I declare to you, that as the monk said about the picture in the convent,--that he sometimes thought the living tenants were the shadows, and the painted figures the realities,--I have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I fled, and coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy incantation! -- Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and courteous acts,--a thousand faces that melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow melts, but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose roots are memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams.

I am not ungrateful, nor unconscious of all the good feeling and intelligence everywhere to be met with through the vast parish to which the lecturer ministers.

But when I set forth, leading a string of my mind's daughters to market, as the country-folk fetch in their strings of horses--Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow who sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy lecturer, as if, because he was decently paid for his services, he had therefore sold his sensibilities .-- Family men get dreadfully homesick.

In the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of the logs in one's fireplace at home.
"There are his young barbarians all at play,"-- if he owns any youthful savages .-- No, the world has a million roosts for a man, but only one nest.
-- It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always made in all discussions.

The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the individual thus armed.