress; it ought to underlie her silks and embroideries, but not
+to show itself too staringly on the outside.---You don't know,
+perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the
+internal organs, and the heart the reddest.  Whatever comes from the
+brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes
+from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.
+
+The young man John did not hear my soliloquy, of course, but sent up
+one more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a
+statement, that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives
+no visits, as is commonly supposed, from virtuous people.
+
+Why, I ask again, (of my reader,) should a person who never did
+anybody any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and
+intelligent, nay, a particularly enlightened and exemplary member of
+society, fail to inspire interest, love, and devotion?  Because of
+the reversed current in the flow of thought and emotion.  The red
+heart sends all its instincts up to the white brain to be analyzed,
+chilled, blanched, and so become pure reason, which is just exactly
+what we do not want of woman as woman.  The current should run the
+other-way.  The nice, calm, cold thought, which in women shapes
+itself so rapidly that they hardly know it as thought, should always
+travel to the lips via the heart.  It does so in those women whom
+all love and admire.  It travels the wrong way in the Model.  That
+is the reason why the Little Gentleman said "I hate her, I hate
+her."  That is the reason why the young man John called her the "old
+fellah," and banished her to the company of the great Unpresentable.
+That is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her to pieces
+with scalpel and forceps.  That is the reason why the young girl
+whom she has befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and
+respect, rather than with the devotion and passionate fondness which
+lie sleeping beneath the calmness of her amber eyes.  I can see her,
+as she sits between this estimable and most correct of personages
+and the misshapen, crotchety, often violent and explosive little man
+on the other side of her, leaning and swaying towards him as she
+speaks, and looking into his sad eyes as if she found some fountain
+in them at which her soul could quiet its thirst.
+
+Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and
+high culture.  It is not
+
+    "The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
+     Zephyr with Aurora playing,"
+
+when the two meet
+
+    "---on beds of violets blue,
+     And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,"
+
+that claim such women as their offspring.  It is rather the east
+wind, as it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a
+clear-eyed wintry noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England
+ice-quarry.--Don't throw up your cap now, and hurrah as if this
+were giving up everything, and turning against the best growth of
+our latitudes,--the daughters of the soil.  The brain-women never
+interest us like the heart women; white roses please less than red.
+But our Northern seasons have a narrow green streak of spring, as
+well as a broad white zone of winter,--they have a glowing band of
+summer and a golden stripe of autumn in their many-colored wardrobe;
+and women are born to us that wear all these hues of earth and
+heaven in their souls.  Our ice-eyed brain-women are really
+admirable, if we only ask of them just what they can give, and no
+more.  Only compare them, talking or writing, with one of those
+babbling, chattering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know
+enough even to keep out of print, and who are interesting to us only
+as specimens of arrest of development for our psychological
+cabinets.
+
+Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues!  We can spare you now.  A little
+clear perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way.
+Go! be useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable,
+talk pure reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of
+an achromatic understanding.  Goodbye!  Where is my Beranger?  I
+must read a verse or two of "Fretillon."
+
+Fair play for all.  But don't claim incompatible qualities for
+anybody.  Justice is a very rare virtue in our community.
+Everything that public sentiment cares about is put into a Papin's
+digester, and boiled under high pressure till all is turned into one
+homogeneous pulp, and the very bones give up their jelly.  What are
+all the strongest epithets of our dictionary to us now?  The critics
+and politicians, and especially the philanthropists, have chewed
+them, till they are mere wads of syllable-fibre, without a
+suggestion of their old pungency and power.
+
+Justice!  A good man respects the rights even of brute matter and
+arbitrary symbols.  If he writes the same word twice in succession,
+by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not
+the first-comer the prior right?  This act of abstract justice,
+which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed,
+is a curious anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute
+wickedness of human dispositions.  Why doesn't a man always strike
+out the first of the two words, to gratify his diabolical love of
+injustice?
+
+So, I say, we owe a genuine, substantial tribute of respect to these
+filtered intellects which have left their womanhood on the strainer.
+They are so clear that it is a pleasure at times to look at the
+world of thought through them.  But the rose and purple tints of
+richer natures they cannot give us, and it is not just to them to
+ask it.
+
+Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way
+one would hardly at first think of.  It loves vitality above all
+things, sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept
+under by the laws of good-breeding,--but still it loves abundant
+life, opulent and showy organizations,--the spherical rather than
+the plane trigonometry of female architecture,--plenty of red blood,
+flashing eyes, tropical voices, and forms that bear the splendors of
+dress without growing pale beneath their lustre.  Among these you
+will find the most delicious women you will ever meet,--women whom
+dress and flattery and the round of city gayeties cannot spoil,--
+talking with whom, you forget their diamonds and laces,--and around
+whom all the nice details of elegance, which the cold-blooded beauty
+next them is scanning so nicely, blend in one harmonious whole, too
+perfect to be disturbed by the petulant sparkle of a jewel, or the
+yellow glare of a bangle, or the gay toss of a feather.
+
+There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion
+or wealth.  Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and
+loyalty, I think I love ease and independence better than the golden
+slavery of perpetual matinees and soirees, or the pleasures of
+accumulation.
+
+But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the
+frivolous class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff
+about.  Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms
+and social intercourse.  What business has a man who knows nothing
+about the beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to talk
+about fashion to a set of people who, if one of the quality left a
+card at their doors, would contrive to keep it on the very top of
+their heap of the names of their two-story acquaintances, till it
+was as yellow as the Codex Vaticanus?
+
+Wealth, too,--what an endless repetition of the same foolish
+trivialities about it!  Take the single fact of its alleged
+uncertain tenure and transitory character.  In old times, when men
+were all the time fighting and robbing each other,--in those
+tropical countries where the Sabeans and the Chaldeans stole all a
+man's cattle and camels, and there were frightful tornadoes and
+rains of fire from heaven, it was true enough that riches took wings
+to themselves not unfrequently in a very unexpected way.  But, with
+common prudence in investments, it is not so now.  In fact, there is
+nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole, as money.  A man's
+learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of remembrance,
+but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live
+and keep his memory green.
+
+I do not think there is much courage or originality in giving
+utterance to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by
+conventional trumpery.  The only distinction which it is necessary
+to point out to feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the
+breadth and depth of that significance which gives to fashion and
+fortune their tremendous power, we do not indorse the extravagances
+which often disgrace the one, nor the meanness which often degrades
+the other.
+
+A remark which seems to contradict a universally current opinion is
+not generally to be taken "neat," but watered with the ideas of
+common-sense and commonplace people.  So, if any of my young friends
+should be tempted to waste their substance on white kids and "all-
+rounds," or to insist on becoming millionaires at once, by anything
+I have said, I will give them references to some of the class
+referred to, well known to the public as providers of literary
+diluents, who will weaken any truth so that there is not an old
+woman in the land who cannot take it with perfect impunity.
+
+I am afraid some of the blessed saints in diamonds will think I mean
+to flatter them.  I hope not;--if I do, set it down as a weakness.
+But there is so much foolish talk about wealth and fashion, (which,
+of course, draw a good many heartless and essentially vulgar people
+into the glare of their candelabra, but which have a real
+respectability and meaning, if we will only look at them
+stereoscopically, with both eyes instead of one,) that I thought it
+a duty to speak a few words for them.  Why can't somebody give us a
+list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another
+list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?
+
+Lest my parish should suppose we have forgotten graver matters in
+these lesser topics, I beg them to drop these trifles and read the
+following lesson for the day.
+
+     THE TWO STREAMS.
+
+Behold the rocky wall
+That down its sloping sides
+Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
+In rushing river-tides!
+
+Yon stream, whose sources run
+Turned by a pebble's edge,
+Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
+Through the cleft mountain-ledge.
+
+The slender rill had strayed,
+But for the slanting stone,
+To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
+Of foam-flecked Oregon.
+
+So from the heights of Will
+Life's parting stream descends,
+And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
+Each widening torrent bends,
+
+From the same cradle's side,
+From the same mother's knee,--
+One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
+One to the Peaceful Sea!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Our landlady's daughter is a young lady of some pretensions to
+gentility.  She wears her bonnet well back on her head, which is
+known by all to be a mark of high breeding.  She wears her trains
+very long, as the great ladies do in Europe.  To be sure, their
+dresses are so made only to sweep the tapestried floors of chateaux
+and palaces; as those odious aristocrats of the other side do not go
+draggling through the mud in silks and satins, but, forsooth, must
+ride in coaches when they are in full dress.  It is true, that,
+considering various habits of the American people, also the little
+accidents which the best-kept sidewalks are liable to, a lady who
+has swept a mile of them is not exactly in such a condition that one
+would care to be her neighbor.  But then there is no need of being
+so hard on these slight weaknesses of the poor, dear women as our
+little deformed gentleman was the other day.
+
+--There are no such women as the Boston women, Sir,--he said.
+Forty-two degrees, north latitude, Rome, Sir, Boston, Sir!  They had
+grand women in old Rome, Sir,--and the women bore such men--children
+as never the world saw before.  And so it was here, Sir.  I tell
+you, the revolution the Boston boys started had to run in woman's
+milk before it ran in man's blood, Sir!
+
+But confound the make-believe women we have turned loose in our
+streets!--where do they come from?  Not out of Boston parlors, I
+trust.  Why, there is n't a beast or a bird that would drag its tail
+through the dirt in the way these creatures do their dresses.
+Because a queen or a duchess wears long robes on great occasions, a
+maid-of-all-work or a factory-girl thinks she must make herself a
+nuisance by trailing through the street, picking up and carrying
+about with her pah!--that's what I call getting vulgarity into your
+bones and marrow.  Making believe be what you are not is the essence
+of vulgarity.  Show over dirt is the one attribute of vulgar people.
+If any man can walk behind one of these women and see what she rakes
+up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he has got a tough stomach.
+I wouldn't let one of 'em into my room without serving 'em as David
+served Saul at the cave in the wilderness,--cut off his skirts, Sir!
+cut off his skirts!
+
+I suggested, that I had seen some pretty stylish ladies who offended
+in the way he condemned.
+
+Stylish women, I don't doubt,--said the Little Gentleman.--Don't
+tell me that a true lady ever sacrifices the duty of keeping all
+about her sweet and clean to the wish of making a vulgar show.  I
+won't believe it of a lady.  There are some things that no fashion
+has any right to touch, and cleanliness is one of those things.  If
+a woman wishes to show that her husband or her father has got money,
+which she wants and means to spend, but doesn't know how, let her
+buy a yard or two of silk and pin it to her dress when she goes out
+to walk, but let her unpin it before she goes into the house;--there
+may be poor women that will think it worth disinfecting.  It is an
+insult to a respectable laundress to carry such things into a house
+for her to deal with.  I don't like the Bloomers any too well,--in
+fact, I never saw but one, and she--or he, or it--had a mob of boys
+after her, or whatever you call the creature, as if she had been
+a-----
+
+The Little Gentleman stopped short,--flushed somewhat, and looked
+round with that involuntary, suspicious glance which the subjects of
+any bodily misfortune are very apt to cast round them.  His eye
+wandered over the company, none of whom, excepting myself and one
+other, had, probably, noticed the movement.  They fell at last on
+Iris,--his next neighbor, you remember.
+
+--We know in a moment, on looking suddenly at a person, if that
+person's eyes have been fixed on us.
+
+Sometimes we are conscious of it before we turn so as to see the
+person.  Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice,
+of love, leak out in this way.  There is no need of Mrs. Felix
+Lorraine's reflection in the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting
+evil for us behind our backs.  We know it, as we know by the ominous
+stillness of a child that some mischief or other is going-on.  A
+young girl betrays, in a moment, that her eyes have been feeding on.
+the face where you find them fixed, and not merely brushing over it
+with their pencils of blue or brown light.
+
+A certain involuntary adjustment assimilates us, you may also
+observe, to that upon which we look.  Roses redden the cheeks of her
+who stoops to gather them, and buttercups turn little people's chins
+yellow.  When we look at a vast landscape, our chests expand as if
+we would enlarge to fill it.  When we examine a minute object, we
+naturally contract, not only our foreheads, but all our dimensions.
+If I see two men wrestling, I wrestle too, with my limbs and
+features.  When a country-fellow comes upon the stage, you will see
+twenty faces in the boxes putting on the bumpkin expression.  There
+is no need of multiplying instances to reach this generalization;
+every person and thing we look upon puts its special mark upon us.
+If this is repeated often enough, we get a permanent resemblance to
+it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it.  Husband and
+wife come to look alike at last, as has often been noticed.  It is a
+common saying of a jockey, that he is "all horse"; and I have often
+fancied that milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an angular
+movement of the arm, that remind one of a pump and the working of
+its handle.
+
+All this came in by accident, just because I happened to mention
+that the Little Gentleman found that Iris had been looking at him
+with her soul in her eyes, when his glance rested on her after
+wandering round the company.  What he thought, it is hard to say;
+but the shadow of suspicion faded off from his face, and he looked
+calmly into the amber eyes, resting his cheek upon the hand that
+wore the red jewel.
+
+--If it were a possible thing,--women are such strange creatures!
+Is there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them?
+Just see how they marry!  A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood
+is like one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd,
+fantastic root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above
+and bifurcated below, will always contrive to make a man--such as he
+is--out of it.  I should like to see any kind of a man,
+distinguishable from a Gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman
+could not shape a husband out of.
+
+--A child,--yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child!  Do
+you know how Art brings all ages together?  There is no age to the
+angels and ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he
+shares their youth until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim.
+The youthful painter talks of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a
+brother, and the veteran forgets that Raphael died at an age to
+which his own is of patriarchal antiquity.
+
+But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom
+Nature has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain.  Pity, I
+suppose.  They say that leads to love.
+
+--I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and
+determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was
+going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were
+drifting.  I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I
+can look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent
+feebleness of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very
+hard to cheat, is only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine,
+knowing that all is in readiness and the slow-match burning quietly
+down to the powder.  He will leave it by-and-by, and then it will
+take care of itself.
+
+One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a
+house and the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the
+building is on fire.  Hark!  There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive,
+crisp, not loud, but very knowing little creeping crackle that is
+tolerably intelligible.  There is a whiff of something floating
+about, suggestive of toasting shingles.  Also a sharp pyroligneous-
+acid pungency in the air that stings one's eyes.  Let us get up and
+see what is going on.--Oh,--oh,--oh! do you know what has got hold
+of you?  It is the great red dragon that is born of the little red
+eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red manes, and his
+thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red eyes glaring
+at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues lapping
+the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath
+warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber
+sweat that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap.  Run for your
+life! leap! or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing
+but a coroner would take for the wreck of a human being!
+
+If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away
+comparison, I shall be much obliged to him.  All I intended to say
+was, that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know
+that they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among
+them.  I don't pretend to say or know what it is that brings these
+two persons together;--and when I say together, I only mean that
+there is an evident affinity of some kind or other which makes their
+commonest intercourse strangely significant, as that each seems to
+understand a look or a word of the other.  When the young girl laid
+her hand on the Little Gentleman's arm,--which so greatly shocked
+the Model, you may remember,--I saw that she had learned the lion-
+tamer's secret.  She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind
+of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster
+that he makes a baby of.
+
+One of two things must happen.  The first is love, downright love,
+on the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man.
+You may laugh, if you like.  But women are apt to love the men who
+they think have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love
+like one that has thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth
+and beauty, and seen it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the
+parched lips of him whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of
+human longing and disappointment?  What would become of him, if this
+fresh soul should stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the
+flamingo drops out of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in
+the marshes of Cagliari, with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a
+kindling of strange fires in the shadowy waters that hold her
+burning image?
+
+--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not of course.  I should think the
+chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her
+than she to marry him.
+
+There is one other thing that might happen.  If the interest he
+awakes in her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in
+it, she will glance off from him into some great passion or other.
+All excitements run to love in women of a certain--let us not say
+age, but youth.  An electrical current passing through a coil of
+wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not
+touching it.  So a woman is turned into a love-magnet by a tingling
+current of life running round her.  I should like to see one of them
+balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn
+so as to point north and south,--as she would, if the love-currents
+are like those of the earth our mother.
+
+Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's "Boy of Windermere"?
+This boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud,
+mimicking the hooting of the owls, who would answer him
+
+               "with quivering peals,
+     And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
+     Redoubled and redoubled."
+
+When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for
+their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far
+distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint
+itself with new force upon his perceptions.--Read the sonnet, if
+you please;--it is Wordsworth all over,--trivial in subject, solemn
+in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true meta-
+physically, but immensely suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild
+term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster.
+All I want of it is to enforce the principle, that, when the door of
+the soul is once opened to a guest, there is no knowing who will
+come in next.
+
+--Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and
+characters.  Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in
+the drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but
+there is a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin
+of her drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run
+riot in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to
+read her thoughts.  This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at
+it honorably.
+
+I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman's
+chamber.  How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only
+guess.  His hours are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in
+the night, I see the light through cracks in his window-shutters on
+the wall of the house opposite.  If the times of witchcraft were not
+over, I should be afraid to be so close a neighbor to a place from
+which there come such strange noises.  Sometimes it is the dragging
+of something heavy over the floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,-
+-it sounds so like what people that kill other people have to do now
+and then.  Occasionally I hear very sweet strains of music,--whether
+of a wind or stringed instrument, or a human voice, strange as it
+may seem, I have often tried to find out, but through the partition
+I could not be quite sure.  If I have not heard a woman cry and
+moan, and then again laugh as though she would die laughing, I have
+heard sounds so like them that--I am a fool to confess it--I have
+covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in my
+dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that so-
+called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,--a
+sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,--a young woman
+in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,--not a
+neck-lace, but a dull-stain.
+
+Of course you don't suppose that I have any foolish superstitions
+about the matter,--I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take
+all that nonsense out of any man's head!  It is not our beliefs that
+frighten us half so much as our fancies.  A man not only believes,
+but knows he runs a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but
+it does n't worry him much.  On the other hand, carry that man
+across a pasture a little way from some dreary country-village, and
+show him an old house where there were strange deaths a good many
+years ago, and there are rumors of ugly spots on the walls,--the old
+man hung himself in the garret, that is certain, and ever since the
+country-people have called it "the haunted house,"--the owners
+have n't been able to let it since the last tenants left on account
+of the noises,--so it has fallen into sad decay, and the moss grows
+on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have turned
+black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear, and
+the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking,--
+take the man who did n't mind the real risk of the cars to that old
+house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there
+alone,--how do you think he will like it?  He doesn't believe one
+word of ghosts,--but then he knows, that, whether waking or
+sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with
+ghostly images.  It is not what we believe, as I said before, that
+frightens us commonly, but what we conceive.  A principle that
+reaches a good way if I am not mistaken.  I say, then, that, if
+these odd sounds coming from the Little Gentleman's chamber
+sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get to sleep, it is not
+because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or mysterious way.
+The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head was one that
+was founded on the landlady's story of his having a pile of gold; it
+was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of sweating
+gold was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews odious
+and afford a pretext for plundering them.  As for the sound like a
+woman laughing and crying, I never said it was a woman's voice; for,
+in the first place, I could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly,
+he may have an organ, or some queer instrument or other, with what
+they call the vox humana stop.  If he moves his bed round to get
+away from the window, or for any such reason, there is nothing very
+frightful in that simple operation.  Most of our foolish conceits
+explain themselves in some such simple way.  And, yet, for all that,
+I confess, that, when I woke up the other evening, and heard, first
+a sweet complaining cry, and then footsteps, and then the dragging
+sound,--nothing but his bed, I am quite sure,--I felt a stirring in
+the roots of my hair as the feasters did in Keats's terrible poem of
+"Lamia."
+
+There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie
+awake and get listening for sounds.  Just keep your ears open any
+time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a
+dark night.  What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises
+you will hear!  The stillness of night is a vulgar error.  All the
+dead things seem to be alive.  Crack!  That is the old chest of
+drawers; you never hear it crack in the daytime.  Creak!  There's a
+door ajar; you know you shut them all.
+
+Where can that latch be that rattles so?  Is anybody trying it
+softly?  or, worse than any body, is----?  (Cold shiver.) Then a
+sudden gust that jars all the windows;--very strange!--there does
+not seem to be any wind about that it belongs to.  When it stops,
+you hear the worms boring in the powdery beams overhead.  Then steps
+outside,--a stray animal, no doubt.  All right,--but a gentle
+moisture breaks out all over you; and then something like a whistle
+or a cry,--another gust of wind, perhaps; that accounts for the
+rustling that just made your heart roll over and tumble about, so
+that it felt more like a live rat under your ribs than a part of
+your own body; then a crash of something that has fallen,--blown
+over, very likely----Pater noster, qui es in coelis! for you are
+damp and cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed trembling so
+that the death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!
+
+No,--night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings.
+Who ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it,
+of that Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,--foxes, and
+owls, and crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on
+moonshiny nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the
+eyes of dead fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach?  Our
+old mother Nature has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when
+she comes in her dress of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops;
+but when she follows us up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black
+velvet and diamonds, every creak of her sandals and every whisper of
+her lips is full of mystery and fear.
+
+You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not believe there is
+anything about this singular little neighbor of mine which is as it
+should not be.  Probably a visit to his room would clear up all that
+has puzzled me, and make me laugh at the notions which began, I
+suppose, in nightmares, and ended by keeping my imagination at work
+so as almost to make me uncomfortable at times.  But it is not so
+easy to visit him as some of our other boarders, for various reasons
+which I will not stop to mention.  I think some of them are rather
+pleased to get "the Professor" under their ceilings.
+
+The young man John, for instance, asked me to come up one day and
+try some "old Burbon," which he said was A 1.  On asking him what
+was the number of his room, he answered, that it was forty-'leven,
+sky-parlor floor, but that I shouldn't find it, if he did n't go
+ahead to show me the way.  I followed him to his habitat, being very
+willing to see in what kind of warren he burrowed, and thinking I
+might pick up something about the boarders who had excited my
+curiosity.
+
+Mighty close quarters they were where the young man John bestowed
+himself and his furniture; this last consisting of a bed, a chair, a
+bureau, a trunk, and numerous pegs with coats and "pants" and
+"vests,"--as he was in the habit of calling waist-coats and
+pantaloons or trousers,--hanging up as if the owner had melted out
+of them.  Several prints were pinned up unframed,--among them that
+grand national portrait-piece, "Barnum presenting Ossian E. Dodge to
+Jenny Lind," and a picture of a famous trot, in which I admired anew
+the cabalistic air of that imposing array of expressions, and
+especially the Italicized word, "Dan Mace names b. h. Major Slocum,"
+and "Hiram Woodruff names g. m. Lady Smith."  "Best three in five.
+Time: 2.40, 2.46, 2.50."
+
+That set me thinking how very odd this matter of trotting horses is,
+as an index of the mathematical exactness of the laws of living
+mechanism.  I saw Lady Suffolk trot a mile in 2.26.  Flora Temple
+has trotted close down to 2.20; and Ethan Allen in 2.25, or less.
+Many horses have trotted their mile under 2.30; none that I remember
+in public as low down as 2.20.  From five to ten seconds, then, in
+about a hundred and sixty is the whole range of the maxima of the
+present race of trotting horses.  The same thing is seen in the
+running of men.  Many can run a mile in five minutes; but when one
+comes to the fractions below, they taper down until somewhere about
+4.30 the maximum is reached.  Averages of masses have been studied
+more than averages of maxima and minima.  We know from the
+Registrar-General's Reports, that a certain number of children--say
+from one to two dozen--die every year in England from drinking hot
+water out of spouts of teakettles.  We know, that, among suicides,
+women and men past a certain age almost never use fire-arms.  A
+woman who has made up her mind to die is still afraid of a pistol or
+a gun.  Or is it that the explosion would derange her costume?
+
+I say, averages of masses we have, but our tables of maxima we owe
+to the sporting men more than to the philosophers.  The lesson their
+experience teaches is, that Nature makes no leaps,--does nothing per
+saltum.  The greatest brain that ever lived, no doubt, was only a
+small fraction of an idea ahead of the second best.  Just look at
+the chess-players.  Leaving out the phenomenal exceptions, the nice
+shades that separate the skilful ones show how closely their brains
+approximate,--almost as closely as chronometers.  Such a person is a
+"knight-player,"--he must have that piece given him.  Another must
+have two pawns.  Another, "pawn and two," or one pawn and two moves.
+Then we find one who claims "pawn and move," holding himself, with
+this fractional advantage, a match for one who would be pretty sure
+to beat him playing even.--So much are minds alike; and you and I
+think we are "peculiar,"--that Nature broke her jelly-mould after
+shaping our cerebral convolutions.  So I reflected, standing and
+looking at the picture.
+
+--I say, Governor,--broke in the young man John,--them bosses '11
+stay jest as well, if you'll only set down.  I've had 'em this year,
+and they haven't stirred.--He spoke, and handed the chair towards
+me,--seating himself, at the same time, on the end of the bed.
+
+You have lived in this house some time?--I said,--with a note of
+interrogation at the end of the statement.
+
+Do I look as if I'd lost much flesh--said he, answering my question
+by another.
+
+No,--said I;--for that matter, I think you do credit to "the
+bountifully furnished table of the excellent lady who provides so
+liberally for the company that meets around her hospitable board."
+
+[The sentence in quotation-marks was from one of those disinterested
+editorials in small type, which I suspect to have been furnished by
+a friend of the landlady's, and paid for as an advertisement.  This
+impartial testimony to the superior qualities of the establishment
+and its head attracted a number of applicants for admission, and a
+couple of new boarders made a brief appearance at the table.  One of
+them was of the class of people who grumble if they don't get
+canvas-backs and woodcocks every day, for three-fifty per week.  The
+other was subject to somnambulism, or walking in the night, when he
+ought to have been asleep in his bed.  In this state he walked into
+several of the boarders' chambers, his eyes wide open, as is usual
+with somnambulists, and, from some odd instinct or other, wishing to
+know what the hour was, got together a number of their watches, for
+the purpose of comparing them, as it would seem.  Among them was a
+repeater, belonging to our young Marylander.  He happened to wake up
+while the somnambulist was in his chamber, and, not knowing his
+infirmity, caught hold of him and gave him a dreadful shaking, after
+which he tied his hands and feet, and so left him till morning, when
+he introduced him to a gentleman used to taking care of such cases
+of somnambulism.]
+
+If you, my reader, will please to skip backward, over this
+parenthesis, you will come to our conversation, which it has
+interrupted.
+
+It a'n't the feed,--said the young man John,--it's the old woman's
+looks when a fellah lays it in too strong.  The feed's well enough.
+After geese have got tough, 'n' turkeys have got strong, 'n' lamb's
+got old, 'n' veal's pretty nigh beef, 'n' sparragrass 's growin'
+tall 'n' slim 'n' scattery about the head, 'n' green peas are
+gettin' so big 'n' hard they'd be dangerous if you fired 'em out of
+a revolver, we get hold of all them delicacies of the season.  But
+it's too much like feedin' on live folks and devourin' widdah's
+substance, to lay yourself out in the eatin' way, when a fellah 's
+as hungry as the chap that said a turkey was too much for one 'n'
+not enough for two.  I can't help lookin' at the old woman.  Corned-
+beef-days she's tolerable calm.  Roastin'-days she worries some, 'n'
+keeps a sharp eye on the chap that carves.  But when there's
+anything in the poultry line, it seems to hurt her feelin's so to
+see the knife goin' into the breast and joints comin' to pieces,
+that there's no comfort in eatin'.  When I cut up an old fowl and
+help the boarders, I always feel as if I ought to say, Won't you
+have a slice of widdah?--instead of chicken.
+
+The young man John fell into a train of reflections which ended in
+his producing a Bologna sausage, a plate of "crackers," as we Boston
+folks call certain biscuits, and the bottle of whiskey described as
+being A 1.
+
+Under the influence of the crackers and sausage, he grew cordial and
+communicative.
+
+It was time, I thought, to sound him as to those of our boarders who
+had excited my curiosity.
+
+What do you think of our young Iris?--I began.
+
+Fust-rate little filly;-he said.--Pootiest and nicest little chap
+I've seen since the schoolma'am left.  Schoolma'am was a brown-
+haired one,--eyes coffee-color.  This one has got wine-colored
+eyes,--'n' that 's the reason they turn a fellah's head, I suppose.
+
+This is a splendid blonde,--I said,--the other was a brunette.
