kills their mortal frames and drives out the immortal tenants. Men
sicken of houses until at last they quit them, as the soul leaves

its body when it is tired of its infirmities. The body has been
called "the house we live in"; the house is quite as much the body

we live in. Shall I tell you some things the Professor said the
other day? - Do! - said the schoolmistress.

A man's body, - said the Professor, - is whatever is occupied by
his will and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I

wrote those papers you remember reading, was much more a portion of
my body than a paralytic's senseless and motionless arm or leg is

of his.
The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it,

like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes.
First, he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his

artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their
cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments.

Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion.
And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as

in a loose outside wrapper.
You shall observe, - the Professor said, - for, like Mr. John

Hunter and other great men, he brings in that SHALL with great
effect sometimes, - you shall observe that a man's clothing or

series of envelopes does after a certain time mould itself upon his
individual nature. We know this of our hats, and are always

reminded of it when we happen to put them on wrong side foremost.
We soon find that the beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with

all its irregular bumps and depressions. Just so all that clothes
a man, even to the blue sky which caps his head, - a little

loosely, - shapes itself to fit each particular being beneath it.
Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets, lovers, condemned criminals,

all find it different, according to the eyes with which they
severally look.

But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer
natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it.

There is a shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells
into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have

crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our
own past. See what these are and you can tell what the occupant

is.
I had no idea, - said the Professor, - until I pulled up my

domestic establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of
roots I had been making during the years I was planted there. Why,

there wasn't a nook or a corner that some fibre had not worked its
way into; and when I gave the last wrench, each of them seemed to

shriek like a mandrake, as it broke its hold and came away.
There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably,

and which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable
aspect and in all dimensions. The infinite galleries of the Past

await but one brief process and all their pictures will be called
out and fixed forever. We had a curious illustration of the great

fact on a very humble scale. When a certain bookcase, long
standing in one place, for which it was built, was removed, there

was the exact image on the wall of the whole, and of many of its
portions. But in the midst of this picture was another, - the

precise outline of a map which had hung on the wall before the
bookcase was built. We had all forgotten everything about the map

until we saw its photograph on the wall. Then we remembered it, as
some day or other we may remember a sin which has been built over

and covered up, when this lower universe is pulled away from before
the wall of Infinity, where the wrong-doing stands self-recorded.

The Professor lived in that house a long time, - not twenty years,
but pretty near it. When he entered that door, two shadows glided

over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed
through it for the last time, - and one of the shadows was claimed

by its owner to be longer than his own. What changes he saw in
that quiet place! Death rained through every roof but his;

children came into life, grew to maturity, wedded, faded away,
threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was played in that

stock-company's theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his,
and no deep sorrow or severecalamity ever entered his dwelling.

Peace be to those walls, forever, - the Professor said, - for the
many pleasant years he has passed within them!

The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been
with him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in

imagination with tender interest wherever he goes. - In that little
court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long, -

- in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes
loitering down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord,

swallowing up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it
goes, until it gets proud and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious

oxbows about the fair Northampton meadows, and at last overflows
the oldest inhabitant's memory in profligate freshets at Hartford

and all along its lower shores, - up in that caravansary on the
banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the

jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions, -
where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance, and the

hills of Beulah, as the Professor always called them, rolled up the
opposite horizon in soft climbing masses, so suggestive of the

Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he used to look through his old
"Dollond" to see if the Shining Ones were not within range of

sight, - sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks which
carried them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village

lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses,
to the terminus of their harmlessstroll, - the patulous fage, in

the Professor's classicdialect, - the spreading beech, in more
familiar phrase, - [stop and breathe here a moment, for the

sentence is not done yet, and we have another long journey before
us,] -

- and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the
amber-flowing Housatonic, - dark stream, but clear, like the lucid

orbs that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed
demi-blondes, - in the home overlooking the winding stream and the

smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the
tracks of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the

winter snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North,
the highest waves of the great land-storm in all this billowy

region, - suggestive to mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried
Titaness, stretched out by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden

away beneath the leaves of the forest, - in that home where seven
blessed summers were passed, which stand in memory like the seven

golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer, -
- in that modestdwelling we were just looking at, not glorious,

yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany, - full of
great and little boys' playthings from top to bottom, - in all

these summer or winter nests he was always at home and always
welcome.

This long articulated sigh of reminiscences, - this calenture which
shows me the maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire and the mountain-

circled green of Grafton beneath the salt waves which come feeling
their way along the wall at my feet, restless and soft-touching as

blind men's busy fingers, - is for that friend of mine who looks
into the waters of the Patapsco and sees beneath them the same

visions which paint themselves for me in the green depths of the
Charles.

- Did I talk all this off to the schoolmistress? - Why, no, - of
course not. I have been talking with you, the reader, for the last

ten minutes. You don't think I should expect any woman to listen
to such a sentence as that long one, without giving her a chance to

put in a word?