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THE WORKS OF 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 
ILLUSTRATED WITH STEEL PORTRAITS 
AND PHOTOGRAVURES 
IN THIRTEEN VOLUMES 
VOLUME II Dr. Holmes in 1859 THE PROFESSOR AT 
THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 
Witt) tfje £>torp of 31r£s? 
BY 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 
BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
JEbe iWreibe ^ress, ^ambnOge Copyright, 1859, 1887, and 1891, 
By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
Copyright, 1892, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
AU rights reserved. 
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. 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 trot- 
ting 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 "Auto- 
crat." No doubt many other statements and opinions 
might be more or less modified if I were writing to- 
day 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 
single 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 rims 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 be- 
trays the flavor of the skin. If there is any freshness VI 
PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION. 
in the original idea of the work, if there is any indi- 
viduality 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 pa- 
pers 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 oth- 
ers. It amuses me to look back on some of the at- 
tacks they called forth. Opinions which do not ex- 
cite 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 re- 
quired the exercise of some forbearance not to recrim- 
inate. 
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. Par- 
tridge bore all this patiently." How many times, 
when, after rough usage from ill-mannered critics, my 
own vocabidary 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 PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION. 
VII 
catastrophe. The chief trouble in offering such pa- 
pers as these to the readers of to-day is that their her- 
esies have become so familiar among intelligent people 
that they have too commonplace an aspect. All the 
light-houses and land-marks of belief bear so differ- 
ently from the way in which they presented them- 
selves 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 unfathom- 
able 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 anti- 
dogmas, the public has become used to so much 
rougher treatment 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 denuncia- 
tion. 
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 Pre- 
face to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps apol- 
ogetic, 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 Pre- 
face. The author thinks he shall be misapprehended 
about this or that matter, that his well-meant expres- 
sions 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 Pre- 
face, 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 ex- 
citement, 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 PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 
IX 
twenty or thirty years since he canie before his untried 
public in those almost plaintive paragraphs in which 
he introduced himself to his readers, - for the Pre- 
face 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 sub- 
scribers against him were glad to get him as a con- 
tributor 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 Con- 
gregational and the Presbyterian, and the very distinct 
fissure which is manifest in the transplanted Angli- 
can 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. X 
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 
The folding-doors are wide open to every Protestant 
to enter all the privileged precincts and private apart- 
ments 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 anthro- 
pology 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 Farms, Mass., June 18, 1891. 
O. W. H. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
PAGE 
Oliver Wendell Holmes at the Age of 50. From a 
Photograph by Warren Frontispiece 
The Dying Tutor 64 
Model of all the Virtues and Iris 98 
John and the Professor 170 
The Professor in the Garden 248 
Iris and the Little Gentleman 302 
The above illustrations are by Alfred Kappes. 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 de- 
pendent creature. 
It is a small favor to ask, - said the divinity-stu- 
dent, - 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 con- 
cluding 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 2 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 I 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 espe- 
cially 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 ex- 
clamation, I looked round the table with curiosity to 
see what it meant. At the further end of it I saw a 
head, and a small portion of a little deformed body, 
moimted on a high chair, which brought the occupant 
up to a fail' 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 per- 
sonage of the famous spectacle. I contrived to lose 
the first of his sentence, but what I heard began so: -• 3 
- by the Frog - Pond, when there were frogs in 
it, and the folks used to come down from the tents on 
'Lection 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 
round, and went on. - Ran away from school one day 
to see Pliillips hung for killing Denegri with a logger- 
head. That was in flip days, when there were always 
two or 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, 
Sir, - 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 
Hall, - 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 
of crooked little streets; - I was born and used to run 
round in one uf '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 shordd 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 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 4 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 na- 
ture might confess an inward suggestion, - of course, 
nothing amounting to a suspicion. For this is a gen- 
tleman from a great city, and sits next to the land- 
lady'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 har- 
monize 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 be- 
gan 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
5 
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 hu- 
manity 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 com- 
panionship 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 fol- 
lowed your precept, Madam; I hope you accept his 
conclusions. 