+Which style do you like best?
+
+Which do I like best, boiled mutton or roast mutton?--said the young
+man John.  Like 'em both,--it a'n't the color of 'em makes the
+goodness.  I 've been kind of lonely since schoolma'am went away.
+Used to like to look at her.  I never said anything particular to
+her, that I remember, but---
+
+I don't know whether it was the cracker and sausage, or that the
+young fellow's feet were treading on the hot ashes of some longing
+that had not had time to cool, but his eye glistened as he stopped.
+
+I suppose she wouldn't have looked at a fellah like me,--he said,--
+but I come pretty near tryin'.  If she had said, Yes, though, I
+shouldn't have known what to have done with her.  Can't marry a
+woman now-a-days till you're so deaf you have to cock your head like
+a parrot to hear what she says, and so longsighted you can't see
+what she looks like nearer than arm's-length.
+
+Here is another chance for you,--I said.--What do you want nicer
+than such a young lady as Iris?
+
+It's no use,--he answered.--I look at them girls and feel as the
+fellah did when he missed catchin' the trout.--'To'od 'a' cost more
+butter to cook him 'n' he's worth,--says the fellah.--Takes a whole
+piece o' goods to cover a girl up now-a-days.  I'd as lief undertake
+to keep a span of elephants,--and take an ostrich to board, too,--as
+to marry one of 'em.  What's the use?  Clerks and counter-jumpers
+ain't anything.  Sparragrass and green peas a'n't for them,--not
+while they're young and tender.  Hossback-ridin' a'n't for them,--
+except once a year, on Fast-day.  And marryin' a'n't for them.
+Sometimes a fellah feels lonely, and would like to have a nice young
+woman, to tell her how lonely he feels.  And sometimes a fellah,--
+here the young man John looked very confidential, and, perhaps, as
+if a little ashamed of his weakness,--sometimes a fellah would like
+to have one o' them small young ones to trot on his knee and push
+about in a little wagon,--a kind of a little Johnny, you know;--it's
+odd enough, but, it seems to me, nobody can afford them little
+articles, except the folks that are so rich they can buy everything,
+and the folks that are so poor they don't want anything.  It makes
+nice boys of us young fellahs, no doubt!  And it's pleasant to see
+fine young girls sittin', like shopkeepers behind their goods,
+waitin', and waitin', and waitin', 'n' no customers,--and the men
+lingerin' round and lookin' at the goods, like folks that want to be
+customers, but have n't the money!
+
+Do you think the deformed gentleman means to make love to Iris?--I
+said.
+
+What!  Little Boston ask that girl to marry him!  Well, now, that's
+cumin' of it a little too strong.  Yes, I guess she will marry him
+and carry him round in a basket, like a lame bantam: Look here!--he
+said, mysteriously;--one of the boarders swears there's a woman
+comes to see him, and that he has heard her singin' and screechin'.
+I should like to know what he's about in that den of his.  He lays
+low 'n' keeps dark,--and, I tell you, there's a good many of the
+boarders would like to get into his chamber, but he don't seem to
+want 'em.  Biddy could tell somethin' about what she's seen when she
+'s been to put his room to rights.  She's a Paddy 'n' a fool, but
+she knows enough to keep her tongue still.  All I know is, I saw her
+crossin' herself one day when she came out of that room.  She looked
+pale enough, 'n' I heard her mutterin' somethin' or other about the
+Blessed Virgin.  If it had n't been for the double doors to that
+chamber of his, I'd have had a squint inside before this; but,
+somehow or other, it never seems to happen that they're both open at
+once.
+
+What do you think he employs himself about?  said I.
+
+The young man John winked.
+
+I waited patiently for the thought, of which this wink was the
+blossom, to come to fruit in words.
+
+I don't believe in witches,--said the young man John.
+
+Nor I.
+
+We were both silent for a few minutes.
+
+
+--Did you ever see the young girl's drawing-books,--I said,
+presently.
+
+All but one,--he answered;--she keeps a lock on that, and won't show
+it.  Ma'am Allen, (the young rogue sticks to that name, in speaking
+of the gentleman with the diamond,) Ma'am Allen tried to peek into
+it one day when she left it on the sideboard.  "If you please," says
+she,--'n' took it from him, 'n' gave him a look that made him curl
+up like a caterpillar on a hot shovel.  I only wished he had n't,
+and had jest given her a little sass, for I've been takin' boxin'-
+lessons, 'n' I 've got a new way of counterin' I want to try on to
+somebody.
+
+--The end of all this was, that I came away from the young fellow's
+room, feeling that there were two principal things that I had to
+live for, for the next six weeks or six months, if it should take so
+long.  These were, to get a sight of the young girl's drawing.
+book, which I suspected had her heart shut up in it, and to get a
+look into the Little Gentleman's room.
+
+I don't doubt you think it rather absurd that I should trouble
+myself about these matters.  You tell me, with some show of reason,
+that all I shall find in the young girl's--book will be some
+outlines of angels with immense eyes, traceries of flowers, rural
+sketches, and caricatures, among which I shall probably have the
+pleasure of seeing my own features figuring.  Very likely.  But I'll
+tell you what I think I shall find.  If this child has idealized the
+strange little bit of humanity over which she seems to have spread
+her wings like a brooding dove,--if, in one of those wild vagaries
+that passionate natures are so liable to, she has fairly sprung upon
+him with her clasping nature, as the sea-flowers fold about the
+first stray shell-fish that brushes their outspread tentacles,
+depend upon it, I shall find the marks of it in this drawing-book of
+hers,--if I can ever get a look at it,--fairly, of course, for I
+would not play tricks to satisfy my curiosity.
+
+Then, if I can get into this Little Gentleman's room under any fair
+pretext, I shall, no doubt, satisfy myself in five minutes that he
+is just like other people, and that there is no particular mystery
+about him.
+
+The night after my visit to the young man John, I made all these and
+many more reflections.  It was about two o'clock in the morning,--
+bright starlight,--so light that I could make out the time on my
+alarm-clock,--when I woke up trembling and very moist.  It was the
+heavy dragging sound, as I had often heard it before that waked me.
+Presently a window was softly closed.  I had just begun to get over
+the agitation with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when
+I heard the sound which seemed to me as of a woman's voice,--the
+clearest, purest soprano which one could well conceive of.  It was
+not loud, and I could not distinguish a word, if it was a woman's
+voice; but there were recurring phrases of sound and snatches of
+rhythm that reached me, which suggested the idea of complaint, and
+sometimes, I thought, of passionate grief and despair.  It died away
+at last,--and then I heard the opening of a door, followed by a low,
+monotonous sound, as of one talking,--and then the closing of a
+door,--and presently the light on the opposite wall disappeared and
+all was still for the night.
+
+By George!  this gets interesting,--I said, as I got out of bed for
+a change of night-clothes.
+
+I had this in my pocket the other day, but thought I would n't read
+it at our celebration.  So I read it to the boarders instead, and
+print it to finish off this record with.
+
+
+          ROBINSON OF LEYDEN.
+
+He sleeps not here; in hope and prayer
+His wandering flock had gone before,
+But he, the shepherd, might not share
+Their sorrows on the wintry shore.
+
+Before the Speedwell's anchor swung,
+Ere yet the Mayflower's sail was spread,
+While round his feet the Pilgrims clung,
+The pastor spake, and thus he said:--
+
+"Men, brethren, sisters, children dear!
+God calls you hence from over sea;
+Ye may not build by Haerlem Meer,
+Nor yet along the Zuyder-Zee.
+
+"Ye go to bear the saving word
+To tribes unnamed and shores untrod:
+Heed well the lessons ye have heard
+From those old teachers taught of God.
+
+"Yet think not unto them was lent
+All light for all the coming days,
+And Heaven's eternal wisdom spent
+In making straight the ancient ways.
+
+"The living fountain overflows
+For every flock, for every lamb,
+Nor heeds, though angry creeds oppose
+With Luther's dike or Calvin's dam."
+
+He spake; with lingering, long embrace,
+With tears of love and partings fond,
+They floated down the creeping Maas,
+Along the isle of Ysselmond.
+
+They passed the frowning towers of Briel,
+The "Hook of Holland's" shelf of sand,
+And grated soon with lifting keel
+The sullen shores of Fatherland.
+
+No home for these!--too well they knew
+The mitred king behind the throne;
+The sails were set, the pennons flew,
+And westward ho!  for worlds unknown.
+
+--And these were they who gave us birth,
+The Pilgrims of the sunset wave,
+Who won for us this virgin earth,
+And freedom with the soil they gave.
+
+The pastor slumbers by the Rhine,--
+In alien earth the exiles lie,--
+Their nameless graves our holiest shrine,
+His words our noblest battle-cry!
+
+Still cry them, and the world shall hear,
+Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea!
+Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer,
+Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee!
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our
+boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were
+going on.  There is no particular change that I can think of in the
+aspect of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were
+quietly playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this
+smooth surface of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show
+themselves some fine morning or other in events, if not in
+catastrophes.  I have been watchful, as I said I should be, but have
+little to tell as yet.  You may laugh at me, and very likely think
+me foolishly fanciful to trouble myself about what is going on in a
+middling-class household like ours.  Do as you like.  But here is
+that terrible fact to begin with,--a beautiful young girl, with the
+blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to Nature's women, turned
+loose among live men.
+
+-Terrible fact?
+
+Very terrible.  Nothing more so.  Do you forget the angels who lost
+heaven for the daughters of men?  Do you forget Helen, and the fair
+women who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was
+born?  If jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if
+pangs that waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness
+or moping melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful
+possibilities, then there is always something frightful about a
+lovely young woman.--I love to look at this "Rainbow," as her
+father used sometimes to call her, of ours.  Handsome creature that
+she is in forms and colors,--the very picture, as it seems to me, of
+that "golden blonde" my friend whose book you read last year fell in
+love with when he was a boy, (as you remember, no doubt,)--handsome
+as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her beauty alone
+that holds my eyes upon her.  Let me tell you one of my fancies, and
+then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for
+me.
+
+It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that
+there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they
+get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later
+years.  These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden
+startling flashes,--second wakings, as it were,--a waking out of the
+waking state, which last is very apt to be a half-sleep.  I have
+many times stopped short and held my breath, and felt the blood
+leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden clairvoyant flashes.  Of
+course I cannot tell what kind of a secret this is, but I think of
+it as a disclosure of certain relations of our personal being to
+time and space, to other intelligences, to the procession of events,
+and to their First Great Cause.  This secret seems to be broken up,
+as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word and there a
+syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is
+written out for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life.  I
+do not think it could be; for I am disposed to consider our beliefs
+about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind of premonition of
+an enlargement of our faculties in some future state than as an
+expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life.  Persons,
+however, have fallen into trances,--as did the Reverend William
+Tennent, among many others,--and learned some things which they
+could not tell in our human words.
+
+Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this
+infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women
+are those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great
+mystery.  There are women's faces, some real, some ideal, which
+contain something in them that becomes a positive element in our
+creed, so direct and palpable a revelation is it of the infinite
+purity and love.  I remember two faces of women with wings, such as
+they call angels, of Fra Angelico,--and I just now came across a
+print of Raphael's Santa Apollina, with something of the same
+quality,--which I was sure had their prototypes in the world above
+ours.  No wonder the Catholics pay their vows to the Queen of
+Heaven!  The unpoetical side of Protestantism is, that it has no
+women to be worshipped.
+
+But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great
+Secret to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces
+of it.  Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty
+of a plain countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the
+lips of a woman, not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a
+message for us, and wait almost with awe to hear their accents.  But
+this young girl has at once the beauty of feature and the unspoken
+mystery of expression.  Can she tell me anything?
+
+Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it
+which I have been groping after through so many friendships that I
+have tired of, and through--Hush!  Is the door fast?  Talking loud
+is a bad trick in these curious boarding-houses.
+
+You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind
+you of and to use for a special illustration.  Riding along over a
+rocky road, suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing
+gravel changes to a deep heavy rumble.  There is a great hollow
+under your feet,--a huge unsunned cavern.  Deep, deep beneath you in
+the core of the living rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away
+it stretches its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into
+streams where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the dark
+until their scales are white as milk and their eyes have withered
+out, obsolete and useless.
+
+So it is in life.  We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces,
+grinding over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--
+now and then jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must
+ride over or round as we best may, sometimes bringing short up
+against a disappointment, but still working along with the creaking
+and rattling and grating and jerking that belong to the journey of
+life, even in the smoothest-rolling vehicle.  Suddenly we hear the
+deep underground reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of
+some abyss of thought or passion beneath us.
+
+I wish the girl would go.  I don't like to look at her so much, and
+yet I cannot help it.  Always that same expression of something that
+I ought to know,--something that she was made to tell and I to
+hear,--lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap
+out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or
+perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet
+whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out
+thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an hour of passion.
+
+It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track.
+The Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three
+Words.  Set your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could
+give you which settle all that matter.  I don't wonder, however,
+that you confounded the Great Secret with the Three Words.
+
+I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to
+tell.  When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the
+morning of the fifth of July.  And just as that little patriotic
+implement is made with a slender train which leads to the magazine
+in its interior, so a sharp eye can almost always see the train
+leading from a young girl's eye or lip to the "I love you" in her
+heart.  But the Three Words are not the Great Secret I mean.  No,
+women's faces are only one of the tablets on which that is written
+in its partial, fragmentary symbols.  It lies deeper than Love,
+though very probably Love is a part of it.  Some, I think,--
+Wordsworth might be one of them,--spell out a portion of it from
+certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others.
+I can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which
+seem to me to come near the region where I think it lies.  I have
+known two persons who pursued it with the passion of the old
+alchemists,--all wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving
+up the daily search for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and
+their dreams changed to visions of things that ran and crawled about
+their floor and ceilings, and so they died.  The vulgar called them
+drunkards.
+
+I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this
+young girl's face produces on me.  It is akin to those influences a
+friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from
+certain voices.  I cannot translate it into words,--only into
+feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her
+face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing,
+which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world
+or on the very threshold of the next.
+
+You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful
+incomprehensibleness of my description of the expression in a young
+girl's face.  You forget what a miserable surface-matter this
+language is in which we try to reproduce our interior state of
+being.  Articulation is a shallow trick.  From the light Poh! which
+we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless scribbler's
+impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest utterances which
+comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need, is only a
+space of some three or four inches.  Words, which are a set of
+clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared
+to tones and expression of the features.  I give it up; I thought I
+could shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this
+young girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use.
+No doubt your head aches, trying to make something of my
+description.  If there is here and there one that can make anything
+intelligible out of my talk about the Great Secret, and who has
+spelt out a syllable or two of it on some woman's face, dead or
+living, that is all I can expect.  One should see the person with
+whom he converses about such matters.  There are dreamy-eyed people
+to whom I should say all these things with a certainty of being
+understood;--
+
+          That moment that his face I see,
+          I know the man that must hear me
+          To him my tale I teach.
+
+--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar
+for this August number, so that they will never see it.
+
+--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious
+attempt, which may go for nothing, and you can have your money
+refunded, if you will make the change.
+
+This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
+unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
+breakfast-table.  The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she
+again seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards
+him.  That slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity
+towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they
+sit side by side, is a physical fact I have often noticed.  Then
+there is a tendency in all the men's eyes to converge on her; and I
+do firmly believe, that, if all their chairs were examined, they
+would be found a little obliquely placed, so as to favor the
+direction in which their occupants love to look.
+
+That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting
+opposite to me, is no exception to the rule.  She brought down some
+mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber.  She
+gave a sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and
+sent another by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.
+
+--Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,--he said, and put it gallantly in
+his button-hole.--After breakfast he must see some of her drawings.
+Very fine performances,--very fine!--truly elegant productions,
+truly elegant!--Had seen Miss Linwood's needlework in London, in
+the year (eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)-
+patronized by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,--elegant,
+truly elegant productions, very fine performances; these drawings
+reminded him of them;--wonderful resemblance to Nature; an
+extraordinary art, painting; Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures
+that he remembered seeing when he was a boy.  Used to remember some
+lines about a portrait Written by Mr. Cowper, beginning,
+
+         "Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
+          With me but roughly since I heard thee last."
+
+And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother
+of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and
+looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look.  The
+dead young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used
+to look at him so many, many years ago.  He stood still as if in a
+waking dream, his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines
+grew indistinct and they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face
+shaped itself out of the glimmering light through which he saw them.
+--What is there quite so profoundly human as an old man's memory of
+a mother who died in his earlier years?  Mother she remains till
+manhood, and by-and-by she grows to be as a sister; and at last,
+when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he looks back upon her in her
+fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he caresses, not his parent,
+but, as it were, his child.
+
+If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words
+with which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of
+thought.
+
+--If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!--he said.
+--All gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms
+of her great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest
+little picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody
+that you don't want to see.--The old gentleman put his hand to his
+forehead so as to shade his eyes.  I saw he was looking at the dim
+photograph of memory, and turned from him to Iris.
+
+How many drawing-books have you filled,--I said,--since you began to
+take lessons?--This was the first,--she answered,--since she was
+here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of
+large size she had covered with drawings.
+
+I turned over the leaves of the book before us.  Academic studies,
+principally of the human figure.  Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so
+forth.  Limbs from statues.  Hands and feet from Nature.  What a
+superb drawing of an arm!  I don't remember it among the figures
+from Michel Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly.
+From Nature, I think, or after a cast from Nature.--Oh!
+
+--Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,--I said, taking up
+the drawing-book with a lock on it,--Yes,--she said.--I should like
+to see her style of working on a small scale.--There was nothing in
+it worth showing,--she said; and presently I saw her try the lock,
+which proved to be fast.  We are all caricatured in it, I haven't
+the least doubt.  I think, though, I could tell by her way of
+dealing with us what her fancies were about us boarders.  Some of
+them act as if they were bewitched with her, but she does not seem
+to notice it much.  Her thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor
+more than on anybody else.  The young fellow John appears to stand
+second in her good graces.  I think he has once or twice sent her
+what the landlady's daughter calls bo-kays of flowers,--somebody
+has, at any rate.--I saw a book she had, which must have come from
+the divinity-student.  It had a dreary title-page, which she had
+enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,--a face from memory,
+apparently,--one of those faces that small children loathe without
+knowing why, and which give them that inward disgust for heaven so
+many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these are
+"good men," and that heaven is full of such.--The gentleman with
+the diamond--the Koh-i-noor, so called by us--was not encouraged, I
+think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap.  He pulls
+his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never
+sees him, as it should seem.  The young Marylander, who I thought
+would have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks
+from his corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to
+say, I wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--
+which would, perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present
+one.  But nothing comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my
+sagacious idea of finding out the girl's fancies by looking into her
+locked drawing-book.
+
+Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made
+an attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber.  For
+this purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was
+just ready to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk,
+followed him as he toiled back to his room.  He rested on the
+landing and faced round toward me.  There was something in his eye
+which said, Stop there!  So we finished our conversation on the
+landing.  The next day, I mustered assurance enough to knock at his
+door, having a pretext ready.--No answer.--Knock again.  A door,
+as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and locked, and presently I
+heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen boots.
+The bolts and the lock of the inner door were unfastened,--with
+unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the passage.  He
+pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which I
+stood.  He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as
+"Mr. Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in;
+and a quaint-looking key in his hand.  Our conversation was short,
+but long enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not
+want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.
+
+I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a
+schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits.  I mean to give
+up such nonsense and mind my own business.--Hark!  What the deuse
+is that odd noise in his chamber?
+
+--I think I am a little superstitious.  There were two things, when
+I was a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a
+distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled
+round the neighborhood where I was born and bred.  The first was a
+series of marks called the "Devil's footsteps."  These were patches
+of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush
+blackberry, the "dewberry," as our Southern neighbors call it, in
+prettier and more Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging
+creepers,--where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet "everlasting" could
+not grow, but all was bare and blasted.  The second was a mark in
+one of the public buildings near my home,--the college dormitory
+named after a Colonial Governor.  I do not think many persons are
+aware of the existence of this mark,--little having been said about
+the story in print, as it was considered very desirable, for the
+sake of the Institution, to hush it up.  In the northwest corner,
+and on the level of the third or fourth story, there are signs of a
+breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be mistaken.  A
+considerable portion of that corner must have been carried away,
+from within outward.  It was an unpleasant affair; and I do not care
+to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred
+things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was
+variously explained, took place.  The story of the Appearance in the
+chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to
+the building there could be no question; and the zig-zag line, where
+the mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly
+visible.  The queer burnt spots, called the "Devil's footsteps," had
+never attracted attention before this time, though there is no
+evidence that they had not existed previously, except that of the
+late Miss M., a "Goody," so called, or sweeper, who was positive on
+the subject, but had a strange horror of referring to an affair of
+which she was thought to know something.--I tell you it was not so
+pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in
+an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper-chambers,
+and a most ghostly garret,--with the "Devil's footsteps" in the
+fields behind the house and in front of it the patched dormitory
+where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled
+those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them
+was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful
+season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for
+his ascetic sanctity.
+
+There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced
+by these two singular facts I have just mentioned.  There was a dark
+storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly
+see a heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which
+seemed to me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their
+fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other's
+backs,--as the people did in that awful crush where so many were
+killed, at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty.  Then the Lady's
+portrait, up-stairs, with the sword-thrusts through it,--marks of
+the British officers' rapiers,--and the tall mirror in which they
+used to look at their red coats,--confound them for smashing its
+mate?--and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy
+used to sit while his hair was dressing;--he was a gentleman, and
+always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save the silk
+covering my grandmother embroidered.  Then the little room
+downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on
+the hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,--"the
+study" in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of
+armed men,--sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will
+show you the "dents" left by the butts of their muskets all over the
+floor.  With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the
+wild stories those awful country-boys that came to live in our
+service brought with them;--of contracts written in blood and left
+out over night, not to be found the next morning, (removed by the
+Evil One, who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed
+away for future use,)--of dreams coming true,--of death-signs,--of
+apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was
+liable to superstitious fancies.
+
+Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly
+see a ghost is all very well-in the day-time.  All the reason in the
+world will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just
+such circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head.
+That is the only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of
+curiosity with which I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy
+with which I lie awake whenever I hear anything going on in his
+chamber after midnight.
+
+But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred
+for the present.  You will see in what way it happened that my
+thoughts were turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how
+I got my fancy full of material images,--faces, heads, figures,
+muscles, and so forth,--in such a way that I should have no chance
+in this number to gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the
+means of so doing.
+
+Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this
+time.  It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it
+that I should sit to him for my portrait.  When a soul draws a body
+in the great lottery of life, where every one is sure of a prize,
+such as it is, the said soul inspects the said body with the same
+curious interest with which one who has ventured into a "gift
+enterprise" examines the "massive silver pencil-case" with the
+coppery smell and impressible tube, or the "splendid gold ring" with
+the questionable specific gravity, which it has been his fortune to
+obtain in addition to his purchase.
+
+The soul, having studied the article of which it finds itself
+proprietor, thinks, after a time, it knows it pretty well.  But
+there is this difference between its view and that of a person
+looking at us:--we look from within, and see nothing but the mould
+formed by the elements in which we are incased; other observers look
+from without, and see us as living statues.  To be sure, by the aid
+of mirrors, we get a few glimpses of our outside aspect; but this
+occasional impression is always modified by that look of the soul
+from within outward which none but ourselves can take.  A portrait
+is apt, therefore, to be a surprise to us.  The artist looks only
+from without.  He sees us, too, with a hundred aspects on our faces
+we are never likely to see.  No genuine expression can be studied by
+the subject of it in the looking-glass.
+
+More than this; he sees us in a way in which many of our friends or
+acquaintances never see us.  Without wearing any mask we are
+conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.  For, in the
+first place, each puts a special reflection of himself upon us, on
+the principle of assimilation you found referred to in my last
+record, if you happened to read that document.  And secondly, each
+of our friends is capable of seeing just so far, and no farther,
+into our face, and each sees in it the particular thing that he
+looks for.  Now the artist, if he is truly an artist, does not take
+any one of these special views.  Suppose he should copy you as you
+appear to the man who wants your name to a subscription-list, you
+could hardly expect a friend who entertains you to recognize the
+likeness to the smiling face which sheds its radiance at his board.
+Even within your own family, I am afraid there is a face which the
+rich uncle knows, that is not so familiar to the poor relation.  The
+artist must take one or the other, or something compounded of the
+two, or something different from either.  What the daguerreotype and
+photograph do is to give the features and one particular look, the
+very look which kills all expression, that of self-consciousness.
+The artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in
+repose, puts your face through its exercises, observes its
+transitions, and so gets the whole range of its expression.  Out of
+all this he forms an ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your
+exact look at any one time or to any particular person.  Such a
+portrait cannot be to everybody what the ungloved call "as nat'ral
+as life."  Every good picture, therefore, must be considered wanting
+in resemblance by many persons.
+
+There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist
+shapes your features from his outline.  It is that you resemble so
+many relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular
+likeness in your countenance.
+
+He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances,
+thus:
+
+There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I
+never thought I had a sign of it.  The mother's eyebrow and grayish-
+blue eye, those I knew I had.  But there is a something which
+recalls a smile that faded away from my sister's lips--how many
+years ago!  I thought it so pleasant in her, that I love myself
+better for having a trace of it.
+
+Are we not young?  Are we not fresh and blooming?  Wait, a bit.  The
+artist takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines,
+diverging outwards from the eye over the temple.  Five years.--The
+artist draws one tolerably distinct and two faint lines,
+perpendicularly between the eyebrows.  Ten years.--The artist
+breaks up the contours round the mouth, so that they look a little
+as a hat does that has been sat upon and recovered itself, ready, as
+one would say, to crumple up again in the same creases, on smiling
+or other change of feature.--Hold on!  Stop that!  Give a young
+fellow a chance!  Are we not whole years short of that interesting
+period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc., etc., etc.?
+
+There now!  That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article,
+getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the
+wrongs of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye
+and the reflection of a red curtain on our cheek.  Is he not a POET
+that painted us?
+
+          "Blest be the art that can immortalize!"
+                                        COWPER.
+
+--Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school
+with any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive
+appellation, and in his features as special and definite an
+expression of his sole individuality as if he were the first created
+of his race: As soon as we are old enough to get the range of three
+or four generations well in hand, and to take in large family
+histories, we never see an individual in a face of any stock we
+know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with fragmentary tints from
+this and that ancestor.  The analysis of a face into its ancestral
+elements requires that it should be examined in the very earliest
+infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it brings
+with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief space when
+Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his silent
+servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he has
+wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all
+the traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after
+feature, from the slight outline to the finished portrait.
+
+--I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our
+bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as
+identified with ourselves.  In early years, while the child "feels
+its life in every limb," it lives in the body and for the body to a
+very great extent.  It ought to be so.  There have been many very
+interesting children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the
+things of earth and an extraordinary development of the spiritual
+nature.  There is a perfect literature of their biographies, all
+alike in their essentials; the same "disinclination to the usual
+amusements of childhood "; the same remarkable sensibility; the same
+docility; the same conscientiousness; in short, an almost uniform
+character, marked by beautiful traits, which we look at with a
+painful admiration.  It will be found that most of these children
+are the subjects of some constitutional unfitness for living, the
+most frequent of which I need not mention.  They are like the
+beautiful, blushing, half-grown fruit that falls before its time
+because its core is gnawed out.  They have their meaning,--they do
+not-live in vain,--but they are windfalls.  I am convinced that many
+healthy children are injured morally by being forced to read too
+much about these little meek sufferers and their spiritual
+exercises.  Here is a boy that loves to run, swim, kick football,
+turn somersets, make faces, whittle, fish, tear his clothes, coast,
+skate, fire crackers, blow squash "tooters," cut his name on fences,
+read about Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat the widest-
+angled slices of pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts with
+his back teeth and bite out the better part of another boy's apple
+with his front ones, turn up coppers, "stick" knives, call names,
+throw stones, knock off hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, "cut
+behind" anything on wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth,
+"holler" Fire! on slight evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an
+engine-company, or, in his own words, "blow for tub No. 11," or
+whatever it may be;--isn't that a pretty nice sort of a boy, though
+he has not got anything the matter with him that takes the taste of
+this world out?  Now, when you put into such a hot-blooded, hard-
+fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's hand a sad-looking volume or
+pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin, white-faced child, whose life
+is really as much a training for death as the last month of a
+condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in common between
+his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the
+experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents?  The time
+comes when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the
+beauty of resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the
+pillow of those who die before their time, in humble hope and trust.
