I looked upon her tranquil face, gradually regaining a cheerfulness

which was often sprightly, as she became interested in the various
matters we talked about and places we visited, I saw that eye and

lip and every shifting lineament were made for love, - unconscious
of their sweet office as yet, and meeting the cold aspect of Duty

with the natural graces which were meant for the reward of nothing
less than the Great Passion.

- I never addressed one word of love to the mistress" target="_blank" title="n.女教师；女校长">schoolmistress in the
course of these pleasant walks. It seemed to me that we talked of

everything but love on that particular morning. There was,
perhaps, a little more timidity and hesitancy on my part than I

have commonly shown among our people at the boarding-house. In
fact, I considered myself the master at the breakfast-table; but,

somehow, I could not command myself just then so well as usual.
The truth is, I had secured a passage to Liverpool in the steamer

which was to leave at noon, - with the condition, however, of being
released in case circumstances occurred to detain me. The

mistress" target="_blank" title="n.女教师；女校长">schoolmistress knew nothing about all this, of course, as yet.
It was on the Common that we were walking. The MALL, or boulevard

of our Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in
different directions. One of these runs down from opposite Joy

Street southward across the whole length of the Common to Boylston
Street. We called it the long path, and were fond of it.

I felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust habit) as we
came opposite the head of this path on that morning. I think I

tried to speak twice without making myself distinctlyaudible. At
last I got out the question, - Will you take the long path with me?

- Certainly, - said the mistress" target="_blank" title="n.女教师；女校长">schoolmistress, - with much pleasure. -
Think, - I said, - before you answer; if you take the long path

with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more! -
The mistress" target="_blank" title="n.女教师；女校长">schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an

arrow had struck her.
One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by, - the one

you may still see close by the Gingko-tree. - Pray, sit down, - I
said. - No, no, she answered, softly, - I will walk the LONG PATH

with you!
- The old gentleman who sits opposite met us walking, arm in arm,

about the middle of the long path, and said, very charmingly, -
"Good morning, my dears!"

CHAPTER XII.
[I DID not think it probable that I should have a great many more

talks with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much
as I could into every conversation. That is the reason why you

will find some odd, miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to
tell at least once, as I should not have a chance to tell them

habitually at our breakfast-table. - We're very free and easy, you
know; we don't read what we don't like. Our parish is so large,

one can't pretend to preach to all the pews at once. One can't be
all the time trying to do the best of one's best if a company works

a steam fire-engine, the firemen needn't be straining themselves
all day to squirt over the top of the flagstaff. Let them wash

some of those lower-story windows a little. Besides, there is no
use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out when you get

through this paper.]
- Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond

to the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am
thinking of travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially

in Italy. Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes
it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it

without sticking. I can prove some facts about travelling by a
story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed, - such

as these:- He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues. - To-
day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's

revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of
Dr. Gould's private planets. - Every traveller is a self-taught

entomologist. - Old jokes are dynamometers of mentaltension; an
old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home, -

which shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, rather
than increased vitality. There was a story about "strahps to your

pahnts," which was vastly funny to us fellows - on the road from
Milan to Venice. - CAELUM, NON ANIMUM, - travellers change their

guineas, but not their characters. The bore is the same, eating
dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans

in Beacon Street. - Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct
for "establishing raws" upon each other. - A man shall sit down

with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take
up the question they had been talking about under "the great elm,"

and forget all about Egypt. When I was crossing the Po, we were
all fighting about the propriety of one fellow's telling another

that his argument was ABSURD; one maintaining it to be a perfectly
admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase "reductio ad

absurdum;" the rest badgering him as a conversational bully.
Mighty little we troubled ourselves for PADUS, the Po, "a river

broader and more rapid than the Rhone," and the times when Hannibal
led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their

trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat
was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!

- Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or
annexed, or implied.

Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but
obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in UNDRESS often

affects us more than one in full costume.
"Is this the mighty ocean? - is this all?"

says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my
soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the

fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken
masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle - ALTA

MAENIA ROMAE - rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale
shadow as never before or since.

I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one
of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old

church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve,
surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the

mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a
noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken

shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous
staircase like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory,

but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription
on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how

this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year
16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls

of the parish (FILLES DE LA PAROISSE) fell from the gallery,
carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but

by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but
real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came

fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the
sharpest treble in the Te Deum. (Look at Carlyle's article on

Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson
talked with in the streets one evening.) All the crowd gone but

these two "filles de la paroisse," - gone as utterly as the dresses
they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and

meat that were in the market on that day.
Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that

call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or
struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne,

over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzapfli's restive horse
sprung with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in

the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild
youth, but God's servant from that day forward. I have forgotten

the famous bears, and all else. - I remember the Percy lion on the
bridge over the little river at Alnwick, - the leaden lion with his

tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle, - and why? Because