The female boarder in black attire looked so puz- 
zled, 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 6 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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, -look- 
ing 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 be- 
come 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
7 
and religion, and yon will find it leaves all its mag- 
netism behind it. Take that famous word, O'm, of 
the Hindoo mythology. Even a priest cannot pro- 
nounce 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. Skep- 
ticism 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 
to,-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 8 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 fol- 
low one exclusive calling are prone to do.-The 
clergy have played the part of the fly-wheel 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 inertice, when its wheels were like to 
grind the bones of some old canonized error into fer- 
tilizers for the soil that yields the bread of life. But 
the mainspring of the world's onward religious move- 
ment 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 com- 
pany 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 bon- 
fire when Robert Calef's book was burned? 
The same, - I said, - when Robert Calef the Bos- 
ton merchant's book was burned in the yard of Har- 
vard 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
9 
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 malfor- 
mation 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 
bit of glass was a death's head. Engraved on one 
side of this, "L. B. 2Et. 22,"- on the other, "Ob. 
1692." 10 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 witcn 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 
soid's being consists,-an incandescent point in the 
filament connecting the negative pole of a past eter- 
nity 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 - I 
was saying that a man who lives out-of-doors, among THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
11 
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' dig- 
ging 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 span- 
ning the chasm, - that idea, I say, is pretty nearly 
worn out. Now when a civilization or a civilized cus- 
tom 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 unfor- 
tunate sick people a mess of things either too odious 
to swallow or too acrid to hold, or, if that were possi- 
ble, 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 pro- 
prietor of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of pep- 
pered 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 say- 12 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
ing 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 ut- 
terly untrustworthy and incompetent observer, (pro- 
found searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler in eru- 
dition, (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 char- 
latan (theorist). Not that the wiser part of the pro- 
fession 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 peo- 
ple 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 tra- 
ditional 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, THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
13 
to a larger extent than most good people seem to be 
aware of. It needn't be true, to do this, any more 
than Homoeopathy need, to do its work. The Spirit- 
ualists have some pretty strong instincts to pry over, 
which no doubt have been roughly handled by theolo- 
gians at different times. And the Nemesis of the pul- 
pit 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 can- 
not have people of cultivation, of pure character, sen- 
sible 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, con- 
stantly, 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 tru- 
est 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 unani- 
mous 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 simpli- 14 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
city, 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 No- 
vember 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 physiolo- 
gical condition of the young person, John. I noticed, 
however, what I should call a palpebral spasm, affect- 
ing 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 faith- 
fully, 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; THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
15 
and special knowledge will leak out, and general 
knowledge will leak in, though a profession were cov- 
ered 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 barri- 
cades, 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 Indepen- 
dence, 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 ruffled-shirt of 16 
TIIE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
the Revolution, was as good as born here. Parson 
Channing 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 peace- 
ful as a young baby, in the old burying-ground! 1 ' ve 
stood on the slab many a time. Meant well, - meant 
well. Juggernaut. Parson Channing 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 cog- 
wheels. - 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 open- 
ing for a lively rejoinder, if the Koh-i-noor had been 
so disposed. The little man uttered it with the dis- 
tinct 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-blade- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
17 
ful 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 accus- 
tomed 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 cur small boarder here is like to prove a refrac- 
tory 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 usur- 
pation which my friend openly justified. But I main- 
tain, 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,) 
or listen to one of those old playbills of our College 
days, in which "Tom and Jerry" ("Thomas and Jer- 
emiah," as the old Greek Professor was said to call 
it,) was announced to be brought on the stage with 
the 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 sugges- 
tive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I enjoy the 
luxury of sitting still for a while as much as another. 18 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
Nobody talks much that doesn'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 wouldn'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 in- 
stant 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" mono- 
logues is over. 
- My friend, - said I to the young fellow whom, 
as 1 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 re- 
volve 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? THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
19 
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. In- 
firmity 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 prin- 
ciple in creation. 