+But it is not until he has worked his way through the period of
+honest hearty animal existence, which every robust child should make
+the most of,--not until he has learned the use of his various
+faculties, which is his first duty,--that a boy of courage and
+animal vigor is in a proper state to read these tearful records of
+premature decay.  I have no doubt that disgust is implanted in the
+minds of many healthy children by early surfeits of pathological
+piety.  I do verily believe that He who took children in His arms
+and blessed them loved the healthiest and most playful of them just
+as well as those who were richest in the tuberculous virtues.  I
+know what I am talking about, and there are more parents in this
+country who will be willing to listen to what I say than there are
+fools to pick a quarrel with me.  In the sensibility and the
+sanctity which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most
+beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the
+Divine benevolence.  But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust
+natures out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply
+what we Professors call "bad practice"; and I know by experience
+that there are worthy people who not only try it on their own
+children, but actually force it on those of their neighbors.
+
+--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed,
+or done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized.  A polite
+note from Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at
+their Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted.  We
+repaired to that scientific Golgotha.
+
+Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the
+woman in the toy called a "weather-house," both on the same wooden
+arm suspended on a pivot,--so that when one comes to the door, the
+other retires backwards, and vice versa.  The more particular
+speciality of one is to lubricate your entrance and exit,--that of
+the other to polish you off phrenologically in the recesses of the
+establishment.  Suppose yourself in a room full of casts and
+pictures, before a counterful of books with taking titles.  I wonder
+if the picture of the brain is there, "approved" by a noted
+Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor's, folio
+plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim.  An extra convolution, No.
+9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which was not to
+be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very liberally
+supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of
+"organs."  Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women,--
+horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of
+life,--looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or
+Joe Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them
+on his cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen "shiners" on a
+stripped twig of willow.
+
+The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let the
+horn-combers wait,--he shall be bumped without inspecting the
+antechamber.
+
+Tape round the head,--22 inches.  (Come on, old 23 inches, if you
+think you are the better man!)
+
+Feels thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles as those
+horrid old women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the
+provision-stalls at the Quincy Market.  Vitality, No.  5 or 6, or
+something or other.  Victuality, (organ at epigastrium,) some
+other number equally significant.
+
+Mild champooing of head now commences.  'Extraordinary revelations!
+Cupidiphilous, 6!  Hymeniphilous, 6 +!  Paediphilous, 5!
+Deipniphilous, 6!  Gelasmiphilous, 6!  Musikiphilous, 5!
+Uraniphilous, 5!  Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on.  Meant for a
+linguist.--Invaluable information.  Will invest in grammars and
+dictionaries immediately.--I have nothing against the grand total
+of my phrenological endowments.
+
+I never set great store by my head, and did not think Messrs.
+Bumpus and Crane would give me so good a lot of organs as they did,
+especially considering that I was a dead-head on that occasion.
+Much obliged to them for their politeness.  They have been useful in
+their way by calling attention to important physiological facts.
+(This concession is due to our immense bump of Candor.)
+
+
+A short Lecture on Phrenology, read to the Boarders at our
+Breakfast-Table.
+
+I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a Pseudo-science.
+A Pseudo-science consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting
+arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its
+doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells
+against it, is excluded.  It is invariably connected with some
+lucrative practical application.  Its professors and practitioners
+are usually shrewd people; they are very serious with the public,
+but wink and laugh a good deal among themselves.  The believing
+multitude consists of women of both sexes, feeble minded inquirers,
+poetical optimists, people who always get cheated in buying horses,
+philanthropists who insist on hurrying up the millennium, and others
+of this class, with here and there a clergyman, less frequently a
+lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a horse-jockey or
+a member of the detective police.--I do not say that Phrenology was
+one of the Pseudo-sciences.
+
+A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies.  It
+may contain many truths, and even valuable ones.  The rottenest bank
+starts with a little specie.  It puts out a thousand promises to pay
+on the strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly
+a good one.  The practitioners of the Pseudo-sciences know that
+common minds, after they have been baited with a real fact or two,
+will jump at the merest rag of a lie, or even at the bare hook.
+When we have one fact found us, we are very apt to supply the next
+out of our own imagination.  (How many persons can read Judges xv.
+16 correctly the first time?) The Pseudo-sciences take advantage of
+this.--I did not say that it was so with Phrenology.
+
+I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was
+something in Phrenology.  A broad, high forehead, it is commonly
+agreed, promises intellect; one that is "villanous low" and has a
+huge hind-head back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature.  I have
+as rarely met an unbiassed and sensible man who really believed in
+the bumps.  It is observed, however, that persons with what the
+Phrenologists call "good heads" are more prone than others toward
+plenary belief in the doctrine.
+
+It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that
+the moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable
+substance of the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary,
+I might be puzzled.  But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar
+cheese, I call on him to prove the truth of the Gaseous nature of
+our satellite, before I purchase.
+
+It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological
+statement.  It is only necessary to show that its truth is not
+proved, and cannot be, by the common course of argument.  The walls
+of the head are double, with a great air-chamber between them, over
+the smallest and most closely crowded "organs."  Can you tell how
+much money there is in a safe, which also has thick double walls, by
+kneading its knobs with your fingers?  So when a man fumbles about
+my forehead, and talks about the organs of Individuality, Size,
+etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt of the outside of
+my strong-box and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-
+dollar-bill under this or that particular rivet.  Perhaps there is;
+only he does n't know anything about at.  But this is a point that
+I, the Professor, understand, my friends, or ought to, certainly,
+better than you do.  The next argument you will all appreciate.
+
+I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of
+Phrenology, which is very similar to that of the Pseudo-sciences.
+An example will show it most conveniently.
+
+A. is a notorious thief.  Messrs. Bumpus and Crane examine him and
+find a good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness.  Positive fact for
+Phrenology.  Casts and drawings of A. are multiplied, and the bump
+does not lose in the act of copying.--I did not say it gained.--
+What do you look so for?  (to the boarders.)
+
+Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A.  But B. has no bump at
+all over Acquisitiveness.  Negative fact; goes against Phrenology.
+--Not a bit of it.  Don't you see how small Conscientiousness is?
+That's the reason B. stole.
+
+And then comes C., ten times as much a thief as either A. or B.,--
+used to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own
+pockets and put its contents in another, if he could find no other
+way of committing petty larceny.  Unfortunately, C.  has a hollow,
+instead of a bump, over Acquisitiveness.  Ah, but just look and see
+what a bump of Alimentiveness!  Did not C. buy nuts and gingerbread,
+when a boy, with the money he stole?  Of course you see why he is a
+thief, and how his example confirms our noble science.
+
+At last comes along a case which is apparently a settler, for there
+is a little brain with vast and varied powers,--a case like that of
+Byron, for instance.  Then comes out the grand reserve-reason which
+covers everything and renders it simply impossible ever to corner a
+Phrenologist.  "It is not the size alone, but the quality of an
+organ, which determines its degree of power."
+
+Oh! oh!  I see.--The argument may be briefly stated thus by the
+Phrenologist: "Heads I win, tails you lose."  Well, that's
+convenient.
+
+It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to
+the Pseudo-sciences.  I did not say it was a Pseudo-science.
+
+I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and
+amazed at the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of
+Phrenology had read their characters written upon their skulls.  Of
+course the Professor acquires his information solely through his
+cranial inspections and manipulations.--What are you laughing at?
+(to the boarders.)--But let us just suppose, for a moment, that a
+tolerably cunning fellow, who did not know or care anything about
+Phrenology, should open a shop and undertake to read off people's
+characters at fifty cents or a dollar apiece.  Let us see how well
+he could get along without the "organs."
+
+I will suppose myself to set up such a shop.  I would invest one
+hundred dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts,
+and other matters that would make the most show for the money.  That
+would do to begin with.  I would then advertise myself as the
+celebrated Professor Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and
+wait for my first customer.  My first customer is a middle-aged man.
+I look at him,--ask him a question or two, so as to hear him talk.
+When I have got the hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed
+to fumble his skull, dictating as follows:
+SCALE FROM 1 TO 10.
+
+LIST OF FACULTIES FOR           PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL.
+      CUSTOMER.
+                             Each to be accompanied with a wink.
+
+Amativeness, 7.        Most men love the conflicting sex, and all
+                    men love to be told they do.
+
+Alimentiveness, 8.     Don't you see that he has burst off his
+                 lowest waistcoat-button with feeding,--hey
+
+Acquisitiveness, 8.    Of course.  A middle-aged Yankee.
+
+Approbativeness 7+.    Hat well brushed.  Hair ditto.  Mark the
+                       effect of that plus sign.
+
+Self-Esteem 6.         His face shows that.
+
+Benevolence 9.         That'll please him.
+
+Conscientiousness 8 1/2  That fraction looks first-rate.
+
+Mirthfulness 7         Has laughed twice since he came in.
+
+Ideality 9             That sounds well.
+
+Form, Size, Weight,    4 to 6.  Average everything that
+Color, Locality,       cannot be guessed.
+Eventuality, etc. etc.
+
+
+                And so of the other faculties.
+
+
+Of course, you know, that isn't the way the Phrenologists do.  They
+go only by the bumps.--What do you keep laughing so for?  (to the
+boarders.) I only said that is the way I should practise
+"Phrenology" for a living.
+
+                    End of my Lecture.
+
+
+--The Reformers have good heads, generally.  Their faces are
+commonly serene enough, and they are lambs in private intercourse,
+even though their voices may be like
+
+         The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore,
+
+when heard from the platform.  Their greatest spiritual danger is
+from the perpetual flattery of abuse to which they are exposed.
+These lines are meant to caution them.
+
+
+     SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER.
+
+          HIS TEMPTATION.
+
+No fear lest praise should make us proud!
+We know how cheaply that is won;
+The idle homage of the crowd
+Is proof of tasks as idly done.
+
+A surface-smile may pay the toil
+That follows still the conquering Right,
+With soft, white hands to dress the spoil
+That sunbrowned valor clutched in fight.
+
+Sing the sweet song of other days,
+Serenely placid, safely true,
+And o'er the present's parching ways
+Thy verse distils like evening dew.
+
+But speak in words of living power,--
+They fall like drops of scalding rain
+That plashed before the burning shower
+Swept o'er the cities of the plain!
+
+Then scowling Hate turns deadly pale,--
+Then Passion's half-coiled adders spring,
+And, smitten through their leprous mail,
+Strike right and left in hope to sting.
+
+If thou, unmoved by poisoning wrath,
+Thy feet on earth, thy heart above,
+Canst walk in peace thy kingly path,
+Unchanged in trust, unchilled in love,--
+
+Too kind for bitter words to grieve,
+Too firm for clamor to dismay,
+When Faith forbids thee to believe,
+And Meekness calls to disobey,--
+
+Ah, then beware of mortal pride!
+The smiling pride that calmly scorns
+Those foolish fingers, crimson dyed
+In laboring on thy crown of thorns!
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+One of our boarders--perhaps more than one was concerned in it--sent
+in some questions to me, the other day, which, trivial as some of
+them are, I felt bound to answer.
+
+1.--Whether a lady was ever known to write a letter covering only a
+single page?
+
+To this I answered, that there was a case on record where a lady had
+but half a sheet of paper and no envelope; and being obliged to send
+through the post-office, she covered only one side of the paper
+(crosswise, lengthwise, and diagonally).
+
+2.--What constitutes a man a gentleman?
+
+To this I gave several answers, adapted to particular classes of
+questioners.
+
+a.  Not trying to be a gentleman.
+
+b.  Self-respect underlying courtesy.
+
+c.  Knowledge and observance of the fitness of things in social
+intercourse.
+
+d.  f. s. d.  (as many suppose.)
+
+3.--Whether face or figure is most attractive in the female sex?
+
+Answered in the following epigram, by a young man about town:
+
+     Quoth Tom, "Though fair her features be,
+     It is her figure pleases me."
+     "What may her figure be?" I cried.
+     "One hundred thousand!" he replied.
+
+When this was read to the boarders, the young man John said he
+should like a chance to "step up" to a figger of that kind, if the
+girl was one of the right sort.
+
+The landlady said them that merried for money didn't deserve the
+blessin' of a good wife.  Money was a great thing when them that had
+it made a good use of it.  She had seen better days herself, and
+knew what it was never to want for anything.  One of her cousins
+merried a very rich old gentleman, and she had heerd that he said he
+lived ten year longer than if he'd staid by himself without anybody
+to take care of him.  There was nothin' like a wife for nussin' sick
+folks and them that couldn't take care of themselves.
+
+The young man John got off a little wink, and pointed slyly with his
+thumb in the direction of our diminutive friend, for whom he seemed
+to think this speech was intended.
+
+If it was meant for him, he did n't appear to know that it was.
+Indeed, he seems somewhat listless of late, except when the
+conversation falls upon one of those larger topics that specially
+interest him, and then he grows excited, speaks loud and fast,
+sometimes almost savagely,--and, I have noticed once or twice,
+presses his left hand to his right side, as if there were something
+that ached, or weighed, or throbbed in that region.
+
+While he speaks in this way, the general conversation is
+interrupted, and we all listen to him.  Iris looks steadily in his
+face, and then he will turn as if magnetized and meet the amber eyes
+with his own melancholy gaze.  I do believe that they have some kind
+of understanding together, that they meet elsewhere than at our
+table, and that there is a mystery, which is going to break upon us
+all of a sudden, involving the relations of these two persons.  From
+the very first, they have taken to each other.  The one thing they
+have in common is the heroic will.  In him, it shows itself in
+thinking his way straightforward, in doing battle for "free trade
+and no right of search" on the high seas of religious controversy,
+and especially in fighting the battles of his crooked old city.  In
+her, it is standing up for her little friend with the most queenly
+disregard of the code of boarding-house etiquette.  People may say
+or look what they like,--she will have her way about this sentiment
+of hers.
+
+The Poor Relation is in a dreadful fidget whenever the Little
+Gentleman says anything that interferes with her own infallibility.
+She seems to think Faith must go with her face tied up, as if she
+had the toothache,--and that if she opens her mouth to the quarter
+the wind blows from, she will catch her "death o' cold."
+
+The landlady herself came to him one day, as I have found out, and
+tried to persuade him to hold his tongue.--The boarders was gettin'
+uneasy,--she said,--and some of 'em would go, she mistrusted, if he
+talked any more about things that belonged to the ministers to
+settle.  She was a poor woman, that had known better days, but all
+her livin' depended on her boarders, and she was sure there was n't
+any of 'em she set so much by as she did by him; but there was them
+that never liked to hear about sech things, except on Sundays.
+
+The Little Gentleman looked very smiling at the landlady, who smiled
+even more cordially in return, and adjusted her cap-ribbon with an
+unconscious movement,--a reminiscence of the long-past pairing-time,
+when she had smoothed her locks and softened her voice, and won her
+mate by these and other bird-like graces.--My dear Madam,--he
+said,--I will remember your interests, and speak only of matters to
+which I am totally indifferent.--I don't doubt he meant this; but a
+day or two after, something stirred him up, and I heard his voice
+uttering itself aloud, thus:
+
+-It must be done, Sir!--he was saying,--it must be done!  Our
+religion has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has been
+Orientalized, it has been Anglicized, and the time is at hand when
+it must be AMERICANIZED!  Now, Sir, you see what Americanizing is in
+politics;--it means that a man shall have a vote because he is a
+man,--and shall vote for whom he pleases, without his neighbor's
+interference.  If he chooses to vote for the Devil, that is his
+lookout;--perhaps he thinks the Devil is better than the other
+candidates; and I don't doubt he's often right, Sir.  Just so a
+man's soul has a vote in the spiritual community; and it doesn't do,
+Sir, or it won't do long, to call him "schismatic" and "heretic" and
+those other wicked names that the old murderous Inquisitors have
+left us to help along "peace and goodwill to men"!
+
+As long as you could catch a man and drop him into an oubliette, or
+pull him out a few inches longer by machinery, or put a hot iron
+through his tongue, or make him climb up a ladder and sit on a board
+at the top of a stake so that he should be slowly broiled by the
+fire kindled round it, there was some sense in these words; they led
+to something.  But since we have done with those tools, we had
+better give up those words.  I should like to see a Yankee
+advertisement like this!--(the Little Gentleman laughed fiercely as
+he uttered the words,--)
+
+--Patent thumb-screws,--will crush the bone in three turns.
+
+--The cast-iron boot, with wedge and mallet, only five dollars!
+
+--The celebrated extension-rack, warranted to stretch a man six
+inches in twenty minutes,--money returned, if it proves
+unsatisfactory.
+
+I should like to see such an advertisement, I say, Sir!  Now, what's
+the use of using the words that belonged with the thumb-screws, and
+the Blessed Virgin with the knives under her petticoats and sleeves
+and bodice, and the dry pan and gradual fire, if we can't have the
+things themselves, Sir?  What's the use of painting the fire round a
+poor fellow, when you think it won't do to kindle one under him,--as
+they did at Valencia or Valladolid, or wherever it was?
+
+--What story is that?--I said.
+
+Why,--he answered,--at the last auto-da-fe, in 1824 or '5, or
+somewhere there,--it's a traveller's story, but a mighty knowing
+traveller he is,--they had a "heretic" to use up according to the
+statutes provided for the crime of private opinion.  They could n't
+quite make up their minds to burn him, so they only hung him in a
+hogshead painted all over with flames!
+
+No, Sir!  when a man calls you names because you go to the ballot-
+box and vote for your candidate, or because you say this or that is
+your opinion, he forgets in which half of the world he was born,
+Sir!  It won't be long, Sir, before we have Americanized religion as
+we have Americanized government; and then, Sir, every soul God sends
+into the world will be good in the face of all men for just so much
+of His "inspiration" as "giveth him understanding"!--None of my
+words, Sir!  none of my words!
+
+--If Iris does not love this Little Gentleman, what does love look
+like when one sees it?  She follows him with her eyes, she leans
+over toward him when he speaks, her face changes with the changes of
+his speech, so that one might think it was with her as with
+Christabel,--
+
+          That all her features were resigned
+          To this sole image in her mind.
+
+But she never looks at him with such intensity of devotion as when
+he says anything about the soul and the soul's atmosphere, religion.
+
+Women are twice as religious as men;--all the world knows that.
+Whether they are any better, in the eyes of Absolute Justice, might
+be questioned; for the additional religious element supplied by sex
+hardly seems to be a matter of praise or blame.  But in all common
+aspects they are so much above us that we get most of our religion
+from them,--from their teachings, from their example,--above all,
+from their pure affections.
+
+Now this poor little Iris had been talked to strangely in her
+childhood.  Especially she had been told that she hated all good
+things,--which every sensible parent knows well enough is not true
+of a great many children, to say the least.  I have sometimes
+questioned whether many libels on human nature had not been a
+natural consequence of the celibacy of the clergy, which was
+enforced for so long a period.
+
+The child had met this and some other equally encouraging statements
+as to her spiritual conditions, early in life, and fought the battle
+of spiritual independence prematurely, as many children do.  If all
+she did was hateful to God, what was the meaning of the approving or
+else the disapproving conscience, when she had done "right" or
+"wrong"?  No "shoulder-striker" hits out straighter than a child
+with its logic.  Why, I can remember lying in my bed in the nursery
+and settling questions which all that I have heard since and got out
+of books has never been able to raise again.  If a child does not
+assert itself in this way in good season, it becomes just what its
+parents or teachers were, and is no better than a plastic image.--
+How old was I at the time?--I suppose about 5823 years old,--that
+is, counting from Archbishop Usher's date of the Creation, and
+adding the life of the race, whose accumulated intelligence is a
+part of my inheritance, to my own.  A good deal older than Plato,
+you see, and much more experienced than my Lord Bacon and most of
+the world's teachers.--Old books, as you well know, are books of
+the world's youth, and new books are fruits of its age.  How many of
+all these ancient folios round me are like so many old cupels!  The
+gold has passed out of them long ago, but their pores are full of
+the dross with which it was mingled.
+
+And so Iris--having thrown off that first lasso which not only
+fetters, but chokes those whom it can hold, so that they give
+themselves up trembling and breathless to the great soul-subduer,
+who has them by the windpipe had settled a brief creed for herself,
+in which love of the neighbor, whom we have seen, was the first
+article, and love of the Creator, whom we have not seen, grew out of
+this as its natural development, being necessarily second in order
+of time to the first unselfish emotions which we feel for the
+fellow-creatures who surround us in our early years.
+
+The child must have some place of worship.  What would a young girl
+be who never mingled her voice with the songs and prayers that rose
+all around her with every returning day of rest?  And Iris was free
+to choose.  Sometimes one and sometimes another would offer to carry
+her to this or that place of worship; and when the doors were
+hospitably opened, she would often go meekly in by herself.  It was
+a curious fact, that two churches as remote from each other in
+doctrine as could well be divided her affections.
+
+The Church of Saint Polycarp had very much the look of a Roman
+Catholic chapel.  I do not wish to run the risk of giving names to
+the ecclesiastical furniture which gave it such a Romish aspect; but
+there were pictures, and inscriptions in antiquated characters, and
+there were reading-stands, and flowers on the altar, and other
+elegant arrangements.  Then there were boys to sing alternately in
+choirs responsive to each other, and there was much bowing, with
+very loud responding, and a long service and a short sermon, and a
+bag, such as Judas used to hold in the old pictures, was carried
+round to receive contributions.  Everything was done not only
+"decently and in order," but, perhaps one might say, with a certain
+air of magnifying their office on the part of the dignified
+clergymen, often two or three in number.  The music and the free
+welcome were grateful to Iris, and she forgot her prejudices at the
+door of the chapel.  For this was a church with open doors, with
+seats for all classes and all colors alike,--a church of zealous
+worshippers after their faith, of charitable and serviceable men and
+women, one that took care of its children and never forgot its poor,
+and whose people were much more occupied in looking out for their
+own souls than in attacking the faith of their neighbors.  In its
+mode of worship there was a union of two qualities,--the taste and
+refinement, which the educated require just as much in their
+churches as elsewhere, and the air of stateliness, almost of pomp,
+which impresses the common worshipper, and is often not without its
+effect upon those who think they hold outward forms as of little
+value.  Under the half-Romish aspect of the Church of Saint
+Polycarp, the young girl found a devout and loving and singularly
+cheerful religious spirit.  The artistic sense, which betrayed
+itself in the dramatic proprieties of its ritual, harmonized with
+her taste.  The mingled murmur of the loud responses, in those
+rhythmic phrases, so simple, yet so fervent, almost as if every
+tenth heart-beat, instead of its dull tic-tac, articulated itself as
+"Good Lord, deliver us!  "--the sweet alternation of the two choirs,
+as their holy song floated from side to side, the keen young voices
+rising like a flight of singing-birds that passes from one grove to
+another, carrying its music with it back and forward,--why should
+she not love these gracious outward signs of those inner harmonies
+which none could deny made beautiful the lives of many of her
+fellow-worshippers in the humble, yet not inelegant Chapel of Saint
+Polycarp?
+
+The young Marylander, who was born and bred to that mode of worship,
+had introduced her to the chapel, for which he did the honors for
+such of our boarders as were not otherwise provided for.  I saw them
+looking over the same prayer-book one Sunday, and I could not help
+thinking that two such young and handsome persons could hardly
+worship together in safety for a great while.  But they seemed to
+mind nothing but their prayer-book.  By-and-by the silken bag was
+handed round.--I don't believe she will; so awkward, you know;-
+besides, she only came by invitation.  There she is, with her hand
+in her pocket, though,--and sure enough, her little bit of silver
+tinkled as it struck the coin beneath.  God bless her! she has n't
+much to give; but her eye glistens when she gives it, and that is
+all Heaven asks.--That was the first time I noticed these young
+people together, and I am sure they behaved with the most charming
+propriety,--in fact, there was one of our silent lady-boarders with
+them, whose eyes would have kept Cupid and Psyche to their good
+behavior.  A day or two after this I noticed that the young
+gentleman had left his seat, which you may remember was at the
+corner diagonal to that of Iris, so that they have been as far
+removed from each other as they could be at the table.  His new seat
+is three or four places farther down the table.  Of course I made a
+romance out of this, at once.  So stupid not to see it!  How could
+it be otherwise?--Did you speak, Madam?  I beg your pardon.  (To my
+lady-reader.)
+
+I never saw anything like the tenderness with which this young girl
+treats her little deformed neighbor.  If he were in the way of going
+to church, I know she would follow him.  But his worship, if any, is
+not with the throng of men and women and staring children.
+
+I, the Professor, on the other hand, am a regular church-goer.  I
+should go for various reasons if I did not love it; but I am happy
+enough to find great pleasure in the midst of devout multitudes,
+whether I can accept all their creeds or not.  One place of worship
+comes nearer than the rest to my ideal standard, and to this it was
+that I carried our young girl.
+
+The Church of the Galileans, as it is called, is even humbler in
+outside pretensions than the Church of Saint Polycarp.  Like that,
+it is open to all comers.  The stranger who approaches it looks down
+a quiet street and sees the plainest of chapels,--a kind of wooden
+tent, that owes whatever grace it has to its pointed windows and the
+high, sharp roofs--traces, both, of that upward movement of
+ecclesiastical architecture which soared aloft in cathedral-spires,
+shooting into the sky as the spike of a flowering aloe from the
+cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below.  This suggestion of
+medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which a hand-bell
+might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was all of
+outward show the small edifice could boast.  Within there was very
+little that pretended to be attractive.  A small organ at one side,
+and a plain pulpit, showed that the building was a church; but it
+was a church reduced to its simplest expression:
+
+Yet when the great and wise monarch of the East sat upon his throne,
+in all the golden blaze of the spoils of Ophir and the freights of
+the navy of Tarshish, his glory was not like that of this simple
+chapel in its Sunday garniture.  For the lilies of the field, in
+their season, and the fairest flowers of the year, in due
+succession, were clustered every Sunday morning over the preacher's
+desk.  Slight, thin-tissued blossoms of pink and blue and virgin
+white in early spring, then the full-breasted and deep-hearted roses
+of summer, then the velvet-robed crimson and yellow flowers of
+autumn, and in the winter delicate exotics that grew under skies of
+glass in the false summers of our crystal palaces without knowing
+that it was the dreadful winter of New England which was rattling
+the doors and frosting the panes,--in their language the whole year
+told its history of life and growth and beauty from that simple
+desk.  There was always at least one good sermon,--this floral
+homily.  There was at least one good prayer,--that brief space when
+all were silent, after the manner of the Friends at their devotions.
+
+Here, too, Iris found an atmosphere of peace and love.  The same
+gentle, thoughtful faces, the same cheerful but reverential spirit,
+the same quiet, the same life of active benevolence.  But in all
+else how different from the Church of Saint Polycarp!  No clerical
+costume, no ceremonial forms, no carefully trained choirs.  A
+liturgy they have, to be sure, which does not scruple to borrow from
+the time-honored manuals of devotion, but also does not hesitate to
+change its expressions to its own liking.
+
+Perhaps the good people seem a little easy with each other;--they
+are apt to nod familiarly, and have even been known to whisper
+before the minister came in.  But it is a relief to get rid of that
+old Sunday--no,--Sabbath face, which suggests the idea that the
+first day of the week is commemorative of some most mournful event.
+The truth is, these brethren and sisters meet very much as a family
+does for its devotions, not putting off their humanity in the least,
+considering it on the whole quite a delightful matter to come
+together for prayer and song and good counsel from kind and wise
+lips.  And if they are freer in their demeanor than some very
+precise congregations, they have not the air of a worldly set of
+people.  Clearly they have not come to advertise their tailors and
+milliners, nor for the sake of exchanging  criticisms on the
+literary character of the sermon they  may hear.  There is no
+restlessness and no restraint  among these quiet, cheerful
+worshippers.  One thing  that keeps them calm and happy during the
+season so evidently trying to many congregations is, that they join
+very generally in the singing.  In this way they  get rid of that
+accumulated nervous force which escapes in all sorts of fidgety
+movements, so that a minister trying to keep his congregation still
+reminds one of a boy with his hand over the nose of a pump which
+another boy is working,--this spirting impatience of the people is
+so like the jets that find their way through his fingers, and the
+grand rush out at the final Amen! has such a wonderful likeness to
+the gush that takes place when the boy pulls his hand away, with
+immense relief, as it seems, to both the pump and the officiating
+youngster.
+
+How sweet is this blending of all voices and all hearts in one
+common song of praise!  Some will sing a little loud, perhaps,--and
+now and then an impatient chorister will get a syllable or two in
+advance, or an enchanted singer so lose all thought of time and
+place in the luxury of a closing cadence that he holds on to the
+last semi-breve upon his private responsibility; but how much more
+of the spirit of the old Psalmist in the music of these imperfectly
+trained voices than in the academic niceties of the paid performers
+who take our musical worship out of our hands!
+
+I am of the opinion that the creed of the Church of the Galileans is
+not laid down in as many details as that of the Church of Saint
+Polycarp.  Yet I suspect, if one of the good people from each of
+those churches had met over the bed of a suffering fellow-creature,
+or for the promotion of any charitable object, they would have found
+they had more in common than all the special beliefs or want of
+beliefs that separated them would amount to.  There are always many
+who believe that the fruits of a tree afford a better test of its
+condition than a statement of the composts with which it is dressed,
+though the last has its meaning and importance, no doubt.
+
+Between these two churches, then, our young Iris divides her
+affections.  But I doubt if she listens to the preacher at either
+with more devotion than she does to her little neighbor when he
+talks of these matters.
+
+What does he believe?  In the first place, there is some deep-rooted
+disquiet lying at the bottom of his soul, which makes him very
+bitter against all kinds of usurpation over the right of private
+judgment.  Over this seems to lie a certain tenderness for humanity
+in general, bred out of life-long trial, I should say, but sharply
+streaked with fiery lines of wrath at various individual acts of
+wrong, especially if they come in an ecclesiastical shape, and
+recall to him the days when his mother's great-grandmother was
+strangled on Witch Hill, with a text from the Old Testament for her
+halter.  With all this, he has a boundless belief in the future of
+this experimental hemisphere, and especially in the destiny of the
+free thought of its northeastern metropolis.
+
+--A man can see further, Sir,--he said one day,--from the top of
+Boston State House, and see more that is worth seeing, than from all
+the pyramids and turrets and steeples in all the places in the
+world!  No smoke, Sir; no fog, Sir; and a clean sweep from the Outer
+Light and the sea beyond it to the New Hampshire mountains!  Yes,
+Sir,--and there are great truths that are higher than mountains and
+broader than seas, that people are looking for from the tops of
+these hills of ours;--such as the world never saw, though it might
+have seen them at Jerusalem, if its eyes had been open!--Where do
+they have most crazy people?  Tell me that, Sir!
+
+I answered, that I had heard it said there were more in New England
+than in most countries, perhaps more than in any part of the world.
+
+Very good, Sir,--he answered.--When have there been most people
+killed and wounded in the course of this century?
+
+During the wars of the French Empire, no doubt,--I said.
+
+That's it! that's it!--said the Little Gentleman;--where the battle
+of intelligence is fought, there are most minds bruised and broken!
+We're battling for a faith here, Sir.
+
+The divinity-student remarked, that it was rather late in the
+world's history for men to be looking out for a new faith.
+
+I did n't say a new faith,--said the Little Gentleman;--old or new,
+it can't help being different here in this American mind of ours
+from anything that ever was before; the people are new, Sir, and
+that makes the difference.  One load of corn goes to the sty, and
+makes the fat of swine,--another goes to the farm-house, and becomes
+the muscle that clothes the right arms of heroes.  It is n't where a
+pawn stands on the board that makes the difference, but what the
+game round it is when it is on this or that square.
+
+Can any man look round and see what Christian countries are now
+doing, and how they are governed, and what is the general condition
+of society, without seeing that Christianity is the flag under which
+the world sails, and not the rudder that steers its course?  No,
+Sir!  There was a great raft built about two thousand years ago,--
+call it an ark, rather,--the world's great ark! big enough to hold
+all mankind, and made to be launched right out into the open waves
+of life,--and here it has been lying, one end on the shore and one
+end bobbing up and down in the water, men fighting all the time as
+to who should be captain and who should have the state-rooms, and
+throwing each other over the side because they could not agree about
+the points of compass, but the great vessel never getting afloat
+with its freight of nations and their rulers;--and now, Sir, there
+is and has been for this long time a fleet of "heretic" lighters
+sailing out of Boston Bay, and they have been saying, and they say
+now, and they mean to keep saying, "Pump out your bilge-water,
+shovel over your loads of idle ballast, get out your old rotten
+cargo, and we will carry it out into deep waters and sink it where
+it will never be seen again; so shall the ark of the world's hope
+float on the ocean, instead of sticking in the dock-mud where it is
+lying!"
+
+It's a slow business, this of getting the ark launched.  The Jordan
+was n't deep enough, and the Tiber was n't deep enough, and the
+Rhone was n't deep enough, and the Thames was n't deep enough, and
+perhaps the Charles is n't deep enough; but I don't feel sure of
+that, Sir, and I love to hear the workmen knocking at the old blocks
+of tradition and making the ways smooth with the oil of the Good
+Samaritan.  I don't know, Sir,--but I do think she stirs a little,--
+I do believe she slides;--and when I think of what a work that is
+for the dear old three-breasted mother of American liberty, I would
+not take all the glory of all the greatest cities in the world for
+my birthright in the soil of little Boston!
+
+--Some of us could not help smiling at this burst of local
+patriotism, especially when it finished with the last two words.
+
+And Iris smiled, too.  But it was the radiant smile of pleasure
+which always lights up her face when her little neighbor gets
+excited on the great topics of progress in freedom and religion, and
+especially on the part which, as he pleases himself with believing,
+his own city is to take in that consummation of human development to
+which he looks forward.
+
+Presently she looked into his face with a changed expression,--the
+anxiety of a mother that sees her child suffering.
+
+You are not well,--she said.
+
+I am never well,--he answered.--His eyes fell mechanically on the
+death's-head ring he wore on his right hand.  She took his hand as
+if it had been a baby's, and turned the grim device so that it
+should be out of sight.  One slight, sad, slow movement of the head
+seemed to say, "The death-symbol is still there!"
+
+A very odd personage, to be sure!  Seems to know what is going on,--
+reads books, old and new,--has many recent publications sent him,
+they tell me, but, what is more curious, keeps up with the everyday
+affairs of the world, too.  Whether he hears everything that is said
+with preternatural acuteness, or whether some confidential friend
+visits him in a quiet way, is more than I can tell.  I can make
+nothing more of the noises I hear in his room than my old
+conjectures.  The movements I mention are less frequent, but I often
+hear the plaintive cry,--I observe that it is rarely laughing of
+late;--I never have detected one articulate word, but I never heard
+such tones from anything but a human voice.
+
+There has been, of late, a deference approaching to tenderness, on
+the part of the boarders generally so far as he is concerned.  This
+is doubtless owing to the air of suffering which seems to have
+saddened his look of late.  Either some passion is gnawing at him
+inwardly, or some hidden disease is at work upon him.
+
+--What 's the matter with Little Boston?--said the young man John to
+me one day.--There a'n't much of him, anyhow; but 't seems to me he
+looks peakeder than ever.  The old woman says he's in a bad way, 'n'
+wants a puss to take care of him.  Them pusses that take care of old
+rich folks marry 'em sometimes,--'n' they don't commonly live a
+great while after that.  No, Sir!  I don't see what he wants to die
+for, after he's taken so much trouble to live in such poor
+accommodations as that crooked body of his.  I should like to know
+how his soul crawled into it, 'n' how it's goin' to get out.  What
+business has he to die, I should like to know?  Let Ma'am Allen (the
+gentleman with the diamond) die, if he likes, and be (this is a
+family-magazine); but we a'n't goin' to have him dyin'.  Not by a
+great sight.  Can't do without him anyhow.  A'n't it fun to hear him
+blow off his steam?
+
+I believe the young fellow would take it as a personal insult, if
+the Little Gentleman should show any symptoms of quitting our table
+for a better world.
+
+--In the mean time, what with going to church in company with our
+young lady, and taking every chance I could get to talk with her, I
+have found myself becoming, I will not say intimate, but well
+acquainted with Miss Iris.  There is a certain frankness and
+directness about her that perhaps belong to her artist nature.  For,
+you see, the one thing that marks the true artist is a clear
+perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction from that imperfect
+mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the feeble pictures
+and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or in stone.  A
+true artist, therefore, can hardly fail to have a sharp, well-
+defined mental physiognomy.  Besides this, many young girls have a
+strange audacity blended with their instinctive delicacy.  Even in
+physical daring many of them are a match for boys; whereas you will
+find few among mature women, and especially if they are mothers, who
+do not confess, and not unfrequently proclaim, their timidity.  One
+of these young girls, as many of us hereabouts remember, climbed to
+the top of a jagged, slippery rock lying out in the waves,--an ugly
+height to get up, and a worse one to get down, even for a bold young
+fellow of sixteen.  Another was in the way of climbing tall trees
+for crows' nests,--and crows generally know about how far boys can
+"shin up," and set their household establishments above that high-
+water mark.  Still another of these young ladies I saw for the first
+time in an open boat, tossing on the ocean ground-swell, a mile or
+two from shore, off a lonely island.  She lost all her daring, after
+she had some girls of her own to look out for.
+
+Many blondes are very gentle, yielding in character, impressible,
+unelastic.  But the positive blondes, with the golden tint running
+through them, are often full of character.  They come, probably
+enough, from those deep-bosomed German women that Tacitus portrayed
+in such strong colors.  The negative blondes, or those women whose
+tints have faded out as their line of descent has become
+impoverished, are of various blood, and in them the soul has often
+become pale with that blanching of the hair and loss of color in the
+eyes which makes them approach the character of Albinesses.
+
+I see in this young girl that union of strength and sensibility
+which, when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to
+accompany this combination of active and passive capacity, we call
+genius.  She is not an accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but
+there is always an air in every careless figure she draws, as it
+were of upward aspiration,--the elan of John of Bologna's Mercury,--
+a lift to them, as if they had on winged sandals, like the herald of
+the Gods.  I hear her singing sometimes; and though she evidently is
+not trained, yet is there a wild sweetness in her fitful and
+sometimes fantastic melodies,--such as can come only from the
+inspiration of the moment,--strangely enough, reminding me of those
+long passages I have heard from my little neighbor's room, yet of
+different tone, and by no means to be mistaken for those weird
+harmonies.
+
+I cannot pretend to deny that I am interested in the girl.  Alone,
+unprotected, as I have seen so many young girls left in boarding-
+houses, the centre of all the men's eyes that surround the table,
+watched with jealous sharpness by every woman, most of all by that
+poor relation of our landlady, who belongs to the class of women
+that like to catch others in mischief when they themselves are too
+mature for indiscretions, (as one sees old rogues turn to thief-
+catchers,) one of Nature's gendarmerie, clad in a complete suit of
+wrinkles, the cheapest coat-of-mail against the shafts of the great
+little enemy,--so surrounded, Iris spans this commonplace household-
+life of ours with her arch of beauty, as the rainbow, whose name she
+borrows, looks down on a dreary pasture with its feeding flocks and
+herds of indifferent animals.
+
+These young girls that live in boarding-houses can do pretty much as
+they will.  The female gendarmes are off guard occasionally.  The
+sitting-room has its solitary moments, when any two boarders who
+wish to meet may come together accidentally, (accidentally, I said,
+Madam, and I had not the slightest intention of Italicizing the
+word,) and discuss the social or political questions of the day, or
+any other subject that may prove interesting.  Many charming
+conversations take place at the foot of the stairs, or while one of
+the parties is holding the latch of a door,--in the shadow of
+porticoes, and especially on those outside balconies which some of
+our Southern neighbors call "stoops," the most charming places in
+the world when the moon is just right and the roses and honeysuckles
+are in full blow,--as we used to think in eighteen hundred and never
+mention it.
+
+On such a balcony or "stoop," one evening, I walked with Iris.  We
+were on pretty good terms now, and I had coaxed her arm under mine,-
+-my left arm, of course.  That leaves one's right arm free to defend
+the lovely creature, if the rival--odious wretch! attempt, to ravish
+her from your side.  Likewise if one's heart should happen to beat a
+little, its mute language will not be without its meaning, as you
+will perceive when the arm you hold begins to tremble, a
+circumstance like to occur, if you happen to be a good-looking young
+fellow, and you two have the "stoop" to yourselves.
+
+We had it to ourselves that evening.  The Koh-inoor, as we called
+him, was in a corner with our landlady's daughter.  The young fellow
+John was smoking out in the yard.  The gendarme was afraid of the
+evening air, and kept inside, The young Marylander came to the door,
+looked out and saw us walking together, gave his hat a pull over his
+forehead and stalked off.  I felt a slight spasm, as it were, in the
+arm I held, and saw the girl's head turn over her shoulder for a
+second.  What a kind creature this is!  She has no special interest
+in this youth, but she does not like to see a young fellow going off
+because he feels as if he were not wanted.
+
+She had her locked drawing-book under her arm.--Let me take it,--I
+said.
+
+She gave it to me to carry.
+
+This is full of caricatures of all of us, I am sure,--said I.
+
+She laughed, and said,--No,--not all of you.
+
+I was there, of course?
+
+Why, no,--she had never taken so much pains with me.
+
+Then she would let me see the inside of it?
+
+She would think of it.
+
+Just as we parted, she took a little key from her pocket and handed
+it to me.  This unlocks my naughty book,--she said,--you shall see
+it.  I am not afraid of you.
+
+I don't know whether the last words exactly pleased me.  At any
+rate, I took the book and hurried with it to my room.  I opened it,
+and saw, in a few glances, that I held the heart of Iris in my hand.
+
+--I have no verses for you this month, except these few lines
+suggested by the season.
+
+
+          MIDSUMMER.
+
+Here!  sweep these foolish leaves away,
+I will not crush my brains to-day!
+Look! are the southern curtains drawn?
+Fetch me a fan, and so begone!
+
+Not that,--the palm-tree's rustling leaf
+Brought from a parching coral-reef!
+Its breath is heated;--I would swing
+The broad gray plumes,--the eagle's wing.
+
+I hate these roses' feverish blood!
+Pluck me a half-blown lily-bud,
+A long-stemmed lily from the lake,
+Cold as a coiling water-snake.
+
+Rain me sweet odors on the air,
+And wheel me up my Indian chair,
+And spread some book not overwise
+Flat out before my sleepy eyes.
+
+--Who knows it not,--this dead recoil
+Of weary fibres stretched with toil,
+The pulse that flutters faint and low
+When Summer's seething breezes blow?
+
+O Nature!  bare thy loving breast
+And give thy child one hour of rest,
+One little hour to lie unseen
+Beneath thy scarf of leafy green!
+
+So, curtained by a singing pine,
+Its murmuring voice shall blend with mine,
+Till, lost in dreams, my faltering lay
+In sweeter music dies away.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+          IRIS, HER BOOK
+
+I pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
+By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
+Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!
+
+For Iris had no mother to infold her,
+Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
+Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her.
+
+She had not learned the mystery of awaking
+Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow's aching,
+Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.
+
+Yet lived, wrought, suffered.  Lo, the pictured token!
+Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
+Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?
+
+She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,
+Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
+And talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.
+
+Twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wearing,
+Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
+Then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.
+
+Questioning all things: Why her Lord had sent her?
+What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her?
+Scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.
+
+And then all tears and anguish: Queen of Heaven,
+Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven,
+Save me!  oh, save me!  Shall I die forgiven?
+
+And then--Ah, God!  But nay, it little matters
+Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters,
+The myriad germs that Nature shapes and shatters!
+
+If she had--Well!  She longed, and knew not wherefore
+Had the world nothing she might live to care for?
+No second self to say her evening prayer for?
+
+She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
+Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
+Showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.
+
+Vain?  Let it be so!  Nature was her teacher.
+What if a lonely and unsistered creature
+Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,
+
+Saying, unsaddened,--This shall soon be faded,
+And double-hued the shining tresses braided,
+And all the sunlight of the morning shaded?
+
+--This her poor book is full of saddest follies,
+Of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
+With summer roses twined and wintry hollies.
+
+In the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
+Somewhere, beneath some maiden's tear-dimmed glances
+May fall her little book of dreams and fancies.
+
+Sweet sister!  Iris, who shall never name thee,
+Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
+Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.
+
+Spare her, I pray thee!  If the maid is sleeping,
+Peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping.
+No more!  She leaves her memory in thy keeping.
+
+
+These verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume.
+As I turned the pages, I hesitated for a moment.  Is it quite fair
+to take advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the
+unsunned depths of a young girl's nature, which I can look through,
+as the balloon-voyagers tell us they see from their hanging-baskets
+through the translucent waters which the keenest eye of such as sail
+over them in ships might strive to pierce in vain?  Why has the
+child trusted me with such artless confessions,--self-revelations,
+which might be whispered by trembling lips, under the veil of
+twilight, in sacred confessionals, but which I cannot look at in the
+light of day without a feeling of wronging a sacred confidence?
+
+To all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought.
+She did not know how fearfully she had disclosed herself; she was
+too profoundly innocent.  Her soul was no more ashamed than the fair
+shapes that walked in Eden without a thought of over-liberal
+loveliness.  Having nobody to tell her story to,--having, as she
+said in her verses, no musical instrument to laugh and cry with
+her,--nothing, in short, but the language of pen and pencil,--all
+the veinings of her nature were impressed on these pages as those of
+a fresh leaf are transferred to the blank sheets which inclose it.
+It was the same thing which I remember seeing beautifully shown in a
+child of some four or five years we had one day at our boarding-
+house.  The child was a deaf mute.  But its soul had the inner sense
+that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity which through
+natural organs realizes itself in words.  Only it had to talk with
+its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alternations of
+feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted over its
+face, I have never seen in any other human countenance.
+
+I wonder if something of spiritual transparency is not typified in
+the golden-blonde organization.  There are a great many little
+creatures,--many small fishes, for instance,--which are literally
+transparent, with the exception of some of the internal organs.  The
+heart can be seen beating as if in a case of clouded crystal.  The
+central nervous column with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through
+the whole length of the diaphanous muscles of the body.  Other
+little creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only
+their surface.  Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black,
+beady-eyes and swarthy hue; Judas, in Leonardo's picture, is the
+model of them all.
+
+However this may be, I should say there never had been a book like
+this of Iris,--so full of the heart's silent language, so
+transparent that the heart itself could be seen beating through it.
+I should say there never could have been such a book, but for one
+recollection, which is not peculiar to myself, but is shared by a
+certain number of my former townsmen.  If you think I over-color
+this matter of the young girl's book, hear this, which there are
+others, as I just said, besides myself, will tell you is strictly
+true.
+
+
+THE BOOK OF THE THREE MAIDEN SISTERS.
+
+In the town called Cantabridge, now a city, water-veined and gas
+windpiped, in the street running down to the Bridge, beyond which
+dwelt Sally, told of in a book of a friend of mine, was of old a
+house inhabited by three maidens.  They left no near kinsfolk, I
+believe; whether they did or not, I have no ill to speak of them;
+for they lived and died in all good report and maidenly credit.  The
+house they lived in was of the small, gambrel-roofed cottage
+pattern, after the shape of Esquires' houses, but after the size of
+the dwellings of handicraftsmen.  The lower story was fitted up as a
+shop.  Specially was it provided with one of those half-doors now so
+rarely met with, which are to whole doors as spencers worn by old
+folk are to coats.  They speak of limited commerce united with a
+social or observing disposition--on the part of the shopkeeper,--
+allowing, as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping off such as
+have not the excuse of business to cross the threshold.  On the
+door-posts, at either side, above the half-door, hung certain
+perennial articles of merchandise, of which my memory still has
+hanging among its faded photographs a kind of netted scarf and some
+pairs of thick woollen stockings.  More articles, but not very many,
+were stored inside; and there was one drawer, containing children's
+books, out of which I once was treated to a minute quarto ornamented
+with handsome cuts.  This was the only purchase I ever knew to be
+made at the shop kept by the three maiden ladies, though it is
+probable there were others.  So long as I remember the shop, the
+same scarf and, I should say, the same stockings hung on the door-
+posts.--You think I am exaggerating again, and that shopkeepers
+would not keep the same article exposed for years.  Come to me, the
+Professor, and I will take you in five minutes to a shop in this
+city where I will show you an article hanging now in the very place
+where more than thirty years ago I myself inquired the price of it
+of the present head of the establishment. [ This was a glass
+alembic, which hung up in Daniel Henchman's apothecary shop, corner
+of Cambridge and Chambers streets.]
+
+The three maidens were of comely presence, and one of them had had
+claims to be considered a Beauty.  When I saw them in the old
+meeting-house on Sundays, as they rustled in through the aisles in
+silks and satins, not gay, but more than decent, as I remember them,
+I thought of My Lady Bountiful in the history of "Little King
+Pippin," and of the Madam Blaize of Goldsmith (who, by the way, must
+have taken the hint of it from a pleasant poem, "Monsieur de la
+Palisse," attributed to De la Monnoye, in the collection of French
+songs before me).  There was some story of an old romance in which
+the Beauty had played her part.  Perhaps they all had had lovers;
+for, as I said, they were shapely and seemly personages, as I
+remember them; but their lives were out of the flower and in the
+berry at the time of my first recollections.
+
+One after another they all three dropped away, objects of kindly
+attention to the good people round, leaving little or almost
+nothing, and nobody to inherit it.  Not absolutely nothing, of
+course.  There must have been a few old dresses--perhaps some bits
+of furniture, a Bible, and the spectacles the good old souls read it
+through, and little keepsakes, such as make us cry to look at, when
+we find them in old drawers;--such relics there must have been.  But
+there was more.  There was a manuscript of some hundred pages,
+closely written, in which the poor things had chronicled for many
+years the incidents of their daily life.  After their death it was
+passed round somewhat freely, and fell into my hands.  How I have
+cried and laughed and colored over it!  There was nothing in it to
+be ashamed of, perhaps there was nothing in it to laugh at, but such
+a picture of the mode of being of poor simple good old women I do
+believe was never drawn before.  And there were all the smallest
+incidents recorded, such as do really make up humble life, but which
+die out of all mere literary memoirs, as the houses where the
+Egyptians or the Athenians lived crumble and leave only their
+temples standing.  I know, for instance, that on a given day of a
+certain year, a kindly woman, herself a poor widow, now, I trust,
+not without special mercies in heaven for her good deeds,--for I
+read her name on a proper tablet in the churchyard a week ago,--sent
+a fractional pudding from her own table to the Maiden Sisters, who,
+I fear, from the warmth and detail of their description, were
+fasting, or at least on short allowance, about that time.  I know
+who sent them the segment of melon, which in her riotous fancy one
+of them compared to those huge barges to which we give the
+ungracious name of mudscows.  But why should I illustrate further
+what it seems almost a breach of confidence to speak of?  Some kind
+friend, who could challenge a nearer interest than the curious
+strangers into whose hands the book might fall, at last claimed it,
+and I was glad that it should be henceforth sealed to common eyes.
+I learned from it that every good and, alas! every evil act we do
+may slumber unforgotten even in some earthly record.  I got a new
+lesson in that humanity which our sharp race finds it so hard to
+learn.  The poor widow, fighting hard to feed and clothe and educate
+her children, had not forgotten the poorer ancient maidens.
+I remembered it the other day, as I stood by her place of rest, and
+I felt sure that it was remembered elsewhere.  I know there are
+prettier words than pudding, but I can't help it,--the pudding went
+upon the record, I feel sure, with the mite which was cast into the
+treasury by that other poor widow whose deed the world shall
+remember forever, and with the coats and garments which the good
+women cried over, when Tabitha, called by interpretation Dorcas, lay
+dead in the upper chamber, with her charitable needlework strewed
+around her.
+
+--Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters.  You will believe me more
+readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one
+that lay open before me.  Sometimes it was a poem that held it,
+sometimes a drawing, angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere
+hieroglyphic symbol of which I could make nothing.  A rag of cloud
+on one page, as I remember, with a streak of red zigzagging out of
+it across the paper as naturally as a crack runs through a China
+bowl.  On the next page a dead bird,--some little favorite, I
+suppose; for it was worked out with a special love, and I saw on the
+leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life I have had a
+letter sealed,--a round spot where the paper is slightly corrugated,
+and, if there is writing there, the letters are somewhat faint and
+blurred.  Most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic
+traceries.  It was strange to me at first to see how often she
+introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,--for it
+seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none
+too little cared for by Nature to be without its beauty for her
+artist eye and pencil.  By the side of the garden-flowers,--of
+Spring's curled darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to
+sketching maidens, of flower-de-luces and morning-glories, nay,
+oftener than these, and more tenderly caressed by the colored brush
+that rendered them,--were those common growths which fling
+themselves to be crushed under our feet and our wheels, making
+themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that we forget each
+of them is a ray of the Divine beauty.
+
+Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,--just as we
+see them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the
+kindling sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens
+the fields, to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems
+fair to loving eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round
+with milk-white rays; the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale
+blue flowers aflame, one after another, sparingly, as the lights are
+kindled in the candelabra of decaying palaces where the heirs of
+dethroned monarchs are dying out; the red and white clovers, the
+broad, flat leaves of the plantain,--"the white man's foot," as the
+Indians called it,--the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping
+plant which we call "knot-grass," and which loves its life so dearly
+that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings
+to the cracks of the pavement;--all these plants, and many more, she
+wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.--On one of the pages
+were some musical notes.  I touched them from curiosity on a piano
+belonging to one of our boarders.  Strange!  There are passages that
+I have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if
+they were gasping for words to interpret them.  She must have heard
+the strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my
+neighbor's chamber.  The illuminated border she had traced round the
+page that held these notes took the place of the words they seemed
+to be aching for.  Above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-
+hued, anxious and jaded and sullen, if you can imagine such an
+expression in water.  On one side an Alpine needle, as it were, of
+black basalt, girdled with snow.  On the other a threaded waterfall.
+The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had a strange look,--
+one would say the cliff was bleeding;--perhaps she did not mean it.
+Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with his
+wings spread over some unseen object.--And on the very next page a
+procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page
+of Fuller's "Holy War," in which I recognized without difficulty
+every boarder at our table in all the glory of the most resplendent
+caricature--three only excepted,--the Little Gentleman, myself, and
+one other.
+
+I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the
+girl's little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.--There is
+a left arm again, though;--no,--that is from the "Fighting
+Gladiator," the "Jeune Heros combattant" of the Louvre;--there is the
+broad ring of the shield.  From a cast, doubtless.  [The separate
+casts of the "Gladiator's" arm look immense; but in its place the
+limb looks light, almost slender,--such is the perfection of that
+miraculous marble.  I never felt as if I touched the life of the old
+Greeks until I looked on that statue.]--Here is something very odd,
+to be sure.  An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures!  What
+could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy?  She
+has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy
+grace.  A Bactrian camel lying under a palm.  A dromedary flashing
+up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the
+desert."  A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the
+forehand, light in the hind-quarter.  [The buffalo is the lion of
+the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough
+collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast.
+And here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering
+curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood under
+their white feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons standing on
+one foot like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold
+stare of monumental effigies.--A very odd page indeed!  Not a
+creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a
+mean figure to look at.  You can make your own comment; I am
+fanciful, you know.  I believe she is trying to idealize what we
+vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light
+of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of
+beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections,
+though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like
+the circle and ellipse.  At any rate, I cannot help referring this
+paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head
+connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.
+--That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine.  I
+believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,
+--if it does not really get freed or half freed from her own.  Did
+you ever see a case of catalepsy?  You know what I mean,--transient
+loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position
+in which they are put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure.  She had
+been talking with him and listening to him one day when the boarders
+moved from the table nearly all at once.  But she sat as before, her
+cheek resting on her hand, her amber eyes wide open and still.  I
+went to her, she was breathing as usual, and her heart was beating
+naturally enough,--but she did not answer.  I bent her arm; it was
+as plastic as softened wag, and kept the place I gave it.--This
+will never do, though, and I sprinkled a few drops of water on her
+forehead.  She started and looked round.--I have been in a dream,--
+she said;--I feel as if all my strength were in this arm;--give me
+your hand!--She took my right hand in her left, which looked soft
+and white enough, but--Good Heaven!  I believe she will crack my
+bones!  All the nervous power in her body must have flashed through
+those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,--she
+who could hardly glove herself when in her common health.  Iris
+turned pale, and the tears came to her eyes;--she saw she had given
+pain.  Then she trembled, and might have fallen but for me;--the
+poor little soul had been in one of those trances that belong to the
+spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly those of women.