The young fellow's face gradually lost its expres- 
sion 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 tome, 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 Chro= 
nonhotonthologos? " 
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 20 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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, crotch- 
ety 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 sig- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
21 
nificance and of grammar. It was a frequent termina- 
tion 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. Op- 
posite me is a Venerable Gentleman with a bland coun- 
tenance, 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-look- 
ing 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 per- 
son. 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 like- 
ness enough; but still it seems to me there is some- 
thing wanting. The Landlady's Daughter is the 
prima donna in the way of feminine attractions. I 22 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 ovex 
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 ex- 
pected. 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 1 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 some- 
thing 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 23 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 me- 
tallic basis. 
There is something in that, - said I. - Only 1 
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 gar- 
den? 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-col- 
ored, 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 
as full of tingling thoughts, such as they are, as a 
limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particu- 
larly awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key- 
board of nerve-pulps, not as yet tanned or ossified, to 
the finger-touch of all outward agencies; knowing 
something 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 pri- 
vate 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 
a narrow artesian well; finding nothing too small for 24 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
his contemplation in the markings of the grammato- 
^hora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the move- 
ment 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 re- 
siduum 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 tempera- 
ture 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 soids are 
seen. We know our humanity by its often inter- 
cepted 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 25 
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 impressi- 
ble temperament, let a customer slip through his fin- 
gers 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 hu- 
man being, a?, 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 in- 
vented, manufactured, and patented her authors, con- 
trived to make critics out of the chips that were left I 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 26 
Painful as the task is, they never fail to warn the 
author, in the most impressive manner, of the proba- 
bilities 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 retir- 
ing before he sinks into imbecility. Trusting to their 
kind offices, I shall endeavor to fulfil -■ 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 na'ry 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 ? THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
27 
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 my thus, - 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 acarus bred in Crosse's flint-solution ? 
Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal 1 
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 28 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
Till the land was filled with loud reverberations 
Of " AU 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. (?) Cu- 
prum, (?) 
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, "AU 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 combi- 
nation of motives, more peremptory than the coal on 
the turtle's back, could have got me to leave the shel- 
ter of my carapace; and after memorable interviews, 
and kindest hospitalities, and grand sights, and huge THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
29 
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 resmne his skel- 
eton. 
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 pic- 
torial art (repeated by the magic graver) that look 
down upon me from the walls of my sacred cell! Ve- 
salius, as Titian drew him, high-fronted, still-eyed, 
thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems a gentle- 
man, 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 daugh- 
ters, cut in copper by Houbraken, bought from a port- 
folio on one of the Paris quais; and ye Three Trees 
of Rembrandt, black in shadow against the blaze of 
sunlight; and thou Rosy Cottager of Sir Joshua,- 
thy roses hinted by the peppery burin of Bartolozzi; 
ye, too, of lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely 
nor 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 
besides 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 recum- 30 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
bent 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 com- 
pliment, namely, - that I talked as if I believed what 
1 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 flow- 
ing 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 sylla- 
bles so gracefully, that we find meaning for the music 
they make as we find faces in the coals and fairy pal- 
aces in the clouds. There is something very odd, 
though, about this mechanical talk. 
You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad 31 
when the engine was detached a long way from the 
station you were approaching? Well, you have no- 
ticed 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 enter- 
tained, and cherish particularly amiable feelings to 
each other. The claret is good; and if our blood red- 
dens 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 PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 32 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 for- 
get 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 disad- 
vantages 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, per- 
haps, - talk, alone, for another; but the grand equal- 
izer 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 ; THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
33 
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 ? - 1 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 ab- 
stinence 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 I Yet better even 
excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon 
all our tables, let us praise it for its color and fra- 
grance 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 I think 
you will find that people who honestly mean to be 
true really contradict themselves much more rarely 34 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
than those who try to be "consistent." But a great 
many things we say can be made to appear contradic- 
tory, 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 gentle- 
man where he has evei' asserted more strongly or abso- 
lutely 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.1 
1 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 con- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
35 
Now let us come back, after this long digression, 
to the conversation with the intelligent Englishman. 