+
+To come back to this wondrous book of Iris.  Two pages faced each
+other which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind.
+On the left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked
+with a single bird.  No trace of earth, but still the winged
+creature seemed to be soaring upward and upward.  Facing it, one of
+those black dungeons such as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured.
+I am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of his, out of
+which the Opium-Eater got his nightmare vision, described by another
+as "cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous and forbidden
+things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions among
+mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscriptions."
+Such a black dungeon faced the page that held the blue sky and the
+single bird; at the bottom of it something was coiled,--what, and
+whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not make out.
+
+I told you the young girl's soul was in this book.  As I turned over
+the last leaves I could not help starting.  There were all sorts of
+faces among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders
+that ran round the pages.  They had mostly the outline of childish
+or womanly or manly beauty, without very distinct individuality.
+But at last it seemed to me that some of them were taking on a look
+not wholly unfamiliar to me; there were features that did not seem
+new.--Can it be so?  Was there ever such innocence in a creature so
+full of life?  She tells her heart's secrets as a three-years-old
+child betrays itself without need of being questioned!  This was no
+common miss, such as are turned out in scores from the young-lady-
+factories, with parchments warranting them accomplished and
+virtuous,--in case anybody should question the fact.  I began to
+understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret of a
+real femme incomprise?--for such there are, though they are not the
+ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.
+
+Poets are never young, in one sense.  Their delicate ear hears the
+far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel
+towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by
+them.  A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.  I
+have frequently seen children, long exercised by pain and
+exhaustion, whose features had a strange look of advanced age.  Too
+often one meets such in our charitable institutions.  Their faces
+are saddened and wrinkled, as if their few summers were threescore
+years and ten.
+
+And so, many youthful poets have written as if their hearts were old
+before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool
+and saddening as that of evening in more common lives.  The profound
+melancholy of those lines of Shelley,
+
+     "I could lie down like a tired child
+      And weep away the life of care
+      Which I have borne and yet must bear."
+
+came from a heart, as he says, "too soon grown old,"--at twenty-six
+years, as dull people count time, even when they talk of poets.
+
+I know enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,--only this
+gift of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as
+well as in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of
+feeling and imagery that takes me by surprise.  And then besides,
+and most of all, I am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy
+confidence in me.  Perhaps I owe it to my--Well, no matter!  How one
+must love the editor who first calls him the venerable So-and-So!
+
+--I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down.  The world is
+always ready to receive talent with open arms.  Very often it does
+not know what to do with genius.  Talent is a docile creature.  It
+bows its head meekly while the world slips the collar over it.  It
+backs into the shafts like a lamb.  It draws its load cheerfully,
+and is patient of the bit and of the whip.  But genius is always
+impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train.
+
+Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius,--namely,
+that it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will, and
+therefore more distinctly human in its character.  Genius, on the
+other hand, is much more like those instincts which govern the
+admirable movements of the lower creatures, and therefore seems to
+have something of the lower or animal character.  A goose flies by a
+chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.  A poet,
+like the goose, sails without visible landmarks to unexplored
+regions of truth, which philosophy has yet to lay down on its atlas.
+The philosopher gets his track by observation; the poet trusts to
+his inner sense, and makes the straighter and swifter line.
+
+And yet, to look at it in another light, is not even the lowest
+instinct more truly divine than any voluntary human act done by the
+suggestion of reason?  What is a bee's architecture but an
+unobstructed divine thought?--what is a builder's approximative rule
+but an obstructed thought of the Creator, a mutilated and imperfect
+copy of some absolute rule Divine Wisdom has established,
+transmitted through a human soul as an image through clouded glass?
+
+Talent is a very common family-trait; genius belongs rather to
+individuals;--just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family,
+but rarely a whole brood of either.  Talent is often to be envied,
+and genius very commonly to be pitied.  It stands twice the chance
+of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute.
+It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass
+against somebody's vested ideas,--blasphemy against somebody's O'm,
+or intangible private truth.
+
+--What is the use of my weighing out antitheses in this way, like a
+rhetorical grocer?--You know twenty men of talent, who are making
+their way in the world; you may, perhaps, know one man of genius,
+and very likely do not want to know any more.  For a divine
+instinct, such as drives the goose southward and the poet
+heavenward, is a hard thing to manage, and proves too strong for
+many whom it possesses.  It must have been a terrible thing to have
+a friend like Chatterton or Burns.  And here is a being who
+certainly has more than talent, at once poet and artist in tendency,
+if not yet fairly developed,--a woman, too;--and genius grafted on
+womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem, as you may see
+a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which cannot keep pace
+with its evolution.
+
+I think now you know something of this young person.  She wants
+nothing but an atmosphere to expand in.  Now and then one meets with
+a nature for which our hard, practical New England life is obviously
+utterly incompetent.  It comes up, as a Southern seed, dropped by
+accident in one of our gardens, finds itself trying to grow and blow
+into flower among the homely roots and the hardy shrubs that
+surround it.  There is no question that certain persons who are born
+among us find themselves many degrees too far north.  Tropical by
+organization, they cannot fight for life with our eastern and
+northwestern breezes without losing the color and fragrance into
+which their lives would have blossomed in the latitude of myrtles
+and oranges.  Strange effects are produced by suffering any living
+thing to be developed under conditions such as Nature had not
+intended for it.  A French physiologist confined some tadpoles under
+water in the dark.  Removed from the natural stimulus of light, they
+did not develop legs and arms at the proper period of their growth,
+and so become frogs; they swelled and spread into gigantic tadpoles.
+I have seen a hundred colossal human tadpoles, overgrown Zarvce or
+embryos; nay, I am afraid we Protestants should look on a
+considerable proportion of the Holy Father's one hundred and thirty-
+nine millions as spiritual larvae, sculling about in the dark by the
+aid of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs,
+and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven
+into the lungs made to receive it.  Of course we never try to keep
+young souls in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or
+two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been
+bred and fed!  Never!  Never.  Never?
+
+Now to go back to our plant.  You may know, that, for the earlier
+stages of development of almost any vegetable, you only want air,
+water, light, and warmth.  But by-and-by, if it is to have special
+complex principles as a part of its organization, they must be
+supplied by the soil;--your pears will crack, if the root of the
+tree gets no iron,--your asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do.
+Just at the period of adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to
+come into flower and to set its fruit.  Then it is that many young
+natures, having exhausted the spiritual soil round them of all it
+contains of the elements they demand, wither away, undeveloped and
+uncolored, unless they are transplanted.
+
+Pray for these dear young souls!  This is the second natural birth;-
+for I do not speak of those peculiar religious experiences which
+form the point of transition in many lives between the consciousness
+of a general relation to the Divine nature and a special personal
+relation.  The litany should count a prayer for them in the list of
+its supplications; masses should be said for them as for souls in
+purgatory; all good Christians should remember them as they remember
+those in peril through travel or sickness or in warfare.
+
+I would transport this child to Rome at once, if I had my will.  She
+should ripen under an Italian sun.  She should walk under the
+frescoed vaults of palaces, until her colors deepened to those of
+Venetian beauties, and her forms were perfected into rivalry with
+the Greek marbles, and the east wind was out of her soil.  Has she
+not exhausted this lean soil of the elements her growing nature
+requires?
+
+I do not know.  The magnolia grows and comes into full flower on
+Cape Ann, many degrees out of its proper region.  I was riding once
+along that delicious road between the hills and the sea, when we
+passed a thicket where there seemed to be a chance of finding it.
+In five minutes I had fallen on the trees in full blossom, and
+filled my arms with the sweet, resplendent flowers.  I could not
+believe I was in our cold, northern Essex, which, in the dreary
+season when I pass its slate-colored, unpainted farm-houses, and
+huge, square, windy, 'squire-built "mansions," looks as brown and
+unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all trodden out and the
+colored fringe worn from all its border.
+
+If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a
+poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well?  Yes,
+but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak
+of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders,
+is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of
+imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread
+its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone
+of humanity?
+
+Take the poet.  On the one hand, I believe that a person with the
+poetical faculty finds material everywhere.  The grandest objects of
+sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations.  The
+sky, the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death love, the hope
+and vision of eternity,--these are images that write themselves in
+poetry in every soul which has anything of the divine gift.
+
+On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished
+life, in distinction from a rich and suggestive one.  Which our
+common New England life might be considered, I will not decide.  But
+there are some things I think the poet misses in our western Eden.
+I trust it is not unpatriotic to mention them in this point of view
+as they come before us in so many other aspects.
+
+There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which
+we grow.  At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked
+up an Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow.  At Canoe Meadow, in the
+Berkshire Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads.  So everywhere
+Indian arrowheads.  Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who
+knows? who cares?  There is no history to the red race,--there is
+hardly an individual in it;--a few instincts on legs and holding a
+tomahawk--there is the Indian of all time.  The story of one red ant
+is the story of all red ants.  So, the poet, in trying to wing his
+way back through the life that has kindled, flitted, and faded along
+our watercourses and on our southern hillsides for unknown
+generations, finds nothing to breathe or fly in; he meets
+
+    "A vast vacuity!  all unawares,
+     Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
+     Ten thousand fathom deep."
+
+But think of the Old World,--that part of it which is the seat of
+ancient civilization!  The stakes of the Britons' stockades are
+still standing in the bed of the Thames.  The ploughman turns up an
+old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the
+time of the Caesars.  In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to
+be of yesterday,--Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding
+newcomer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls
+of Fiesole or Volterra.  It makes a man human to live on these old
+humanized soils.  He cannot help marching in step with his kind in
+the rear of such a procession.  They say a dead man's hand cures
+swellings, if laid on them.  There is nothing like the dead cold
+hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the
+solemn flow of the life of our race.  Rousseau came out of one of
+his sad self-torturing fits, as he cast his eye on the arches of the
+old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.
+
+I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving
+railroad village.  The new "depot," the smartly-painted pine houses,
+the spacious brick hotel, the white meeting-house, and the row of
+youthful and leggy trees before it, are exhilarating.  They speak of
+progress, and the time when there shall be a city, with a His Honor
+the Mayor, in the place of their trim but transient architectural
+growths.  Pardon me, if I prefer the pyramids.  They seem to me
+crystals formed from a stronger solution of humanity than the
+steeple of the new meeting-house.  I may be wrong, but the Tiber has
+a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the Pons Alius, even
+more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles eddying round the
+piles of West Boston Bridge.
+
+Then, again, we Yankees are a kind of gypsies,--a mechanical and
+migratory race.  A poet wants a home.  He can dispense with an
+apple-parer and a reaping-machine.  I feel this more for others than
+for myself, for the home of my birth and childhood has been as yet
+exempted from the change which has invaded almost everything around
+it.
+
+--Pardon me a short digression.  To what small things our memory and
+our affections attach themselves!  I remember, when I was a child,
+that one of the girls planted some Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs in the
+southwest gorner of our front-yard.  Well, I left the paternal roof
+and wandered in other lands, and learned to think in the words of
+strange people.  But after many years, as I looked on the little
+front-yard again, it occurred to me that there used to be some Star-
+of-Bethlehems in the southwest corner.  The grass was tall there,
+and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and
+glossier.  Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he
+hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of
+Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my
+monumental memorial-flower.  Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly
+in her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they
+are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by
+the shade of the elms and rooted in the matted turf.
+
+Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial
+as that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil,
+you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time.  Even a stone
+with a whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the
+back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory.
+This intussusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their
+faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured
+in the material structure of the thinking centre itself.  In the
+very core of the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the
+soul, is a small mineral deposit, consisting, as I have seen it in
+the microscope, of grape-like masses of crystalline matter.
+
+But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the
+Star-of-Bethlehems, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest
+home-feeling.  Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the
+dwelling of pleasant old Neighbor Walrus.  I remember the sweet
+honeysuckle that I saw in flower against the wall of his house a few
+months ago, as long as I remember the sky and stars.  That clump of
+peonies, butting their purple heads through the soil every spring in
+just the same circle, and by-and-by unpacking their hard balls of
+buds in flowers big enough to make a double handful of leaves, has
+come up in just that place, Neighbor Walrus tells me, for more years
+than I have passed on this planet.  It is a rare privilege in our
+nomadic state to find the home of one's childhood and its immediate
+neighborhood thus unchanged.  Many born poets, I am afraid, flower
+poorly in song, or not at all, because they have been too often
+transplanted.
+
+Then a good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;--their
+voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery
+without elasticity or oil.  I wish it were fair to print a letter a
+young girl, about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since.  "I
+am *** *** ***," she says, and tells her whole name outright.  Ah!--
+said I, when I read that first frank declaration,--you are one of
+the right sort!--She was.  A winged creature among close-clipped
+barn door fowl.  How tired the poor girl was of the dull life about
+her,--the old woman's "skeleton hand" at the window opposite,
+drawing her curtains,--"Ma'am shooing away the hens,"--the vacuous
+country eyes staring at her as only country eyes can stare,--a
+routine of mechanical duties, and the soul's half-articulated cry
+for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,--pray for her, and for all
+such!  Faith often cures their longings; but it is so hard to give a
+soul to heaven that has not first been trained in the fullest and
+sweetest human affections!  Too often they fling their hearts away
+on unworthy objects.  Too often they pine in a secret discontent,
+which spreads its leaden cloud over the morning of their youth.  The
+immeasurable distance between one of these delicate natures and the
+average youths among whom is like to be her only choice makes one's
+heart ache.  How many women are born too finely organized in sense
+and soul for the highway they must walk with feet unshod!  Life is
+adjusted to the wants of the stronger sex.  There are plenty of
+torrents to be crossed in its journey; but their stepping-stones are
+measured by the stride of man, and not of woman.
+
+Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart.  So says
+the great medical authority, Laennec.  Incurable cases of this kind
+used to find their hospitals in convents.  We have the disease in
+New England,--but not the hospitals.  I don't like to think of it.
+I will not believe our young Iris is going to die out in this way.
+Providence will find her some great happiness, or affliction, or
+duty,--and which would be best for her, I cannot tell.  One thing is
+sure: the interest she takes in her little neighbor is getting to be
+more engrossing than ever.  Something is the matter with him, and
+she knows it, and I think worries herself about it.
+
+I wonder sometimes how so fragile and distorted a frame has kept the
+fiery spirit that inhabits it so long its tenant.  He accounts for
+it in his own way.
+
+The air of the Old World is good for nothing, he said, one day.--
+Used up, Sir,--breathed over and over again.  You must come to this
+side, Sir, for an atmosphere fit to breathe nowadays.  Did not
+worthy Mr. Higginson say that a breath of New England's air is
+better than a sup of Old England's ale?  I ought to have died when I
+was a boy, Sir; but I could n't die in this Boston air,--and I think
+I shall have to go to New York one of these days, when it's time for
+me to drop this bundle,--or to New Orleans, where they have the
+yellow fever,--or to Philadelphia, where they have so many doctors.
+
+This was some time ago; but of late he has seemed, as I have before
+said, to be ailing.  An experienced eye, such as I think I may call
+mine, can tell commonly whether a man is going to die, or not, long
+before he or his friends are alarmed about him.  I don't like it.
+
+Iris has told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her
+family, and that she is afraid she has it.  Those who are so endowed
+look upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him.  According to
+the degree to which it covers him, his death will be near or more
+remote.  It is an awful faculty; but science gives one too much like
+it.  Luckily for our friends, most of us who have the scientific
+second-sight school ourselves not to betray our knowledge by word or
+look.
+
+Day by day, as the Little Gentleman comes to the table, it seems to
+me that the shadow of some approaching change falls darker and
+darker over his countenance.  Nature is struggling with something,
+and I am afraid she is under in the wrestling-match.  You do not
+care much, perhaps, for my particular conjectures as to the nature
+of his difficulty.  I should say, however, from the sudden flushes
+to which he is subject, and certain other marks which, as an expert,
+I know how to interpret, that his heart was in trouble; but then he
+presses his hand to the right side, as if there were the centre of
+his uneasiness.
+
+When I say difficulty about the heart, I do not mean any of those
+sentimental maladies of that organ which figure more largely in
+romances than on the returns which furnish our Bills of Mortality.
+I mean some actual change in the organ itself, which may carry him
+off by slow and painful degrees, or strike him down with one huge
+pang and only time for a single shriek,--as when the shot broke
+through the brave Captain Nolan's breast, at the head of the Light
+Brigade at Balaklava, and with a loud cry he dropped dead from his
+saddle.
+
+I thought it only fair to say something of what I apprehended to
+some who were entitled to be warned.  The landlady's face fell when
+I mentioned my fears.
+
+Poor man!--she said.--And will leave the best room empty!  Has n't
+he got any sisters or nieces or anybody to see to his things, if he
+should be took away?  Such a sight of cases, full of everything!
+Never thought of his failin' so suddin.  A complication of diseases,
+she expected.  Liver-complaint one of 'em?
+
+After this first involuntary expression of the too natural selfish
+feelings, (which we must not judge very harshly, unless we happen to
+be poor widows ourselves, with children to keep filled, covered, and
+taught,--rents high,--beef eighteen to twenty cents per pound,)--
+after this first squeak of selfishness, followed by a brief movement
+of curiosity, so invariable in mature females, as to the nature of
+the complaint which threatens the life of a friend or any person who
+may happen to be mentioned as ill,--the worthy soul's better
+feelings struggled up to the surface, and she grieved for the doomed
+invalid, until a tear or two came forth and found their way down a
+channel worn for them since the early days of her widowhood.
+
+Oh, this dreadful, dreadful business of being the prophet of evil!
+Of all the trials which those who take charge of others' health and
+lives have to undergo, this is the most painful.  It is all so plain
+to the practised eye!--and there is the poor wife, the doting
+mother, who has never suspected anything, or at least has clung
+always to the hope which you are just going to wrench away from her!
+--I must tell Iris that I think her poor friend is in a precarious
+state.  She seems nearer to him than anybody.
+
+I did tell her.  Whatever emotion it produced, she kept a still
+face, except, perhaps, a little trembling of the lip.--Could I be
+certain that there was any mortal complaint?--Why, no, I could not
+be certain; but it looked alarming to me.--He shall have some of my
+life,--she said.
+
+I suppose this to have been a fancy of hers, or a kind of magnetic
+power she could give out;--at any rate, I cannot help thinking she
+wills her strength away from herself, for she has lost vigor and
+color from that day.  I have sometimes thought he gained the force
+she lost; but this may have been a whim, very probably.
+
+One day she came suddenly to me, looking deadly pale.  Her lips
+moved, as if she were speaking; but I could not at first hear a
+word.  Her hair looked strangely, as if lifting itself, and her eyes
+were full of wild light.  She sunk upon a chair, and I thought was
+falling into one of her trances.  Something had frozen her blood
+with fear; I thought, from what she said, half audibly, that she
+believed she had seen a shrouded figure.
+
+That night, at about eleven o'clock, I was sent for to see the
+Little Gentleman, who was taken suddenly ill.  Bridget, the servant,
+went before me with a light.  The doors were both unfastened, and I
+found myself ushered, without hindrance, into the dim light of the
+mysterious apartment I had so longed to enter.
+
+I found these stanzas in the young girl's book among many others.  I
+give them as characterizing the tone of her sadder moments.
+
+
+          UNDER THE VIOLETS.
+
+Her hands are cold; her face is white;
+No more her pulses come and go;
+Her eyes are shut to life and light;
+Fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
+And lay her where the violets blow.
+
+But not beneath a graven stone,
+To plead for tears with alien eyes;
+A slender cross of wood alone
+Shall say, that here a maiden lies
+In peace beneath the peaceful skies.
+
+And gray old trees of hugest limb
+Shall wheel their circling shadows round
+To make the scorching sunlight dim
+That drinks the greenness from the ground,
+And drop their dead leaves on her mound.
+
+When o'er their boughs the squirrels run,
+And through their leaves the robins call,
+And, ripening in the autumn sun,
+The acorns and the chestnuts fall,
+Doubt not that she will heed them all.
+
+For her the morning choir shall sing
+Its matins from the branches high,
+And every minstrel voice of spring,
+That trills beneath the April sky,
+Shall greet her with its earliest cry.
+
+When, turning round their dial-track,
+Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
+Her little mourners, clad in black,
+The crickets, sliding through the grass,
+Shall pipe for her an evening mass.
+
+At last the rootlets of the trees
+Shall find the prison where she lies,
+And bear the buried dust they seize
+In leaves and blossoms to the skies.
+So may the soul that warmed it rise!
+
+If any, born of kindlier blood,
+Should ask, What maiden lies below?
+Say only this: A tender bud,
+That tried to blossom in the snow,
+Lies withered where the violets blow.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+You will know, perhaps, in the course of half an hour's reading,
+what has been haunting my hours of sleep and waking for months.  I
+cannot tell, of course, whether you are a nervous person or not.
+If, however, you are such a person,--if it is late at night,--if all
+the rest of the household have gone off to bed,--if the wind is
+shaking your windows as if a human hand were rattling the sashes,--
+if your candle or lamp is low and will soon burn out,--let me advise
+you to take up some good quiet sleepy volume, or attack the
+"Critical Notices" of the last Quarterly and leave this to be read
+by daylight, with cheerful voices round, and people near by who
+would hear you, if you slid from your chair and came down in a lump
+on the floor.
+
+I do not say that your heart will beat as mine did, I am willing to
+confess, when I entered the dim chamber.  Did I not tell you that I
+was sensitive and imaginative, and that I had lain awake with
+thinking what were the strange movements and sounds which I heard
+late at night in my little neighbor's apartment?  It had come to
+that pass that I was truly unable to separate what I had really
+heard from what I had dreamed in those nightmares to which I have
+been subject, as before mentioned.  So, when I walked into the room,
+and Bridget, turning back, closed the door and left me alone with
+its tenant, I do believe you could have grated a nutmeg on my skin,
+such a "goose-flesh" shiver ran over it.  It was not fear, but what
+I call nervousness,--unreasoning, but irresistible; as when, for
+instance, one looking at the sun going down says, "I will count
+fifty before it disappears"; and as he goes on and it becomes
+doubtful whether he will reach the number, he gets strangely
+flurried, and his imagination pictures life and death and heaven and
+hell as the issues depending on the completion or non-completion of
+the fifty he is counting.  Extreme curiosity will excite some people
+as much as fear, or what resembles fear, acts on some other less
+impressible natures.
+
+I may find myself in the midst of strange facts in this little
+conjurer's room.  Or, again, there may be nothing in this poor
+invalid's chamber but some old furniture, such as they say came over
+in the Mayflower.  All this is just what I mean to, find out while
+I am looking at the Little Gentleman, who has suddenly become my
+patient.  The simplest things turn out to be unfathomable mysteries;
+the most mysterious appearances prove to be the most commonplace
+objects in disguise.
+
+I wonder whether the boys who live in Roxbury and Dorchester are
+ever moved to tears or filled with silent awe as they look upon the
+rocks and fragments of "puddingstone" abounding in those localities.
+I have my suspicions that those boys "heave a stone" or "fire a
+brickbat," composed of the conglomerate just mentioned, without any
+more tearful or philosophical contemplations than boys of less
+favored regions expend on the same performance.  Yet a lump of
+puddingstone is a thing to look at, to think about, to study over,
+to dream upon, to go crazy with, to beat one's brains out against.
+Look at that pebble in it.  From what cliff was it broken?  On what
+beach rolled by the waves of what ocean?  How and when imbedded in
+soft ooze, which itself became stone, and by-and-by was lifted into
+bald summits and steep cliffs, such as you may see on Meetinghouse-
+Hill any day--yes, and mark the scratches on their faces left when
+the boulder-carrying glaciers planed the surface of the continent
+with such rough tools that the storms have not worn the marks out of
+it with all the polishing of ever so many thousand years?
+
+Or as you pass a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it
+any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time.
+Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are
+fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish.  One
+of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an
+opaque mass in its centre.  And while you are looking, the opaque
+mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like
+a forming planet,--life beginning in the microcosm, as in the great
+worlds of the firmament, with the revolution that turns the surface
+in ceaseless round to the source of life and light.
+
+A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk!  Before you have solved their
+mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified
+slag, or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces.  Mysteries
+are common enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and
+Dorchester think of "brickbats" and the spawn of creatures that
+live in roadside puddles.
+
+But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly
+plain, when we can get at them so as to turn them over.  How many
+ghosts that "thick men's blood with cold" prove to be shirts hung
+out to dry!  How many mermaids have been made out of seals!  How
+many times have horse-mackerels been taken for the sea-serpent!
+
+--Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the
+matter with the patient.  That is what I say to myself, as I draw a
+chair to the bedside.  The bed is an old-fashioned, dark mahogany
+four-poster.  It was never that which made the noise of something
+moving.  It is too heavy to be pushed about the room.--The Little
+Gentleman was sitting, bolstered up by pillows, with his hands
+clasped and their united palms resting on the back of the head, one
+of the three or four positions specially affected by persons whose
+breathing is difficult from disease of the heart or other causes.
+
+Sit down, Sir,--he said,--sit down!  I have come to the hill
+Difficulty, Sir, and am fighting my way up.--His speech was
+laborious and interrupted.
+
+Don't talk,--I said,--except to answer my questions.--And I
+proceeded to "prospect" for the marks of some local mischief, which
+you know is at the bottom of all these attacks, though we do not
+always find it.  I suppose I go to work pretty much like other
+professional folks of my temperament.  Thus:
+
+Wrist, if you please.--I was on his right side, but he presented
+his left wrist, crossing it over the other.--I begin to count,
+holding watch in left hand.  One, two, three, four,--What a handsome
+hand! wonder if that splendid stone is a carbuncle.--One, two,
+three, four, five, six, seven,--Can't see much, it is so dark,
+except one white object.--One, two, three, four,--Hang it!  eighty
+or ninety in the minute, I guess.--Tongue, if you please.--Tongue
+is put out.  Forget to look at it, or, rather, to take any
+particular notice of it;--but what is that white object, with the
+long arm stretching up as if pointing to the sky, just as Vesalius
+and Spigelius and those old fellows used to put their skeletons?  I
+don't think anything of such objects, you know; but what should he
+have it in his chamber for?  As I had found his pulse irregular and
+intermittent, I took out a stethoscope, which is a pocket-spyglass
+for looking into people's chests with your ears, and laid it over
+the place where the heart beats.  I missed the usual beat of the
+organ.--How is this?--I said,--where is your heart gone to?--He
+took the stethoscope and shifted it across to the right side; there
+was a displacement of the organ.--I am ill-packed,--he said;--there
+was no room for my heart in its place as it is with other men.--God
+help him!
+
+It is hard to draw the line between scientific curiosity and the
+desire for the patient's sake to learn all the details of his
+condition.  I must look at this patient's chest, and thump it and
+listen to it.  For this is a case of ectopia cordis, my boy,--
+displacement of the heart; and it is n't every day you get a chance
+to overhaul such an interesting malformation.  And so I managed to
+do my duty and satisfy my curiosity at the same time.  The torso was
+slight and deformed; the right arm attenuated,--the left full,
+round, and of perfect symmetry.  It had run away with the life of
+the other limbs,--a common trick enough of Nature's, as I told you
+before.  If you see a man with legs withered from childhood, keep
+out of the way of his arms, if you have a quarrel with him.  He has
+the strength of four limbs in two; and if he strikes you, it is an
+arm-blow plus a kick administered from the shoulder instead of the
+haunch, where it should have started from.
+
+Still examining him as a patient, I kept my eyes about me to search
+all parts of the chamber and went on with the double process, as
+before.--Heart hits as hard as a fist,--bellows-sound over mitral
+valves (professional terms you need not attend to).--What the deuse
+is that long case for?  Got his witch grandmother mummied in it?
+And three big mahogany presses,--hey?--A diabolical suspicion came
+over me which I had had once before,--that he might be one of our
+modern alchemists,--you understand, make gold, you know, or what
+looks like it, sometimes with the head of a king or queen or of
+Liberty to embellish one side of the piece.--Don't I remember
+hearing him shut a door and lock it once?  What do you think was
+kept under that lock?  Let's have another look at his hand, to see
+if there are any calluses.
+
+One can tell a man's business, if it is a handicraft, very often by
+just taking a look at his open hand.  Ah!  Four calluses at the end
+of the fingers of the right hand.  None on those of the left.  Ah,
+ha!  What do those mean?
+
+All this seems longer in the telling, of course, than it was in
+fact.  While I was making these observations of the objects around
+me, I was also forming my opinion as to the kind of case with which
+I had to deal.
+
+There are three wicks, you know, to the lamp of a man's life: brain,
+blood, and breath.  Press the brain a little, its light goes out,
+followed by both the others.  Stop the heart a minute and out go all
+three of the wicks.  Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently
+the fluid ceases to supply the other centres of flame, and all is
+soon stagnation, cold, and darkness.  The "tripod of life" a French
+physiologist called these three organs.  It is all clear enough
+which leg of the tripod is going to break down here.  I could tell
+you exactly what the difficulty is;--which would be as intelligible
+and amusing as a watchmaker's description of a diseased timekeeper
+to a ploughman.  It is enough to say, that I found just what I
+expected to, and that I think this attack is only the prelude of
+more serious consequences,--which expression means you very well
+know what.
+
+And now the secrets of this life hanging on a thread must surely
+come out.  If I have made a mystery where there was none, my
+suspicions will be shamed, as they have often been before.  If there
+is anything strange, my visits will clear it up.
+
+I sat an hour or two by the side of the Little Gentleman's bed,
+after giving him some henbane to quiet his brain, and some foxglove,
+which an imaginative French professor has called the "Opium of the
+Heart."  Under their influence he gradually fell into an uneasy,
+half-waking slumber, the body fighting hard for every breath, and
+the mind wandering off in strange fancies and old recollections,
+which escaped from his lips in broken sentences.
+
+--The last of 'em,--he said,--the last of 'em all,--thank God!  And
+the grave he lies in will look just as well as if he had been
+straight.  Dig it deep, old Martin, dig it deep,--and let it be as
+long as other folks' graves.  And mind you get the sods flat, old
+man,--flat as ever a straight-backed young fellow was laid under.
+And then, with a good tall slab at the head, and a foot-stone six
+foot away from it, it'll look just as if there was a man underneath.
+
+A man!  Who said he was a man?  No more men of that pattern to bear
+his name!--Used to be a good-looking set enough.--Where 's all the
+manhood and womanhood gone to since his great-grandfather was the
+strongest man that sailed out of the town of Boston, and poor Leah
+there the handsomest woman in Essex, if she was a witch?
+
+--Give me some light,--he said,--more light.  I want to see the
+picture.
+
+He had started either from a dream or a wandering reverie.  I was
+not unwilling to have more light in the apartment, and presently had
+lighted an astral lamp that stood on a table.--He pointed to a
+portrait hanging against the wall.--Look at her,--he said,--look at
+her!  Wasn't that a pretty neck to slip a hangman's noose over?
+
+The portrait was of a young woman, something more than twenty years
+old, perhaps.  There were few pictures of any merit painted in New
+England before the time of Smibert, and I am at a loss to know what
+artist could have taken this half-length, which was evidently from
+life.  It was somewhat stiff and flat, but the grace of the figure
+and the sweetness of the expression reminded me of the angels of the
+early Florentine painters.  She must have been of some
+consideration, for she was dressed in paduasoy and lace with hanging
+sleeves, and the old carved frame showed how the picture had been
+prized by its former owners.  A proud eye she had, with all her
+sweetness.--I think it was that which hanged her, as his strong arm
+hanged Minister George Burroughs;--but it may have been a little
+mole on one cheek, which the artist had just hinted as a beauty
+rather than a deformity.  You know, I suppose, that nursling imps
+addict themselves, after the fashion of young opossums, to these
+little excrescences.  "Witch-marks" were good evidence that a young
+woman was one of the Devil's wet-nurses;--I should like to have seen
+you make fun of them in those days!--Then she had a brooch in her
+bodice, that might have been taken for some devilish amulet or
+other; and she wore a ring upon one of her fingers, with a red stone
+in it, that flamed as if the painter had dipped his pencil in fire;
+--who knows but that it was given her by a midnight suitor fresh
+from that fierce element, and licensed for a season to leave his
+couch of flame to tempt the unsanctified hearts of earthly maidens
+and brand their cheeks with the print of his scorching kisses?
+
+She and I,--he said, as he looked steadfastly at the canvas,--she
+and I are the last of 'em.--She will stay, and I shall go.  They
+never painted me,--except when the boys used to make pictures of me
+with chalk on the board-fences.  They said the doctors would want my
+skeleton when I was dead.--You are my friend, if you are a doctor,
+--a'n't you?
+
+I just gave him my hand.  I had not the heart to speak.
+
+I want to lie still,--he said,--after I am put to bed upon the hill
+yonder.  Can't you have a great stone laid over me, as they did over
+the first settlers in the old burying-ground at Dorchester, so as to
+keep the wolves from digging them up?  I never slept easy over the
+sod;--I should like to lie quiet under it.  And besides,--he said,
+in a kind of scared whisper,--I don't want to have my bones stared
+at, as my body has been.  I don't doubt I was a remarkable case;
+but, for God's sake, oh, for God's sake, don't let 'em make a show
+of the cage I have been shut up in and looked through the bars of
+for so many years.
+
+I have heard it said that the art of healing makes men hard-hearted
+and indifferent to human suffering.  I am willing to own that there
+is often a professional hardness in surgeons, just as there is in
+theologians,--only much less in degree than in these last.  It does
+not commonly improve the sympathies of a man to be in the habit of
+thrusting knives into his fellow-creatures and burning them with
+red-hot irons, any more than it improves them to hold the blinding-
+white cantery of Gehenna by its cool handle and score and crisp
+young souls with it until they are scorched into the belief of--
+Transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception.  And, to say the
+plain truth, I think there are a good many coarse people in both
+callings.  A delicate nature will not commonly choose a pursuit
+which implies the habitual infliction of suffering, so readily as
+some gentler office.  Yet, while I am writing this paragraph, there
+passes by my window, on his daily errand of duty, not seeing me,
+though I catch a glimpse of his manly features through the oval
+glass of his chaise, as he drives by, a surgeon of skill and
+standing, so friendly, so modest, so tenderhearted in all his ways,
+that, if he had not approved himself at once adroit and firm, one
+would have said he was of too kindly a mould to be the minister of
+pain, even if he were saving pain.
+
+You may be sure that some men, even among those who have chosen the
+task of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more
+thoughtful and truly compassionate in the midst of their cruel
+experience.  They become less nervous, but more sympathetic.  They
+have a truer sensibility for others' pain, the more they study pain
+and disease in the light of science.  I have said this without
+claiming any special growth in humanity for myself, though I do hope
+I grow tenderer in my feelings as I grow older.  At any rate, this
+was not a time in which professional habits could keep down certain
+instincts of older date than these.
+
+This poor little man's appeal to my humanity against the supposed
+rapacity of Science, which he feared would have her "specimen," if
+his ghost should walk restlessly a thousand years, waiting for his
+bones to be laid in the dust, touched my heart.  But I felt bound to
+speak cheerily.
+
+--We won't die yet awhile, if we can help it,--I said,--and I trust
+we can help it.  But don't be afraid; if I live longest, I will see
+that your resting place is kept sacred till the dandelions and
+buttercups blow over you.
+
+He seemed to have got his wits together by this time, and to have a
+vague consciousness that he might have been saying more than he
+meant for anybody's ears.--I have been talking a little wild, Sir,
+eh? he said.--There is a great buzzing in my head with those drops
+of yours, and I doubt if my tongue has not been a little looser than
+I would have it, Sir.  But I don't much want to live, Sir; that's
+the truth of the matter, and it does rather please me to think that
+fifty years from now nobody will know that the place where I lie
+does n't hold as stout and straight a man as the best of 'em that
+stretch out as if they were proud of the room they take.  You may
+get me well, if you can, Sir, if you think it worth while to try;
+but I tell you there has been no time for this many a year when the
+smell of fresh earth was not sweeter to me than all the flowers that
+grow out of it.  There's no anodyne like your good clean gravel,
+Sir.  But if you can keep me about awhile, and it amuses you to try,
+you may show your skill upon me, if you like.  There is a pleasure
+or two that I love the daylight for, and I think the night is not
+far off, at best.--I believe I shall sleep now; you may leave me,
+and come, if you like, in the morning.
+
+Before I passed out, I took one more glance round the apartment.
+The beautiful face of the portrait looked at me, as portraits often
+do, with a frightful kind of intelligence in its eyes.  The drapery
+fluttered on the still outstretched arm of the tall object near the
+window;--a crack of this was open, no doubt, and some breath of wind
+stirred the hanging folds.  In my excited state, I seemed to see
+something ominous in that arm pointing to the heavens.  I thought of
+the figures in the Dance of Death at Basle, and that other on the
+panels of the covered Bridge at Lucerne, and it seemed to me that
+the grim mask who mingles with every crowd and glides over every
+threshold was pointing the sick man to his far home, and would soon
+stretch out his bony hand and lead him or drag him on the unmeasured
+journey towards it.
+
+The fancy had possession of me, and I shivered again as when I first
+entered the chamber.  The picture and the shrouded shape; I saw only
+these two objects.  They were enough.  The house was deadly still,
+and the night-wind, blowing through an open window, struck me as
+from a field of ice, at the moment I passed into the creaking
+corridor.  As I turned into the common passage, a white figure,
+holding a lamp, stood full before me.  I thought at first it was one
+of those images made to stand in niches and hold a light in their
+hands.  But the illusion was momentary, and my eyes speedily
+recovered from the shock of the bright flame and snowy drapery to
+see that the figure was a breathing one.  It was Iris, in one of her
+statue-trances.  She had come down, whether sleeping or waking, I
+knew not at first, led by an instinct that told her she was wanted,-
+-or, possibly, having overheard and interpreted the sound of our
+movements,--or, it may be, having learned from the servant that
+there was trouble which might ask for a woman's hand.  I sometimes
+think women have a sixth sense, which tells them that others, whom
+they cannot see or hear, are in suffering.  How surely we find them
+at the bedside of the dying!  How strongly does Nature plead for
+them, that we should draw our first breath in their arms, as we sigh
+away our last upon their faithful breasts!
+
+With white, bare feet, her hair loosely knotted, clad as the
+starlight knew her, and the morning when she rose from slumber, save
+that she had twisted a scarf round her long dress, she stood still
+as a stone before me, holding in one hand a lighted coil of
+waxtaper, and in the other a silver goblet.  I held my own lamp
+close to her, as if she had been a figure of marble, and she did not
+stir.  There was no breach of propriety then, to scare the Poor
+Relation with and breed scandal out of.  She had been "warned in a
+dream," doubtless suggested by her waking knowledge and the sounds
+which had reached her exalted sense.  There was nothing more natural
+than that she should have risen and girdled her waist, and lighted
+her taper, and found the silver goblet with "Ex dono pupillorum" on
+it, from which she had taken her milk and possets through all her
+childish years, and so gone blindly out to find her place at the
+bedside,--a Sister of Charity without the cap and rosary; nay,
+unknowing whither her feet were leading her, and with wide blank
+eyes seeing nothing but the vision that beckoned her along.--Well,
+I must wake her from her slumber or trance.--I called her name, but
+she did not heed my voice.
+
+The Devil put it into my head that I would kiss one handsome young
+girl before I died, and now was my chance.  She never would know it,
+and I should carry the remembrance of it with me into the grave, and
+a rose perhaps grow out of my dust, as a brier did out of Lord
+Lovers, in memory of that immortal moment!  Would it wake her from
+her trance?  and would she see me in the flush of my stolen triumph,
+and hate and despise me ever after?  Or should I carry off my trophy
+undetected, and always from that time say to myself, when I looked
+upon her in the glory of youth and the splendor of beauty, "My lips
+have touched those roses and made their sweetness mine forever"?
+You think my cheek was flushed, perhaps, and my eyes were glittering
+with this midnight flash of opportunity.  On the contrary, I believe
+I was pale, very pale, and I know that I trembled.  Ah, it is the
+pale passions that are the fiercest,--it is the violence of the
+chill that gives the measure of the fever!  The fighting-boy of our
+school always turned white when he went out to a pitched battle with
+the bully of some neighboring village; but we knew what his
+bloodless cheeks meant,--the blood was all in his stout heart,--he
+was a slight boy, and there was not enough to redden his face and
+fill his heart both at once.
+
+Perhaps it is making a good deal of a slight matter, to tell the
+internal conflicts in the heart of a quiet person something more
+than juvenile and something less than senile, as to whether he
+should be guilty of an impropriety, and, if he were, whether he
+would get caught in his indiscretion.  And yet the memory of the
+kiss that Margaret of Scotland gave to Alain Chartier has lasted
+four hundred years, and put it into the head of many an ill-favored
+poet, whether Victoria, or Eugenie, would do as much by him, if she
+happened to pass him when he was asleep.  And have we ever forgotten
+that the fresh cheek of the young John Milton tingled under the lips
+of some high-born Italian beauty, who, I believe, did not think to
+leave her card by the side of the slumbering youth, but has
+bequeathed the memory of her pretty deed to all coming time?  The
+sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo
+lasts a deal longer.
+
+There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of
+mind suffers, as compared with the man of action.  While he is
+taking an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he
+lets his chance slip through his fingers.  Iris woke up, of her own
+accord, before I had made up my mind what I was going to do about
+it.
+
+When I remember how charmingly she looked, I don't blame myself at
+all for being tempted; but if I had been fool enough to yield to the
+impulse, I should certainly have been ashamed to tell of it.  She
+did not know what to make of it, finding herself there alone, in
+such guise, and me staring at her.  She looked down at her white
+robe and bare feet, and colored,--then at the goblet she held in her
+hand, then at the taper; and at last her thoughts seemed to clear
+up.
+
+I know it all,--she said.--He is going to die, and I must go and
+sit by him.  Nobody will care for him as I shall, and I have nobody
+else to care for.
+
+I assured her that nothing was needed for him that night but rest,
+and persuaded her that the excitement of her presence could only do
+harm.  Let him sleep, and he would very probably awake better in the
+morning.  There was nothing to be said, for I spoke with authority;
+and the young girl glided away with noiseless step and sought her
+own chamber.
+
+The tremor passed away from my limbs, and the blood began to burn in
+my cheeks.  The beautiful image which had so bewitched me faded
+gradually from my imagination, and I returned to the still
+perplexing mysteries of my little neighbor's chamber.
+
+All was still there now.  No plaintive sounds, no monotonous
+murmurs, no shutting of windows and doors at strange hours, as if
+something or somebody were coming in or going out, or there was
+something to be hidden in those dark mahogany presses.  Is there an
+inner apartment that I have not seen?  The way in which the house is
+built might admit of it.  As I thought it over, I at once imagined a
+Bluebeard's chamber.  Suppose, for instance, that the narrow
+bookshelves to the right are really only a masked door, such as we
+remember leading to the private study of one of our most
+distinguished townsmen, who loved to steal away from his stately
+library to that little silent cell.  If this were lighted from
+above, a person or persons might pass their days there without
+attracting attention from the household, and wander where they
+pleased at night,--to Copp's-Hill burial-ground, if they liked,--I
+said to myself, laughing, and pulling the bed-clothes over my head.
+There is no logic in superstitious-fancies any more than in dreams.
+A she-ghost wouldn't want an inner chamber to herself.  A live
+woman, with a valuable soprano voice, wouldn't start off at night to
+sprain her ankles over the old graves of the North-End cemetery.
+
+It is all very easy for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this
+page in the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and
+anserine unchristian names, because I had these fancies running
+through my head.  I don't care much for your abuse.  The question is
+not, what it is reasonable for a man to think about, but what he
+actually does think about, in the dark, and when be is alone, and
+his whole body seems but one great nerve of hearing, and he sees the
+phosphorescent flashes of his own eyeballs as they turn suddenly in
+the direction of the last strange noise,--what he actually does
+think about, as he lies and recalls all the wild stories his head is
+full of, his fancy hinting the most alarming conjectures to account
+for the simplest facts about him, his common-sense laughing them to
+scorn the next minute, but his mind still returning to them, under
+one shape or another, until he gets very nervous and foolish, and
+remembers how pleasant it used to be to have his mother come and
+tuck him up and go and sit within call, so that she could hear him
+at any minute, if he got very much scared and wanted her.  Old
+babies that we are!
+
+Daylight will clear up all that lamp-light has left doubtful.  I
+longed for the morning to come, for I was more curious than ever.
+So, between my fancies and anticipations, I had but a poor night of
+it, and came down tired to the breakfast-table.  My visit was not to
+be made until after this morning hour; there was nothing urgent, so
+the servant was ordered to tell me.
+
+It was the first breakfast at which the high chair at the side of
+Iris had been unoccupied.--You might jest as well take away that
+chair,--said our landlady,--he'll never want it again.  He acts like
+a man that 's struck with death, 'n' I don't believe he 'll ever
+come out of his chamber till he 's laid out and brought down a
+corpse.--These good women do put things so plainly!  There were two
+or three words in her short remark that always sober people, and
+suggest silence or brief moral reflections.
+
+--Life is dreadful uncerting,--said the Poor Relation,--and pulled
+in her social tentacles to concentrate her thoughts on this fact of
+human history.
+
+--If there was anything a fellah could do,--said the young man John,
+so called,--a fellah 'd like the chance o' helpin' a little cripple
+like that.  He looks as if he couldn't turn over any handier than a
+turtle that's laid on his back; and I guess there a'n't many people
+that know how to lift better than I do.  Ask him if he don't want
+any watchers.  I don't mind settin' up any more 'n a cat-owl.  I was
+up all night twice last month.
+
+[My private opinion is, that there was no small amount of punch
+absorbed on those two occasions, which I think I heard of at the
+time];--but the offer is a kind one, and it is n't fair to question
+how he would like sitting up without the punch and the company and
+the songs and smoking.  He means what he says, and it would be a
+more considerable achievement for him to sit quietly all night by a
+sick man than for a good many other people.  I tell you this odd
+thing: there are a good many persons, who, through the habit of
+making other folks uncomfortable, by finding fault with all their
+cheerful enjoyments, at last get up a kind of hostility to comfort
+in general, even in their own persons.  The correlative to loving
+our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our
+neighbors.  Look at old misers; first they starve their dependants,
+and then themselves.  So I think it more for a lively young fellow
+to be ready to play nurse than for one of those useful but forlorn
+martyrs who have taken a spite against themselves and love to
+gratify it by fasting and watching.
+
+--The time came at last for me to make my visit.  I found Iris
+sitting by the Little Gentleman's pillow.  To my disappointment, the
+room was darkened.  He did not like the light, and would have the
+shutters kept nearly closed.  It was good enough for me; what
+business had I to be indulging my curiosity, when I had nothing to
+do but to exercise such skill as I possessed for the benefit of my
+patient?  There was not much to be said or done in such a case; but
+I spoke as encouragingly as I could, as I think we are always bound
+to do.  He did not seem to pay any very anxious attention, but the
+poor girl listened as if her own life and more than her own life
+were depending on the words I uttered.  She followed me out of the
+room, when I had got through my visit.
+
+How long?--she said.
+
+Uncertain.  Any time; to-day,--next week, next month,--I answered.
+--One of those cases where the issue is not doubtful, but may be
+sudden or slow.
+
+The women of the house were kind, as women always are in trouble.
+But Iris pretended that nobody could spare the time as well as she,
+and kept her place, hour after hour, until the landlady insisted
+that she'd be killin' herself, if she begun at that rate, 'n' haf to
+give up, if she didn't want to be clean beat out in less 'n a week.
+
+At the table we were graver than common.  The high chair was set
+back against the wall, and a gap left between that of the young girl
+and her nearest neighbor's on the right.  But the next morning, to
+our great surprise, that good-looking young Marylander had very
+quietly moved his own chair to the vacant place.  I thought he was
+creeping down that way, but I was not prepared for a leap spanning
+such a tremendous parenthesis of boarders as this change of position
+included.  There was no denying that the youth and maiden were a
+handsome pair, as they sat side by side.  But whatever the young
+girl may have thought of her new neighbor she never seemed for a
+moment to forget the poor little friend who had been taken from her
+side.  There are women, and even girls, with whom it is of no use to
+talk.  One might as well reason with a bee as to the form of his
+cell, or with an oriole as to the construction of his swinging nest,
+as try to stir these creatures from their own way of doing their own
+work.  It was not a question with Iris, whether she was entitled by
+any special relation or by the fitness of things to play the part of
+a nurse.  She was a wilful creature that must have her way in this
+matter.  And it so proved that it called for much patience and long
+endurance to carry through the duties, say rather the kind offices,
+the painful pleasures, which she had chosen as her share in the
+household where accident had thrown her.  She had that genius of
+ministration which is the special province of certain women, marked
+even among their helpful sisters by a soft, low voice, a quiet
+footfall, a light hand, a cheering smile, and a ready self-surrender
+to the objects of their care, which such trifles as their own food,
+sleep, or habits of any kind never presume to interfere with.
+Day after day, and too often through the long watches of the night,
+she kept her place by the pillow.
+
+That girl will kill herself over me, Sir,--said the poor Little
+Gentleman to me, one day,--she will kill herself, Sir, if you don't
+call in all the resources of your art to get me off as soon as may
+be.  I shall wear her out, Sir, with sitting in this close chamber
+and watching when she ought to be sleeping, if you leave me to the
+care of Nature without dosing me.
+
+This was rather strange pleasantry, under the circumstances.  But
+there are certain persons whose existence is so out of parallel with
+the larger laws in the midst of which it is moving, that life
+becomes to them as death and death as life.--How am I getting
+along?--he said, another morning.  He lifted his shrivelled hand,
+with the death's-head ring on it, and looked at it with a sad sort
+of complacency.  By this one movement, which I have seen repeatedly
+of late, I know that his thoughts have gone before to another
+condition, and that he is, as it were, looking back on the
+infirmities of the body as accidents of the past.  For, when he was
+well, one might see him often looking at the handsome hand with the
+flaming jewel on one of its fingers.  The single well-shaped limb
+was the source of that pleasure which in some form or other Nature
+almost always grants to her least richly endowed children.  Handsome
+hair, eyes, complexion, feature, form, hand, foot, pleasant voice,
+strength, grace, agility, intelligence,--how few there are that have
+not just enough of one at least of these gifts to show them that the
+good Mother, busy with her millions of children, has not quite
+forgotten them!  But now he was thinking of that other state, where,
+free from all mortal impediments, the memory of his sorrowful burden
+should be only as that of the case he has shed to the insect whose
+"deep-damasked wings" beat off the golden dust of the lily-anthers,
+as he flutters in the ecstasy of his new life over their full-blown
+summer glories.
+
+No human being can rest for any time in a state of equilibrium,
+where the desire to live and that to depart just balance each other.
+If one has a house, which he has lived and always means to live in,
+he pleases himself with the thought of all the conveniences it
+offers him, and thinks little of its wants and imperfections.  But
+once having made up his mind to move to a better, every incommodity
+starts out upon him, until the very ground-plan of it seems to have
+changed in his mind, and his thoughts and affections, each one of
+them packing up its little bundle of circumstances, have quitted
+their several chambers and nooks and migrated to the new home, long
+before its apartments are ready to receive their coming tenant.  It
+is so with the body.  Most persons have died before they expire,--
+died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it
+were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.  The
+fact of the tranquillity with which the great majority of dying
+persons await this locking of those gates of life through which its
+airy angels have been going and coming, from the moment of the first
+cry, is familiar to those who have been often called upon to witness
+the last period of life.  Almost always there is a preparation made
+by Nature for unearthing a soul, just as on the smaller scale there
+is for the removal of a milktooth.  The roots which hold human life
+to earth are absorbed before it is lifted from its place.  Some of
+the dying are weary and want rest, the idea of which is almost
+inseparable in the universal mind from death.  Some are in pain, and
+want to be rid of it, even though the anodyne be dropped, as in the
+legend, from the sword of the Death-Angel.  Some are stupid,
+mercifully narcotized that they may go to sleep without long tossing
+about.  And some are strong in faith and hope, so that, as they draw
+near the next world, they would fair hurry toward it, as the caravan
+moves faster over the sands when the foremost travellers send word
+along the file that water is in sight.  Though each little party
+that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water
+to which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less
+has it been true in all ages and for human beings of every creed
+which recognized a future, that those who have fallen worn out by
+their march through the Desert have dreamed at least of a River of
+Life, and thought they heard its murmurs as they lay dying.
+
+The change from the clinging to the present to the welcoming of the
+future comes very soon, for the most part, after all hope of life is
+extinguished, provided this be left in good degree to Nature, and
+not insolently and cruelly forced upon those who are attacked by
+illness, on the strength of that odious foreknowledge often imparted
+by science, before the white fruit whose core is ashes, and which we
+call death, has set beneath the pallid and drooping flower of
+sickness.  There is a singular sagacity very often shown in a
+patient's estimate of his own vital force.  His physician knows the
+state of his material frame well enough, perhaps,--that this or that
+organ is more or less impaired or disintegrated; but the patient has
+a sense that he can hold out so much longer,--sometimes that he must
+and will live for a while, though by the logic of disease he ought
+to die without any delay.
+
+The Little Gentleman continued to fail, until it became plain that
+his remaining days were few.  I told the household what to expect.
+There was a good deal of kind feeling expressed among the boarders,
+in various modes, according to their characters and style of
+sympathy.  The landlady was urgent that he should try a certain
+nostrum which had saved somebody's life in jest sech a case.  The
+Poor Relation wanted me to carry, as from her, a copy of "Allein's
+Alarm," etc.  I objected to the title, reminding her that it
+offended people of old, so that more than twice as many of the book
+were sold when they changed the name to "A Sure Guide to Heaven."
+The good old gentleman whom I have mentioned before has come to the
+time of life when many old men cry easily, and forget their tears as
+children do.--He was a worthy gentleman,--he said,--a very worthy
+gentleman, but unfortunate,--very unfortunate.  Sadly deformed about
+the spine and the feet.  Had an impression that the late Lord Byron
+had some malformation of this kind.  Had heerd there was something
+the matter with the ankle-j'ints of that nobleman, but he was a man
+of talents.  This gentleman seemed to be a man of talents.  Could
+not always agree with his statements,--thought he was a little over-
+partial to this city, and had some free opinions; but was sorry to
+lose him,--and if--there was anything--he--could--.  In the midst of
+these kind expressions, the gentleman with the diamond, the Koh-i-
+noor, as we called him, asked, in a very unpleasant sort of way, how
+the old boy was likely to cut up,--meaning what money our friend was
+going to leave behind.
+
+The young fellow John spoke up, to the effect that this was a
+diabolish snobby question, when a man was dying and not dead.--To
+this the Koh-i-noor replied, by asking if the other meant to insult
+him.  Whereto the young man John rejoined that he had no particul'r
+intentions one way or t'other. -The Kohi-noor then suggested the
+young man's stepping out into the yard, that he, the speaker, might
+"slap his chops."--Let 'em alone, said young Maryland,--it 'll soon
+be over, and they won't hurt each other much.--So they went out.
+
+The Koh-i-noor entertained the very common idea, that, when one
+quarrels with another, the simple thing to do is to knock the man
+down, and there is the end of it.  Now those who have watched such
+encounters are aware of two things: first, that it is not so easy to
+knock a man down as it is to talk about it; secondly, that, if you
+do happen to knock a man down, there is a very good chance that he
+will be angry, and get up and give you a thrashing.
+
+So the Koh-i-noor thought he would begin, as soon as they got into
+the yard, by knocking his man down, and with this intention swung
+his arm round after the fashion of rustics and those unskilled in
+the noble art, expecting the young fellow John to drop when his
+fist, having completed a quarter of a circle, should come in contact
+with the side of that young man's head.  Unfortunately for this
+theory, it happens that a blow struck out straight is as much
+shorter, and therefore as much quicker than the rustic's swinging
+blow, as the radius is shorter than the quarter of a circle.  The
+mathematical and mechanical corollary was, that the Koh-i-noor felt
+something hard bring up suddenly against his right eye, which
+something he could have sworn was a paving-stone, judging by his
+sensations; and as this threw his person somewhat backwards, and the
+young man John jerked his own head back a little, the swinging blow
+had nothing to stop it; and as the Jewel staggered between the hit
+he got and the blow he missed, he tripped and "went to grass," so
+far as the back-yard of our boardinghouse was provided with that
+vegetable.  It was a signal illustration of that fatal mistake, so
+frequent in young and ardent natures with inconspicuous calves and
+negative pectorals, that they can settle most little quarrels on the
+spot by "knocking the man down."