We begin skirmishing with a few light ideas, -test- 
ing 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 Pyra- 
mus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall to talk 
through. Therefore, on the whole, if he were a su- 
perior 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-genera- 
ditions 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 un- 
suspected 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 Venner, written soon after this book was pub- 
lished, illustrates the direction in which my thought was moving. 
The imaginary subject of the story obeyed her will, but her will 
obeyed the mysterious ante-natal poisoning influence. 36 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
tions. 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 mu- 
seum 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 dif- 
ficulties about race and complexion which the Eng- 
lishman 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 oth- 
er'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 Peru- 
vians. 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
37 
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 run- 
ning accompaniment. 
C. -Third voice, or Mental Basso, -low grumble 
of an 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 in- 
fernal 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, - late - 
I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes 
makes itself felt through the superincumbent strata. 38 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 trou- 
bling 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 uni- 
formity 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 an- 
other. 
- What is the saddle of a thought? Why, a 
word, of course- - Twenty years after you have dis- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
39 
missed 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 ban- 
daged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot, - as help- 
less, 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 be- 
fore. 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 ban- 
dages on; of 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, some- 
times, when I see how those functions of the large- 
brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade are abused by 40 
my fellow-vertebrates, -perhaps by myself. How 
they spar for wind, instead of hitting from the shoul- 
der ! 
- The young fellow called John arose and placed 
himself in a neat fighting attitude. - Fetch on the 
fellah that makes them long words I - he said, - and 
planted a straight hit with the right fist in the con- 
cave palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and 
ball.-You small boy there, hurry up that "Web- 
ster'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 diction- 
ary, if we are to have any. I don't believe in clip- 
ping the coin of the realm, Sir ! If I put a weather- 
cock 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 weather- 
cock 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 any- 
where 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 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 41 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 lan- 
guage which we have inherited from our English fa- 
thers. 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 Commence- 
ment, 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 look- 
ing down out of the galleries, and taught people how 
to spell a word that was n't in the Colonial dictiona- 
ries ! 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 Bos- 
ton to play tricks with it. We never make a new word 
till we have made a new thing or a new thought, Sir I 
When 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 Le- 
viathan clipper, the Occidental, - this thirty-masted 
wind-and-steam wave-crusher, - must throw a little 42 
spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the wa- 
ters 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 fust-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 Gov- 
ernor. 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 lie had a glazed 'lection- 
bun, 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 sp'ilt 
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 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
43 
to shriek. It did not, - but he sat as if watch- 
ing 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 enshrinedo 
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 dis- 
covery 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 44 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 har- 
row 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. 
Habw? - said the divinity-student. - He colored, 
as he noticed on my face a twitch in one of the mus- 
cles which tuck up the corner of the mouth, (zygoma- 
ticus major0 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 sur- 
prise, 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 cele- 
brated; another is by the odd old family names, par- 
ticularly those of the Hebrew prophets, which the 
good old people have saddled them with. 45 
- 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 talk- 
ing 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 succes- 
sively inmates of the lady's dwelling; and now, sev- 
enty 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 
it seemed to be: hair crisped, moustache springing 
thick and dark, head firmly planted, lips finished, as 
one commonly sees them in gentlemen's families, a 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 46 
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 - portholed 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. 
1 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. 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
47 
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 Bom- 
bazine (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 dis- 
appointed, if I sometimes interrupt a discussion to 
give an account of whatever fact or traits I may dis- 
cover 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 cu- 
riosity. That his room contains heavy furniture, that 
he is a restless little body and is apt to be up late. 48 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 oth- 
erwise singularly imperfect - I have repeatedly no- 
ticed 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 fin- 
ished in alto rilievo, would be a variety in the board- 
ing-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 come 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. 49 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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," 8 - the one on the right; 
" Mr. Mayor," 4 my young one, how are you to-night ? 
That's our " Member of Congress," 6 we say when we chaff ; 
There's the " Reverend " 6 What's his name ? - don't make me 
laugh I 
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 ; 
1 Francis Thomas. 2 George Tyler Bigelow. 
8 Francis Boardman Crowninshield. 
4 G. W. Richardson. 6 George Thomas Davis. 
6 James Freeman Clarke. 7 Benjamin Peirce. 50 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 ! 
III. 