+
+We are in the habit of handling our faces so carefully, that a heavy
+blow, taking effect on that portion of the surface, produces a most
+unpleasant surprise, which is accompanied with odd sensations, as of
+seeing sparks, and a kind of electrical or ozone-like odor, half-
+sulphurous in character, and which has given rise to a very vulgar
+and profane threat sometimes heard from the lips of bullies.  A
+person not used to pugilistic gestures does not instantly recover
+from this surprise.  The Koh-i-noor exasperated by his failure, and
+still a little confused by the smart hit he had received, but
+furious, and confident of victory over a young fellow a good deal
+lighter than himself, made a desperate rush to bear down all before
+him and finish the contest at once.  That is the way all angry
+greenhorns and incompetent persons attempt to settle matters.  It
+does n't do, if the other fellow is only cool, moderately quick, and
+has a very little science.  It didn't do this time; for, as the
+assailant rushed in with his arms flying everywhere, like the vans
+of a windmill, be ran a prominent feature of his face against a fist
+which was travelling in the other direction, and immediately after
+struck the knuckles of the young man's other fist a severe blow with
+the part of his person known as the epigastrium to one branch of
+science and the bread-basket to another.  This second round closed
+the battle.  The Koh-i-noor had got enough, which in such cases is
+more than as good as a feast.  The young fellow asked him if he was
+satisfied, and held out his hand.  But the other sulked, and
+muttered something about revenge.--Jest as ye like,--said the young
+man John.--Clap a slice o' raw beefsteak on to that mouse o' yours
+'n' 't'll take down the swellin'.  (Mouse is a technical term for a
+bluish, oblong, rounded elevation occasioned by running one's
+forehead or eyebrow against another's knuckles.) The young fellow
+was particularly pleased that he had had an opportunity of trying
+his proficiency in the art of self-defence without the gloves.  The
+Koh-i-noor did not favor us with his company for a day or two, being
+confined to his chamber, it was said, by a slight feverish, attack.
+He was chop-fallen always after this, and got negligent in his
+person.  The impression must have been a deep one; for it was
+observed, that, when he came down again, his moustache and whiskers
+had turned visibly white about the roots.  In short, it disgraced
+him, and rendered still more conspicuous a tendency to drinking, of
+which he had been for some time suspected.  This, and the disgust
+which a young lady naturally feels at hearing that her lover has
+been "licked by a fellah not half his size," induced the landlady's
+daughter to take that decided step which produced a change in the
+programme of her career I may hereafter allude to.
+
+I never thought he would come to good, when I heard him attempting
+to sneer at an unoffending city so respectable as Boston.  After a
+man begins to attack the State-House, when he gets bitter about the
+Frog-Pond, you may be sure there is not much left of him.  Poor
+Edgar Poe died in the hospital soon after he got into this way of
+talking; and so sure as you find an unfortunate fellow reduced to
+this pass, you had better begin praying for him, and stop lending
+him money, for he is on his last legs.  Remember poor Edgar!  He is
+dead and gone; but the State-House has its cupola fresh-gilded, and
+the Frog-Pond has got a fountain that squirts up a hundred feet into
+the air and glorifies that humble sheet with a fine display of
+provincial rainbows.
+
+--I cannot fulfil my promise in this number.  I expected to gratify
+your curiosity, if you have become at all interested in these
+puzzles, doubts, fancies, whims, or whatever you choose to call
+them, of mine.  Next month you shall hear all about it.
+
+--It was evening, and I was going to the sick-chamber.  As I paused
+at the door before entering, I heard a sweet voice singing.  It was
+not the wild melody I had sometimes heard at midnight:--no, this was
+the voice of Iris, and I could distinguish every word.  I had seen
+the verses in her book; the melody was new to me.  Let me finish my
+page with them.
+
+
+          HYMN OF TRUST.
+
+O Love Divine, that stooped to share
+Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,
+On Thee we cast each earthborn care,
+We smile at pain while Thou art near!
+
+Though long the weary way we tread,
+And sorrow crown each lingering year,
+No path we shun, no darkness dread,
+Our hearts still whispering, Thou art near!
+
+When drooping pleasure turns to grief,
+And trembling faith is changed to fear,
+The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf
+Shall softly tell us, Thou art near!
+
+On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
+O Love Divine, forever dear,
+Content to suffer, while we know,
+Living and dying, Thou art near!
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+A young fellow, born of good stock, in one of the more thoroughly
+civilized portions of these United States of America, bred in good
+principles, inheriting a social position which makes him at his ease
+everywhere, means sufficient to educate him thoroughly without
+taking away the stimulus to vigorous exertion, and with a good
+opening in some honorable path of labor, is the finest sight our
+private satellite has had the opportunity of inspecting on the
+planet to which she belongs.  In some respects it was better to be a
+young Greek.  If we may trust the old marbles, my friend with his
+arm stretched over my head, above there, (in plaster of Paris,) or
+the discobolus, whom one may see at the principal sculpture gallery
+of this metropolis,--those Greek young men were of supreme beauty.
+Their close curls, their elegantly set heads, column-like necks,
+straight noses, short, curled lips, firm chins, deep chests, light
+flanks, large muscles, small joints, were finer than anything we
+ever see.  It may well be questioned whether the human shape will
+ever present itself again in a race of such perfect symmetry.  But
+the life of the youthful Greek was local, not planetary, like that
+of the young American.  He had a string of legends, in place of our
+Gospels.  He had no printed books, no newspaper, no steam caravans,
+no forks, no soap, none of the thousand cheap conveniences which
+have become matters of necessity to our modern civilization.  Above
+all things, if he aspired to know as well as to enjoy, he found
+knowledge not diffused everywhere about him, so that a day's labor
+would buy him more wisdom than a year could master, but held in
+private hands, hoarded in precious manuscripts, to be sought for
+only as gold is sought in narrow fissures, and in the beds of
+brawling streams.  Never, since man came into this atmosphere of
+oxygen and azote, was there anything like the condition of the young
+American of the nineteenth century.  Having in possession or in
+prospect the best part of half a world, with all its climates and
+soils to choose from; equipped with wings of fire and smoke than fly
+with him day and night, so that he counts his journey not in miles,
+but in degrees, and sees the seasons change as the wild fowl sees
+them in his annual flights; with huge leviathans always ready to
+take him on their broad backs and push behind them with their
+pectoral or caudal fins the waters that seam the continent or
+separate the hemispheres; heir of all old civilizations, founder of
+that new one which, if all the prophecies of the human heart are not
+lies, is to be the noblest, as it is the last; isolated in space
+from the races that are governed by dynasties whose divine right
+grows out of human wrong, yet knit into the most absolute solidarity
+with mankind of all times and places by the one great thought he
+inherits as his national birthright; free to form and express his
+opinions on almost every subject, and assured that he will soon
+acquire the last franchise which men withhold from man,--that of
+stating the laws of his spiritual being and the beliefs he accepts
+without hindrance except from clearer views of truth,--he seems to
+want nothing for a large, wholesome, noble, beneficent life.  In
+fact, the chief danger is that he will think the whole planet is
+made for him, and forget that there are some possibilities left in
+the debris of the old-world civilization which deserve a certain
+respectful consideration at his hands.
+
+The combing and clipping of this shaggy wild continent are in some
+measure done for him by those who have gone before.  Society has
+subdivided itself enough to have a place for every form of talent.
+Thus, if a man show the least sign of ability as a sculptor or a
+painter, for instance, he finds the means of education and a demand
+for his services.  Even a man who knows nothing but science will be
+provided for, if he does not think it necessary to hang about his
+birthplace all his days,--which is a most unAmerican weakness.  The
+apron-strings of an American mother are made of India-rubber.  Her
+boy belongs where he is wanted; and that young Marylander of ours
+spoke for all our young men, when he said that his home was wherever
+the stars and stripes blew over his head.
+
+And that leads me to say a few words of this young gentleman, who
+made that audacious movement lately which I chronicled in my last
+record,--jumping over the seats of I don't know how many boarders to
+put himself in the place which the Little Gentleman's absence had
+left vacant at the side of Iris.  When a young man is found
+habitually at the side of any one given young lady,--when he lingers
+where she stays, and hastens when she leaves,--when his eyes follow
+her as she moves and rest upon her when she is still,--when he
+begins to grow a little timid, he who was so bold, and a little
+pensive, he who was so gay, whenever accident finds them alone,--
+when he thinks very often of the given young lady, and names her
+very seldom,--
+
+What do you say about it, my charming young expert in that sweet
+science in which, perhaps, a long experience is not the first of
+qualifications?
+
+--But we don't know anything about this young man, except that he is
+good-looking, and somewhat high-spirited, and strong-limbed, and has
+a generous style of nature,--all very promising, but by no means
+proving that he is a proper lover for Iris, whose heart we turned
+inside out when we opened that sealed book of hers.
+
+Ah, my dear young friend!  When your mamma then, if you will believe
+it, a very slight young lady, with very pretty hair and figure--came
+and told her mamma that your papa had--had--asked No, no, no! she
+could n't say it; but her mother--oh the depth of maternal sagacity!
+--guessed it all without another word!--When your mother, I say,
+came and told her mother she was engaged, and your grandmother told
+your grandfather, how much did they know of the intimate nature of
+the young gentleman to whom she had pledged her existence?  I will
+not be so hard as to ask how much your respected mamma knew at that
+time of the intimate nature of your respected papa, though, if we
+should compare a young girl's man-as-she-thinks-him with a forty-
+summered matron's man-as-she-finds-him, I have my doubts as to
+whether the second would be a facsimile of the first in most cases.
+
+The idea that in this world each young person is to wait until he or
+she finds that precise counterpart who alone of all creation was
+meant for him or her, and then fall instantly in love with it, is
+pretty enough, only it is not Nature's way.  It is not at all
+essential that all pairs of human beings should be, as we sometimes
+say of particular couples, "born for each other."  Sometimes a man
+or a woman is made a great deal better and happier in the end for
+having had to conquer the faults of the one beloved, and make the
+fitness not found at first, by gradual assimilation.  There is a
+class of good women who have no right to marry perfectly good men,
+because they have the power of saving those who would go to ruin but
+for the guiding providence of a good wife.  I have known many such
+cases.  It is the most momentous question a woman is ever called
+upon to decide, whether the faults of the man she loves are beyond
+remedy and will drag her down, or whether she is competent to be his
+earthly redeemer and lift him to her own level.
+
+A person of genius should marry a person of character.  Genius does
+not herd with genius.  The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never
+found in company.  They don't care for strange scents,--they like
+plain animals better than perfumed ones.  Nay, if you will have the
+kindness to notice, Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the
+personal peculiarity by which her lord is so widely known.
+
+Now when genius allies itself with character, the world is very apt
+to think character has the best of the bargain.  A brilliant woman
+marries a plain, manly fellow, with a simple intellectual
+mechanism;--we have all seen such cases.  The world often stares a
+good deal and wonders.  She should have taken that other, with a far
+more complex mental machinery.  She might have had a watch with the
+philosophical compensation-balance, with the metaphysical index
+which can split a second into tenths, with the musical chime which
+can turn every quarter of an hour into melody.  She has chosen a
+plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all.
+
+Let her alone!  She knows what she is about.  Genius has an
+infinitely deeper reverence for character than character can have
+for genius.  To be sure, genius gets the world's praise, because its
+work is a tangible product, to be bought, or had for nothing.  It
+bribes the common voice to praise it by presents of speeches, poems,
+statues, pictures, or whatever it can please with.  Character
+evolves its best products for home consumption; but, mind you, it
+takes a deal more to feed a family for thirty years than to make a
+holiday feast for our neighbors once or twice in our lives.  You
+talk of the fire of genius.  Many a blessed woman, who dies unsung
+and unremembered, has given out more of the real vital heat that
+keeps the life in human souls, without a spark flitting through her
+humble chimney to tell the world about it, than would set a dozen
+theories smoking, or a hundred odes simmering, in the brains of so
+many men of genius.  It is in latent caloric, if I may borrow a
+philosophical expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out
+the life that warms them.  Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse
+hardly warms her thin fingers,--but she has melted all the ice out
+of the hearts of those young Gracchi, and her lost heat is in the
+blood of her youthful heroes.  We are always valuing the soul's
+temperature by the thermometer of public deed or word.  Yet the
+great sun himself, when he pours his noonday beams upon some vast
+hyaline boulder, rent from the eternal ice-quarries, and floating
+toward the tropics, never warms it a fraction above the thirty-two
+degrees of Fahrenheit that marked the moment when the first drop
+trickled down its side.
+
+How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the
+law that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong,
+to get as low as the earth will let it!  That is genius.  But what
+is this transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and
+the rainbow, to that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the
+same yesterday, to-day, and forever, (if the universe be eternal,)
+--the great outspread hand of God himself, forcing all things down
+into their places, and keeping them there?  Such, in smaller
+proportion, is the force of character to the fitful movements of
+genius, as they are or have been linked to each other in many a
+household, where one name was historic, and the other, let me say
+the nobler, unknown, save by some faint reflected ray, borrowed from
+its lustrous companion.
+
+Oftentimes, as I have lain swinging on the water, in the swell of
+the Chelsea ferry-boats, in that long, sharp-pointed, black cradle
+in which I love to let the great mother rock me, I have seen a tall
+ship glide by against the tide, as if drawn by some invisible
+towline, with a hundred strong arms pulling it.  Her sails hung
+unfilled, her streamers were drooping, she had neither side-wheel
+nor stern-wheel; still she moved on, stately, in serene triumph, as
+if with her own life.  But I knew that on the other side of the
+ship, hidden beneath the great hulk that swam so majestically, there
+was a little toiling steam-tug, with heart of fire and arms of iron,
+that was hugging it close and dragging it bravely on; and I knew,
+that, if the little steam-tug untwined her arms and left the tall
+ship, it would wallow and roll about, and drift hither and thither,
+and go off with the refluent tide, no man knows whither.  And so I
+have known more than one genius, high-decked, full-freighted, wide-
+sailed, gay-pennoned, that, but for the bare toiling arms, and
+brave, warm, beating heart of the faithful little wife, that nestled
+close in his shadow, and clung to him, so that no wind or wave could
+part them, and dragged him on against all the tide of circumstance,
+would soon have gone down the stream and been heard of no more.
+--No, I am too much a lover of genius, I sometimes think, and too
+often get impatient with dull people, so that, in their weak talk,
+where nothing is taken for granted, I look forward to some future
+possible state of development, when a gesture passing between a
+beatified human soul and an archangel shall signify as much as the
+complete history of a planet, from the time when it curdled to the
+time when its sun was burned out.  And yet, when a strong brain is
+weighed with a true heart, it seems to me like balancing a bubble
+against a wedge of gold.
+
+--It takes a very true man to be a fitting companion for a woman of
+genius, but not a very great one.  I am not sure that she will not
+embroider her ideal better on a plain ground than on one with a
+brilliant pattern already worked in its texture.  But as the very
+essence of genius is truthfulness, contact with realities, (which
+are always ideas behind shows of form or language,) nothing is so
+contemptible as falsehood and pretence in its eyes.  Now it is not
+easy to find a perfectly true woman, and it is very hard to find a
+perfectly true man.  And a woman of genius, who has the sagacity to
+choose such a one as her companion, shows more of the divine gift in
+so doing than in her finest talk or her most brilliant work of
+letters or of art.
+
+I have been a good while coming at a secret, for which I wished to
+prepare you before telling it.  I think there is a kindly feeling
+growing up between Iris and our young Marylander.  Not that I
+suppose there is any distinct understanding between them, but that
+the affinity which has drawn him from the remote corner where he sat
+to the side of the young girl is quietly bringing their two natures
+together.  Just now she is all given up to another; but when he no
+longer calls upon her daily thoughts and cares, I warn you not to be
+surprised, if this bud of friendship open like the evening primrose,
+with a sound as of a sudden stolen kiss, and lo! the flower of full-
+blown love lies unfolded before you.
+
+And now the days had come for our little friend, whose whims and
+weaknesses had interested us, perhaps, as much as his better traits,
+to make ready for that long journey which is easier to the cripple
+than to the strong man, and on which none enters so willingly as he
+who has borne the life-long load of infirmity during his earthly
+pilgrimage.  At this point, under most circumstances, I would close
+the doors and draw the veil of privacy before the chamber where the
+birth which we call death, out of life into the unknown world, is
+working its mystery.  But this friend of ours stood alone in the
+world, and, as the last act of his life was mainly in harmony with
+the rest of its drama, I do not here feel the force of the objection
+commonly lying against that death-bed literature which forms the
+staple of a certain portion of the press.  Let me explain what I
+mean, so that my readers may think for themselves a little, before
+they accuse me of hasty expressions.
+
+The Roman Catholic Church has certain formulas for its dying
+children, to which almost all of them attach the greatest
+importance.  There is hardly a criminal so abandoned that he is not
+anxious to receive the "consolations of religion" in his last hours.
+Even if he be senseless, but still living, I think that the form is
+gone through with, just as baptism is administered to the
+unconscious new-born child.  Now we do not quarrel with these forms.
+We look with reverence and affection upon all symbols which give
+peace and comfort to our fellow-creatures.  But the value of the
+new-born child's passive consent to the ceremony is null, as
+testimony to the truth of a doctrine.  The automatic closing of a
+dying man's lips on the consecrated wafer proves nothing in favor of
+the Real Presence, or any other dogma.  And, speaking generally, the
+evidence of dying men in favor of any belief is to be received with
+great caution.
+
+They commonly tell the truth about their present feelings, no doubt.
+A dying man's deposition about anything he knows is good evidence.
+But it is of much less consequence what a man thinks and says when
+he is changed by pain, weakness, apprehension, than what he thinks
+when he is truly and wholly himself.  Most murderers die in a very
+pious frame of mind, expecting to go to glory at once; yet no man
+believes he shall meet a larger average of pirates and cut-throats
+in the streets of the New Jerusalem than of honest folks that died
+in their beds.
+
+Unfortunately, there has been a very great tendency to make capital
+of various kinds out of dying men's speeches.  The lies that have
+been put into their mouths for this purpose are endless.  The prime
+minister, whose last breath was spent in scolding his nurse, dies
+with a magnificent apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter.
+Addison gets up a tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,--or
+somebody makes the posthumous dying epigram for him.  The incoherent
+babble of green fields is translated into the language of stately
+sentiment.  One would think, all that dying men had to do was to say
+the prettiest thing they could,--to make their rhetorical point,--
+and then bow themselves politely out of the world.
+
+Worse than this is the torturing of dying people to get their
+evidence in favor of this or that favorite belief.  The camp-
+followers of proselyting sects have come in at the close of every
+life where they could get in, to strip the languishing soul of its
+thoughts, and carry them off as spoils.  The Roman Catholic or other
+priest who insists on the reception of his formula means kindly, we
+trust, and very commonly succeeds in getting the acquiescence of the
+subject of his spiritual surgery, but do not let us take the
+testimony of people who are in the worst condition to form opinions
+as evidence of the truth or falsehood of that which they accept.  A
+lame man's opinion of dancing is not good for much.  A poor fellow
+who can neither eat nor drink, who is sleepless and full of pains,
+whose flesh has wasted from him, whose blood is like water, who is
+gasping for breath, is not in a condition to judge fairly of human
+life, which in all its main adjustments is intended for men in a
+normal, healthy condition.  It is a remark I have heard from the
+wise Patriarch of the Medical Profession among us, that the moral
+condition of patients with disease above the great breathing-muscle,
+the diaphragm, is much more hopeful than that of patients with
+disease below it, in the digestive organs.  Many an honest ignorant
+man has given us pathology when he thought he was giving us
+psychology.  With this preliminary caution I shall proceed to the
+story of the Little Gentleman's leaving us.
+
+When the divinity-student found that our fellow-boarder was not
+likely to remain long with us, he, being a young man of tender
+conscience and kindly nature, was not a little exercised on his
+behalf.  It was undeniable that on several occasions the Little
+Gentleman had expressed himself with a good deal of freedom on a
+class of subjects which, according to the divinity-student, he had
+no right to form an opinion upon.  He therefore considered his
+future welfare in jeopardy.
+
+The Muggletonian sect have a very odd way of dealing with people.
+If I, the Professor, will only give in to the Muggletonian doctrine,
+there shall be no question through all that persuasion that I am
+competent to judge of that doctrine; nay, I shall be quoted as
+evidence of its truth, while I live, and cited, after I am dead, as
+testimony in its behalf.  But if I utter any ever so slight Anti-
+Muggletonian sentiment, then I become incompetent to form any
+opinion on the matter.  This, you cannot fail to observe, is exactly
+the way the pseudo-sciences go to work, as explained in my Lecture
+on Phrenology.  Now I hold that he whose testimony would be accepted
+in behalf of the Muggletonian doctrine has a right to be heard
+against it.  Whoso offers me any article of belief for my signature
+implies that I am competent to form an opinion upon it; and if my
+positive testimony in its favor is of any value, then my negative
+testimony against it is also of value.
+
+I thought my young friend's attitude was a little too much like that
+of the Muggletonians.  I also remarked a singular timidity on his
+part lest somebody should "unsettle" somebody's faith,--as if faith
+did not require exercise as much as any other living thing, and were
+not all the better for a shaking up now and then.  I don't mean that
+it would be fair to bother Bridget, the wild Irish girl, or Joice
+Heth, the centenarian, or any other intellectual non-combatant; but
+all persons who proclaim a belief which passes judgment on their
+neighbors must be ready to have it "unsettled," that is, questioned,
+at all times and by anybody,--just as those who set up bars across a
+thoroughfare must expect to have them taken down by every one who
+wants to pass, if he is strong enough.
+
+Besides, to think of trying to water-proof the American mind against
+the questions that Heaven rains down upon it shows a misapprehension
+of our new conditions.  If to question everything be unlawful and
+dangerous, we had better undeclare our independence at once; for
+what the Declaration means is the right to question everything, even
+the truth of its own fundamental proposition.
+
+The old-world order of things is an arrangement of locks and canals,
+where everything depends on keeping the gates shut, and so holding
+the upper waters at their level; but the system under which the
+young republican American is born trusts the whole unimpeded tide of
+life to the great elemental influences, as the vast rivers of the
+continent settle their own level in obedience to the laws that
+govern the planet and the spheres that surround it.
+
+The divinity-student was not quite up to the idea of the
+commonwealth, as our young friend the Marylander, for instance,
+understood it.  He could not get rid of that notion of private
+property in truth, with the right to fence it in, and put up a sign-
+board, thus:
+
+               ALL TRESPASSERS ARE WARNED OFF THESE
+                              GROUNDS!
+
+He took the young Marylander to task for going to the Church of the
+Galileans, where he had several times accompanied Iris of late.
+
+I am a Churchman,--the young man said,--by education and habit.  I
+love my old Church for many reasons, but most of all because I think
+it has educated me out of its own forms into the spirit of its
+highest teachings.  I think I belong to the "Broad Church," if any
+of you can tell what that means.
+
+I had the rashness to attempt to answer the question myself.--Some
+say the Broad Church means the collective mass of good people of all
+denominations.  Others say that such a definition is nonsense; that
+a church is an organization, and the scattered good folks are no
+organization at all.  They think that men will eventually come
+together on the basis of one or two or more common articles of
+belief, and form a great unity.  Do they see what this amounts to?
+It means an equal division of intellect!  It is mental agrarianism!
+a thing that never was and never will be until national and
+individual idiosyncrasies have ceased to exist.  The man of thirty-
+nine beliefs holds the man of one belief a pauper; he is not going
+to give up thirty-eight of them for the sake of fraternizing with
+the other in the temple which bears on its front, "Deo erexit
+Voltaire."  A church is a garden, I have heard it said, and the
+illustration was neatly handled.  Yes, and there is no such thing as
+a broad garden.  It must be fenced in, and whatever is fenced in is
+narrow.  You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing together
+in it, except by the forcing system, which is a mighty narrow piece
+of business.  You can't make a village or a parish or a family think
+alike, yet you suppose that you can make a world pinch its beliefs
+or pad them to a single pattern!  Why, the very life of an
+ecclesiastical organization is a life of induction, a state of
+perpetually disturbed equilibrium kept up by another charged body in
+the neighborhood.  If the two bodies touch and share their
+respective charges, down goes the index of the electrometer!
+
+Do you know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to
+himself?  Smith is always a Smithite.  He takes in exactly Smith's-
+worth of knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity.
+And Brown has from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to
+excommunicate him, to anonymous-article him, because he did not take
+in Brown's-worth of knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity.  He cannot
+do it, any more than a pint-pot can hold a quart, or a quart-pot be
+filled by a pint.  Iron is essentially the same everywhere and
+always; but the sulphate of iron is never the same as the carbonate
+of iron.  Truth is invariable; but the Smithate of truth must always
+differ from the Brownate of truth.
+
+The wider the intellect, the larger and simpler the expressions in
+which its knowledge is embodied.  The inferior race, the degraded
+and enslaved people, the small-minded individual, live in the
+details which to larger minds and more advanced tribes of men reduce
+themselves to axioms and laws.  As races and individual minds must
+always differ just as sulphates and carbonates do, I cannot see
+ground for expecting the Broad Church to be founded on any fusion of
+intellectual beliefs, which of course implies that those who hold
+the larger number of doctrines as essential shall come down to those
+who hold the smaller number.  These doctrines are to the negative
+aristocracy what the quarterings of their coats are to the positive
+orders of nobility.
+
+The Broad Church, I think, will never be based on anything that
+requires the use of language. Freemasonry gives an idea of such a
+church, and a brother is known and cared for in a strange land where
+no word of his can be understood.  The apostle of this church may be
+a deaf mute carrying a cup of cold water to a thirsting
+fellow-creature.  The cup of cold water does not require to be
+translated for a foreigner to understand it.  I am afraid the only
+Broad Church possible is one that has its creed in the heart, and
+not in the head,--that we shall know its members by their fruits,
+and not by their words.  If you say this communion of well-doers is
+no church, I can only answer, that all organized bodies have their
+limits of size, and that when we find a man a hundred feet high and
+thirty feet broad across the shoulders, we will look out for an
+organization that shall include all Christendom.
+
+Some of us do practically recognize a Broad Church and a Narrow
+Church, however.  The Narrow Church may be seen in the ship's boats
+of humanity, in the long boat, in the jolly boat, in the captain's
+gig, lying off the poor old vessel, thanking God that they are safe,
+and reckoning how soon the hulk containing the mass of their
+fellow-creatures will go down.  The Broad Church is on board,
+working hard at the pumps, and very slow to believe that the ship
+will be swallowed up with so many poor people in it, fastened down
+under the hatches ever since it floated.
+
+--All this, of course, was nothing but my poor notion about these
+matters. I am simply an "outsider," you know; only it doesn't do
+very well for a nest of Hingham boxes to talk too much about
+outsiders and insiders!
+
+After this talk of ours, I think these two young people went pretty
+regularly to the Church of the Galileans.  Still they could not keep
+away from the sweet harmonies and rhythmic litanies of Saint
+Polycarp on the great Church festival-days; so that, between the
+two, they were so much together, that the boarders began to make
+remarks, and our landlady said to me, one day, that, though it was
+noon of her business, them that had eyes couldn't help seein' that
+there was somethin' goin', on between them two young people; she
+thought the young man was a very likely young man, though jest what
+his prospecs was was unbeknown to her; but she thought he must be
+doing well, and rather guessed he would be able to take care of a
+femily, if he didn't go to takin' a house; for a gentleman and his
+wife could board a great deal cheaper than they could keep house;
+--but then that girl was nothin' but a child, and wouldn't think of
+bein' married this five year.  They was good boarders, both of 'em,
+paid regular, and was as pooty a couple as she ever laid eyes on.
+
+--To come back to what I began to speak of before, -the divinity-
+student was exercised in his mind about the Little Gentleman, and,
+in the kindness of his heart,--for he was a good young man,--and in
+the strength of his convictions,--for he took it for granted that he
+and his crowd were right, and other folks and their crowd were
+wrong,--he determined to bring the Little Gentleman round to his
+faith before he died, if he could.  So he sent word to the sick man,
+that he should be pleased to visit him and have some conversation
+with him; and received for answer that he would be welcome.
+
+The divinity-student made him a visit, therefore and had a somewhat
+remarkable interview with him, which I shall briefly relate, without
+attempting to justify the positions taken by the Little Gentleman.
+He found him weak, but calm.  Iris sat silent by his pillow.
+
+After the usual preliminaries, the divinity-student said; in a kind
+way, that he was sorry to find him in failing health, that he felt
+concerned for his soul, and was anxious to assist him in making
+preparations for the great change awaiting him.
+
+I thank you, Sir,--said the Little Gentleman, permit me to ask you,
+what makes you think I am not ready for it, Sir, and that you can do
+anything to help me, Sir?
+
+I address you only as a fellow-man,--said the divinity-student,--and
+therefore a fellow-sinner.
+
+I am not a man, Sir!--said the Little Gentleman.--I was born into
+this world the wreck of a man, and I shall not be judged with a race
+to which I do not belong.  Look at this!--he said, and held up his
+withered arm.--See there!--and he pointed to his misshapen
+extremities.--Lay your hand here!--and he laid his own on the
+region of his misplaced heart.--I have known nothing of the life of
+your race.  When I first came to my consciousness, I found myself an
+object of pity, or a sight to show.  The first strange child I ever
+remember hid its face and would not come near me.  I was a broken-
+hearted as well as broken-bodied boy.  I grew into the emotions of
+ripening youth, and all that I could have loved shrank from my
+presence.  I became a man in years, and had nothing in common with
+manhood but its longings.  My life is the dying pang of a worn-out
+race, and I shall go down alone into the dust, out of this world of
+men and women, without ever knowing the fellowship of the one or the
+love of the other.  I will not die with a lie rattling in my throat.
+If another state of being has anything worse in store for me, I have
+had a long apprenticeship to give me strength that I may bear it.  I
+don't believe it, Sir!  I have too much faith for that.  God has not
+left me wholly without comfort, even here.  I love this old place
+where I was born;--the heart of the world beats under the three
+hills of Boston, Sir!  I love this great land, with so many tall men
+in it, and so many good, noble women.--His eyes turned to the
+silent figure by his pillow.--I have learned to accept meekly what
+has been allotted to me, but I cannot honestly say that I think my
+sin has been greater than my suffering.  I bear the ignorance and
+the evil-doing of whole generations in my single person.  I never
+drew a breath of air nor took a step that was not a punishment for
+another's fault.  I may have had many wrong thoughts, but I cannot
+have done many wrong deeds,--for my cage has been a narrow one, and
+I have paced it alone.  I have looked through the bars and seen the
+great world of men busy and happy, but I had no part in their
+doings.  I have known what it was to dream of the great passions;
+but since my mother kissed me before she died, no woman's lips have
+pressed my cheek,--nor ever will.
+
+--The young girl's eyes glittered with a sudden film, and almost
+without a thought, but with a warm human instinct that rushed up
+into her face with her heart's blood, she bent over and kissed him.
+It was the sacrament that washed out the memory of long years of
+bitterness, and I should hold it an unworthy thought to defend her.
+The Little Gentleman repaid her with the only tear any of us ever
+saw him shed.
+
+The divinity-student rose from his place, and, turning away from the
+sick man, walked to the other side of the room, where he bowed his
+head and was still.  All the questions he had meant to ask had faded
+from his memory.  The tests he had.  prepared by which to judge of
+his fellow-creature's fitness for heaven seemed to have lost their
+virtue.  He could trust the crippled child of sorrow to the Infinite
+Parent.  The kiss of the fair-haired girl had been like a sign from
+heaven, that angels watched over him whom he was presuming but a
+moment before to summon before the tribunal of his private judgment.
+Shall I pray with you?--he said, after a pause.  A little before he
+would have said, Shall I pray for you?--The Christian religion, as
+taught by its Founder, is full of sentiment.  So we must not blame
+the divinity-student, if he was overcome by those yearnings of human
+sympathy which predominate so much more in the sermons of the Master
+than in the writings of his successors, and which have made the
+parable of the Prodigal Son the consolation of mankind, as it has
+been the stumbling-block of all exclusive doctrines.
+
+Pray!--said the Little Gentleman.
+
+The divinity-student prayed, in low, tender tones,
+
+Iris and the Little Gentleman that God would look on his servant
+lying helpless at the feet of his mercy; that He would remember his
+long years of bondage in the flesh; that He would deal gently with
+the bruised reed.  Thou hast visited the sins of the fathers upon
+this their child.  Oh, turn away from him the penalties of his own
+transgressions!  Thou hast laid upon him, from infancy, the cross
+which thy stronger children are called upon to take up; and now that
+he is fainting under it, be Thou his stay, and do Thou succor him
+that is tempted!  Let his manifold infirmities come between him and
+Thy judgment; in wrath remember mercy!  If his eyes are not opened
+to all Thy truth, let Thy compassion lighten the darkness that rests
+upon him, even as it came through the word of thy Son to blind
+Bartimeus, who sat by the wayside, begging!
+
+Many more petitions he uttered, but all in the same subdued tone of
+tenderness.  In the presence of helpless suffering, and in the fast-
+darkening shadow of the Destroyer, he forgot all but his Christian
+humanity, and cared more about consoling his fellow-man than making
+a proselyte of him.
+
+This was the last prayer to which the Little Gentleman ever
+listened.  Some change was rapidly coming over him during this last
+hour of which I have been speaking.  The excitement of pleading his
+cause before his self-elected spiritual adviser,--the emotion which
+overcame him, when the young girl obeyed the sudden impulse of her
+feelings and pressed her lips to his cheek,--the thoughts that
+mastered him while the divinity-student poured out his soul for him
+in prayer, might well hurry on the inevitable moment.  When the
+divinity-student had uttered his last petition, commending him to
+the Father through his Son's intercession, he turned to look upon
+him before leaving his chamber.  His face was changed.--There is a
+language of the human countenance which we all understand without an
+interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that
+ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect.  By the stillness of
+the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by
+the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the
+contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is
+soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its
+windows and putting out its fires.--Such was the aspect of the face
+upon which the divinity-student looked, after the brief silence
+which followed his prayer.  The change had been rapid, though not
+that abrupt one which is liable to happen at any moment in these
+cases.--The sick man looked towards him.--Farewell,--he said,--I
+thank you.  Leave me alone with her.
+
+When the divinity-student had gone, and the Little Gentleman found
+himself alone with Iris, he lifted his hand to his neck, and took
+from it, suspended by a slender chain, a quaint, antique-looking
+key,--the same key I had once seen him holding.  He gave this to
+her, and pointed to a carved cabinet opposite his bed, one of those
+that had so attracted my curious eyes and set me wondering as to
+what it might contain.
+
+Open it,--he said,--and light the lamp.--The young girl walked to
+the cabinet and unlocked the door.  A deep recess appeared, lined
+with black velvet, against which stood in white relief an ivory
+crucifix.  A silver lamp hung over it.  She lighted the lamp and
+came back to the bedside.  The dying man fixed his eyes upon the
+figure of the dying Saviour.--Give me your hand, he said; and Iris
+placed her right hand in his left.  So they remained, until
+presently his eyes lost their meaning, though they still remained
+vacantly fixed upon the white image.  Yet he held the young girl's
+hand firmly, as if it were leading him through some deep-shadowed
+valley and it was all he could cling to.  But presently an
+involuntary muscular contraction stole over him, and his terrible
+dying grasp held the poor girl as if she were wedged in an engine of
+torture.  She pressed her lips together and sat still.  The
+inexorable hand held her tighter and tighter, until she felt as if
+her own slender fingers would be crushed in its gripe.  It was one
+of the tortures of the Inquisition she was suffering, and she could
+not stir from her place.  Then, in her great anguish, she, too, cast
+her eyes upon that dying figure, and, looking upon its pierced hands
+and feet and side and lacerated forehead, she felt that she also
+must suffer uncomplaining.  In the moment of her sharpest pain she
+did not forget the duties of her under office, but dried the dying
+man's moist forehead with her handkerchief, even while the dews of
+agony were glistening on her own.  How long this lasted she never
+could tell.  Time and thirst are two things you and I talk about;
+but the victims whom holy men and righteous judges used to stretch
+on their engines knew better what they meant than you or I!--What
+is that great bucket of water for?  said the Marchioness de
+Brinvilliers, before she was placed on the rack.--For you to
+drink,--said the torturer to the little woman.--She could not think
+that it would take such a flood to quench the fire in her and so
+keep her alive for her confession.  The torturer knew better than
+she.
+
+After a time not to be counted in minutes, as the clock measures,--
+without any warning,--there came a swift change of his features; his
+face turned white, as the waters whiten when a sudden breath passes
+over their still surface; the muscles instantly relaxed, and Iris,
+released at once from her care for the sufferer and from his
+unconscious grasp, fell senseless, with a feeble cry,--the only
+utterance of her long agony.
+
+Perhaps you sometimes wander in through the iron gates of the Copp's
+Hill burial-ground.  You love to stroll round among the graves that
+crowd each other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit.
+You love to lean on the freestone slab which lies over the bones of
+the Mathers,--to read the epitaph of stout William Clark, "Despiser
+of Sorry Persons and little Actions,"--to stand by the stone grave
+of sturdy Daniel Malcolm and look upon the splintered slab that
+tells the old rebel's story,--to kneel by the triple stone that says
+how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died
+on the same day and lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a
+moving ballad, by the late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen in his
+autobiography, which will explain the secret of the triple
+gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a mistake, unless
+the stone is wrong.
+
+Not very far from that you will find a fair mound, of dimensions fit
+to hold a well-grown man.  I will not tell you the inscription upon
+the stone which stands at its head; for I do not wish you to be sure
+of the resting-place of one who could not bear to think that he
+should be known as a cripple among the dead, after being pointed at
+so long among the living.  There is one sign, it is true, by which,
+if you have been a sagacious reader of these papers, you will at
+once know it; but I fear you read carelessly, and must study them
+more diligently before you will detect the hint to which I allude.
+
+The Little Gentleman lies where he longed to lie, among the old
+names and the old bones of the old Boston people.  At the foot of
+his resting-place is the river, alive with the wings and antennae of
+its colossal water-insects; over opposite are the great war-ships,
+and the heavy guns, which, when they roar, shake the soil in which
+he lies; and in the steeple of Christ Church, hard by, are the sweet
+chimes which are the Boston boy's Ranz des Vaches, whose echoes
+follow him all the world over.
+
+
+                         In Pace!
+
+I, told you a good while ago that the Little Gentleman could not do
+a better thing than to leave all his money, whatever it might be, to
+the young girl who has since that established such a claim upon him.
+He did not, however.  A considerable bequest to one of our public
+institutions keeps his name in grateful remembrance.  The telescope
+through which he was fond of watching the heavenly bodies, and the
+movements of which had been the source of such odd fancies on my
+part, is now the property of a Western College.  You smile as you
+think of my taking it for a fleshless human figure, when I saw its
+tube pointing to the sky, and thought it was an arm, under the white
+drapery thrown over it for protection.  So do I smile now; I belong
+to the numerous class who are prophets after the fact, and hold my
+nightmares very cheap by daylight
+
+I have received many letters of inquiry as to the sound resembling a
+woman's voice, which occasioned me so many perplexities.  Some
+thought there was no question that he had a second apartment, in
+which he had made an asylum for a deranged female relative.  Others
+were of opinion that he was, as I once suggested, a "Bluebeard" with
+patriarchal tendencies, and I have even been censured for
+introducing so Oriental an element into my record of boarding-house
+experience.
+
+Come in and see me, the Professor, some evening when I have nothing
+else to do, and ask me to play you Tartini's Devil's Sonata on that
+extraordinary instrument in my possession, well known to amateurs as
+one of the masterpieces of Joseph Guarnerius.  The vox humana of the
+great Haerlem organ is very lifelike, and the same stop in the organ
+of the Cambridge chapel might be mistaken in some of its tones for a
+human voice; but I think you never heard anything come so near the
+cry of a prima donna as the A string and the E string of this
+instrument.  A single fact will illustrate the resemblance.  I was
+executing some tours de force upon it one evening, when the
+policeman of our district rang the bell sharply, and asked what was
+the matter in the house.  He had heard a woman's screams,--he was
+sure of it.  I had to make the instrument sing before his eyes
+before he could be satisfied that he had not heard the cries of a
+woman.  The instrument was bequeathed to me by the Little Gentleman.
+Whether it had anything to do with the sounds I heard coming from
+his chamber, you can form your own opinion;--I have no other
+conjecture to offer.  It is not true that a second apartment with a
+secret entrance was found; and the story of the veiled lady is the
+invention of one of the Reporters.
+
+Bridget, the housemaid, always insisted that he died a Catholic.
+She had seen the crucifix, and believed that he prayed on his knees
+before it.  The last circumstance is very probably true; indeed,
+there was a spot worn on the carpet just before this cabinet which
+might be thus accounted for.  Why he, whose whole life was a
+crucifixion, should not love to look on that divine image of
+blameless suffering, I cannot see; on the contrary, it seems to me
+the most natural thing in the world that he should.  But there are
+those who want to make private property of everything, and can't
+make up their minds that people who don't think as they do should
+claim any interest in that infinite compassion expressed in the
+central figure of the Christendom which includes us all.
+
+The divinity-student expressed a hope before the boarders that he
+should meet him in heaven.--The question is, whether he'll meet
+you,--said the young fellow John, rather smartly.  The divinity-
+student had n't thought of that.
+
+However, he is a worthy young man, and I trust I have shown him in a
+kindly and respectful light.  He will get a parish by-and-by; and,
+as he is about to marry the sister of an old friend,--the
+Schoolmistress, whom some of us remember,--and as all sorts of
+expensive accidents happen to young married ministers, he will be
+under bonds to the amount of his salary, which means starvation, if
+they are forfeited, to think all his days as he thought when he was
+settled,--unless the majority of his people change with him or in
+advance of him.  A hard ease, to which nothing could reconcile a
+man, except that the faithful discharge of daily duties in his
+personal relations with his parishioners will make him useful enough
+in his way, though as a thinker he may cease to exist before he has
+reached middle age.
+
+--Iris went into mourning for the Little Gentleman.  Although, as I
+have said, he left the bulk of his property, by will, to a public
+institution, he added a codicil, by which he disposed of various
+pieces of property as tokens of kind remembrance.  It was in this
+way I became the possessor of the wonderful instrument I have spoken
+of, which had been purchased for him out of an Italian convent.  The
+landlady was comforted with a small legacy.  The following extract
+relates to Iris: "in consideration of her manifold acts of
+kindness, but only in token of grateful remembrance, and by no means
+as a reward for services which cannot be compensated, a certain
+messuage, with all the land thereto appertaining, situated in ______
+Street, at the North End, so called, of Boston, aforesaid, the same
+being the house in which I was born, but now inhabited by several
+families, and known as 'The Rookery.'" Iris had also the crucifix,
+the portrait, and the red-jewelled ring.  The funeral or death's-
+head ring was buried with him.
+
+It was a good while, after the Little Gentleman was gone, before our
+boarding-house recovered its wonted cheerfulness.  There was a
+flavor in his whims and local prejudices that we liked, even while
+we smiled at them.  It was hard to see the tall chair thrust away
+among useless lumber, to dismantle his room, to take down the
+picture of Leah, the handsome Witch of Essex, to move away the
+massive shelves that held the books he loved, to pack up the tube
+through which he used to study the silent stars, looking down at him
+like the eyes of dumb creatures, with a kind of stupid half-
+consciousness that did not worry him as did the eyes of men and
+women,--and hardest of all to displace that sacred figure to which
+his heart had always turned and found refuge, in the feelings it
+inspired, from all the perplexities of his busy brain.  It was hard,
+but it had to be done.
+
+And by-and-by we grew cheerful again, and the breakfast-table wore
+something of its old look.  The Koh-i-noor, as we named the
+gentleman with the diamond, left us, however, soon after that
+"little mill," as the young fellow John called it, where he came off
+second best.  His departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the
+landlady's daughter, inclosing a lock of purple hair which she "had
+valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the
+vows he had breathed," speedily followed by another, inclosing the
+landlady's bill.  The next morning he was missing, as were his
+limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it.  Three empty bottles of
+Mrs. Allen's celebrated preparation, each of them asserting, on its
+word of honor as a bottle, that its former contents were "not a
+dye," were all that was left to us of the Koh-i-noor.
+
+From this time forward, the landlady's daughter manifested a decided
+improvement in her style of carrying herself before the boarders.
+She abolished the odious little flat, gummy side-curl.  She left off
+various articles of "jewelry."  She began to help her mother in some
+of her household duties.  She became a regular attendant on the
+ministrations of a very worthy clergyman, having been attracted to
+his meetin' by witnessing a marriage ceremony in which he called a
+man and a woman a "gentleman" and a "lady,"--a stroke of gentility
+which quite overcame her.  She even took a part in what she called a
+Sabbath school, though it was held on Sunday, and by no means on
+Saturday, as the name she intended to utter implied.  All this,
+which was very sincere, as I believe, on her part, and attended with
+a great improvement in her character, ended in her bringing home a
+young man, with straight, sandy hair, brushed so as to stand up
+steeply above his forehead, wearing a pair of green spectacles, and
+dressed in black broadcloth.  His personal aspect, and a certain
+solemnity of countenance, led me to think he must be a clergyman;
+and as Master Benjamin Franklin blurted out before several of us
+boarders, one day, that "Sis had got a beau," I was pleased at the
+prospect of her becoming a minister's wife.  On inquiry, however, I
+found that the somewhat solemn look which I had noticed was indeed a
+professional one, but not clerical.  He was a young undertaker, who
+had just succeeded to a thriving business.  Things, I believe, are
+going on well at this time of writing, and I am glad for the
+landlady's daughter and her mother.  Sextons and undertakers are the
+cheerfullest people in the world at home, as comedians and circus-
+clowns are the most melancholy in their domestic circle.
+
+As our old boarding-house is still in existence, I do not feel at
+liberty to give too minute a statement of the present condition of
+each and all of its inmates.  I am happy to say, however, that they
+are all alive and well, up to this time.  That amiable old gentleman
+who sat opposite to me is growing older, as old men will, but still
+smiles benignantly on all the boarders, and has come to be a kind of
+father to all of them,--so that on his birthday there is always
+something like a family festival.  The Poor Relation, even, has
+warmed into a filial feeling towards him, and on his last birthday
+made him a beautiful present, namely, a very handsomely bound copy
+of Blair's celebrated poem, "The Grave."
+
+The young man John is still, as he says, "in fustrate fettle."  I
+saw him spar, not long since, at a private exhibition, and do
+himself great credit in a set-to with Henry Finnegass, Esq., a
+professional gentleman of celebrity.  I am pleased to say that he
+has been promoted to an upper clerkship, and, in consequence of his
+rise in office, has taken an apartment somewhat lower down than
+number "forty-'leven," as he facetiously called his attic.  Whether
+there is any truth, or not, in the story of his attachment to, and
+favorable reception by, the daughter of the head of an extensive
+wholesale grocer's establishment, I will not venture an opinion; I
+may say, however, that I have met him repeatedly in company with a
+very well-nourished and high-colored young lady, who, I understand,
+is the daughter of the house in question.
+
+Some of the boarders were of opinion that Iris did not return the
+undisguised attentions of the handsome young Marylander.  Instead of
+fixing her eyes steadily on him, as she used to look upon the Little
+Gentleman, she would turn them away, as if to avoid his own.  They
+often went to church together, it is true; but nobody, of course,
+supposes there is any relation between religious sympathy and those
+wretched "sentimental" movements of the human heart upon which it is
+commonly agreed that nothing better is based than society,
+civilization, friendship, the relation of husband and wife, and of
+parent and child, and which many people must think were singularly
+overrated by the Teacher of Nazareth, whose whole life, as I said
+before, was full of sentiment, loving this or that young man,
+pardoning this or that sinner, weeping over the dead, mourning for
+the doomed city, blessing, and perhaps kissing, the little children,
+so that the Gospels are still cried over almost as often as the last
+work of fiction!
+
+But one fine June morning there rumbled up to the door of our
+boarding-house a hack containing a lady inside and a trunk on the
+outside.  It was our friend the lady-patroness of Miss Iris, the
+same who had been called by her admiring pastor "The Model of all
+the Virtues."  Once a week she had written a letter, in a rather
+formal hand, but full of good advice, to her young charge.  And now
+she had come to carry her away, thinking that she had learned all
+she was likely to learn under her present course of teaching.  The
+Model, however, was to stay awhile,--a week, or more,--before they
+should leave together.
+
+Iris was obedient, as she was bound to be.  She was respectful,
+grateful, as a child is with a just, but not tender parent.  Yet
+something was wrong.  She had one of her trances, and became statue-
+like, as before, only the day after the Model's arrival.  She was
+wan and silent, tasted nothing at table, smiled as if by a forced
+effort, and often looked vaguely away from those who were looking at
+her, her eyes just glazed with the shining moisture of a tear that
+must not be allowed to gather and fall.  Was it grief at parting
+from the place where her strange friendship had grown up with the
+Little Gentleman?  Yet she seemed to have become reconciled to his
+loss, and rather to have a deep feeling of gratitude that she had
+been permitted to care for him in his last weary days.
+
+The Sunday after the Model's arrival, that lady had an attack of
+headache, and was obliged to shut herself up in a darkened room
+alone.  Our two young friends took the opportunity to go together to
+the Church of the Galileans.  They said but little going,--
+"collecting their thoughts" for the service, I devoutly hope.  My
+kind good friend the pastor preached that day one of his sermons
+that make us all feel like brothers and sisters, and his text was
+that affectionate one from John, "My little children, let us not
+love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth."  When
+Iris and her friend came out of church, they were both pale, and
+walked a space without speaking.
+
+At last the young man said,--You and I are not little children,
+Iris!
+
+She looked in his face an instant, as if startled, for there was
+something strange in the tone of his voice.  She smiled faintly, but
+spoke never a word.
+
+In deed and in truth, Iris,----
+
+What shall a poor girl say or do, when a strong man falters in his
+speech before her, and can do nothing better than hold out his hand
+to finish his broken sentence?
+
+The poor girl said nothing, but quietly laid her ungloved hand in
+his,--the little soft white hand which had ministered so tenderly
+and suffered so patiently.
+
+The blood came back to the young man's cheeks, as he lifted it to
+his lips, even as they walked there in the street, touched it gently
+with them, and said, "It is mine!"
+
+Iris did not contradict him.
+
+The seasons pass by so rapidly, that I am startled to think how much
+has happened since these events I was describing.  Those two young
+people would insist on having their own way about their own affairs,
+notwithstanding the good lady, so justly called the Model, insisted
+that the age of twenty-five years was as early as any discreet young
+lady should think of incurring the responsibilities, etc., etc.
+Long before Iris had reached that age, she was the wife of a young
+Maryland engineer, directing some of the vast constructions of his
+native State,--where he was growing rich fast enough to be able to
+decline that famous Russian offer which would have made him a kind
+of nabob in a few years.  Iris does not write verse often, nowadays,
+but she sometimes draws.  The last sketch of hers I have seen in my
+Southern visits was of two children, a boy and girl, the youngest
+holding a silver goblet, like the one she held that evening when I--
+I was so struck with her statue-like beauty.  If in the later,
+summer months you find the grass marked with footsteps around that
+grave on Copp's Hill I told you of, and flowers scattered over it,
+you may be sure that Iris is here on her annual visit to the home of
+her childhood and that excellent lady whose only fault was, that
+Nature had written out her list of virtues an ruled paper, and
+forgotten to rub out the lines.
+
+One thing more I must mention.  Being on the Common, last Sunday, I
+was attracted by the cheerful spectacle of a well-dressed and
+somewhat youthful papa wheeling a very elegant little carriage
+containing a stout baby.  A buxom young lady watched them from one
+of the stone seats, with an interest which could be nothing less
+than maternal.  I at once recognized my old friend, the young fellow
+whom we called John.  He was delighted to see me, introduced me to
+"Madam," and would have the lusty infant out of the carriage, and
+hold him up for me to look at.
+
+Now, then,--he said to the two-year-old,--show the gentleman how you
+hit from the shoulder.  Whereupon the little imp pushed his fat fist
+straight into my eye, to his father's intense satisfaction.
+
+Fust-rate little chap,--said the papa.--Chip of the old block.
+Regl'r little Johnny, you know.
+
+I was so much pleased to find the young fellow settled in life, and
+pushing about one of "them little articles" he had seemed to want so
+much, that I took my "punishment" at the hands of the infant
+pugilist with great equanimity.--And how is the old boarding-
+house?--I asked.
+
+A 1,--he answered.--Painted and papered as good as new.  Gabs in
+all the rooms up to the skyparlors.  Old woman's layin' up money,
+they say.  Means to send Ben Franklin to college.  Just then the
+first bell rang for church, and my friend, who, I understand, has
+become a most exemplary member of society, said he must be off to
+get ready for meetin', and told the young one to "shake dada," which
+he did with his closed fist, in a somewhat menacing manner.  And so
+the young man John, as we used to call him, took the pole of the
+miniature carriage, and pushed the small pugilist before him
+homewards, followed, in a somewhat leisurely way, by his pleasant-
+looking lady-companion, and I sent a sigh and a smile after him.
+
+That evening, as soon as it was dark, I could not help going round
+by the old boarding-house.  The "gahs" was lighted, but the
+curtains, or more properly, the painted shades; were not down.  And
+so I stood there and looked in along the table where the boarders
+sat at the evening meal,--our old breakfast-table, which some of us
+feel as if we knew so well.  There were new faces at it, but also
+old and familiar ones.--The landlady, in a wonderfully smart cap,
+looking young, comparatively speaking, and as if half the wrinkles
+had been ironed out of her forehead.--Her daughter, in rather
+dressy half-mourning, with a vast brooch of jet, got up, apparently,
+to match the gentleman next her, who was in black costume and sandy
+hair,--the last rising straight from his forehead, like the marble
+flame one sometimes sees at the top of a funeral urn.--The Poor
+Relation, not in absolute black, but in a stuff with specks of
+white; as much as to say, that, if there were any more Hirams left
+to sigh for her, there were pin-holes in the night of her despair,
+through which a ray of hope might find its way to an adorer.
+--Master Benjamin Franklin, grown taller of late, was in the act of
+splitting his face open with a wedge of pie, so that his features
+were seen to disadvantage for the moment.--The good old gentleman
+was sitting still and thoughtful.  All at once he turned his face
+toward the window where I stood, and, just as if he had seen me,
+smiled his benignant smile.  It was a recollection of some past
+pleasant moment; but it fell upon me like the blessing of a father.
+
+I kissed my hand to them all, unseen as I stood in the outer
+darkness; and as I turned and went my way, the table and all around
+it faded into the realm of twilight shadows and of midnight dreams.
+
+                   ---------------------
+
+And so my year's record is finished. The Professor has talked less
+than his predecessor, but he has heard and seen more.  Thanks to all
+those friends who from time to time have sent their messages of
+kindly recognition and fellow-feeling!  Peace to all such as may
+have been vexed in spirit by any utterance these pages have
+repeated!  They will, doubtless, forget for the moment the
+difference in the hues of truth we look at through our human prisms,
+and join in singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the light
+we all need to lead us, and the warmth which alone can make us all
+brothers.
+
+
+          A SUN-DAY HYMN.
+
+Lord of all being! throned afar,
+Thy glory flames from sun and star,
+Centre and soul of every sphere,
+Yet to each loving heart how near!
+
+Sun of our life, thy quickening ray
+Sheds on our path the glow of day;
+Star of our hope, thy softened light
+Cheers the long watches of the night.
+
+Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn;
+Our noontide is thy gracious dawn;
+Our rainbow arch thy mercy's sign;
+All, save the clouds of sin, are thine!
+
+Lord of all life, below, above,
+Whose light is truth, whose warmth is love,
+Before thy ever-blazing throne
+We ask no lustre of our own.
+
+Grant us thy truth to make us free,
+And kindling hearts that burn for thee,
+Till all thy living altars claim
+One holy light, one heavenly flame.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+
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