[7%c 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 mascu- 
line constituents. These combined to make our first 
mother, by a logical necessity involved in the previous 
8 Stat nominis umbra. 
1 Benjamin Robbins Curtis. 
3 Samuel Francis Smith. 51 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
creation of our common father. All this, mythically, 
illustratively, and by no means doctrinally or polemi- 
cally. 
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 be- 
lieves 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 clair- 
voyant, 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, Baltimo- 
reans, 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 col- 
lege 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, formid- 
able as a red-eyed bison in the crack of hand-to-hand 52 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 Telamo- 
nian Ajax, defiant. No words from Harry, the Bal- 
timorean, - 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 ex- 
plosion 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 dif- 
ferent 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* THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
53 
horses, Barefoot and Serab by name, to Massachu- 
setts, 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 per- 
fection. 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 accommo- 
date any classical young gentleman who chose to con- 
sider 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 
savate, which is not commonly thought able to stand 
its ground against English pugilistic science.1 - These 
are old recollections, with not much to recommend 
them, except, perhaps, a dash of life, which may be 
worth a little something. 
1 There are two sides to this question. See Larousse, Grand 
Dictionnaire Universel du XIX Siecle, article " Boxe." 54 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 sit- 
ting. 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 any- 
body 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 im- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
55 
mensely rich and have the good-nature to die and leave 
them all his money, it would be as nice as a three-vol- 
ume 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 new- 
comer 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 per- 56 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
son 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 cir- 
cumstance 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 mysteri- 
ously 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 occur- 
rence 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 57 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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, nour- 
ished 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 high- 
water to suit a fishing-party as to change these periods. 
The crucial experiment is this. Offer a bulky and 
boggybun to the suspected individual just ten minutes 
before dinner. If this is eagerly accepted and de- 
voured, the fact of youth is established. If the sub- 
ject 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 Com- 
mons-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 58 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 wait- 
ing 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 pres- 
ent 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 ovei' 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 con- 
sciousness, until in some future life we see the photo- 
graphic 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 sep- 
arate 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 peb- 
bles in a stream, with the blood which warms your THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
59 
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 ex- 
cepted. - Did I hear some gentleman say, " Doubt- 
ed? " - I am the Professor. I sit in my chair with a 
petard under it that will blow me through the sky- 
light 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 un- 
til things began to whirl slightly round you, is it pos- 
sible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact con- 
nection 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 re- 
member, 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 60 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 liv- 
ing 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 61 
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 butch- 
er'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 throxigh 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 charm- 
ing 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 Bas- 
kerville, - 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, 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
" misera ante diem, subitoque aecensa furore ; " 
but when he came to the lines, 62 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
" 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 star- 
vation. 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, how- 
ever, they fade and waste away under various pre- 
texts, - 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 quanti- 
ties, 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 su- 
perfluities 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
63 
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 starva- 
tion. 
- The mother of little Iris was not called Elec- 
tra, like hers of the old story, neither was her grand- 
father 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 ad- 
mirable as reading equally well from the initial let- 
ter forwards and from the terminal letter backwards. 
The poor lady, seated with her companion at the chess- 
board 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 trou- 64 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
sers a little tighter, and took in another reef in his 
never-ample waistcoat. His temples got a little hol- 
low, 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 some- 
thing new. As the doctor went out, he said to him- 
self, - " 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 astrologi- 
cal sign of Jupiter before it, (just as your own physi- 
cian 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. The Dying Tutor THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
65 
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 clas- 
sics, and fell back on the Latin grammar. 
"Iris!" he said,- "filial a 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 mur- 
mured, " 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, 
" Morihundus." 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! 
hceret lateri, - I am going, - vale, vale, vale, good- 
bye, good-bye, - the Lord take care of my child! - 
D amine, audi vel audita!" 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, princi- 
pally classics, - a print or two, and a plaster model 
of the Pantheon, with some pieces of furniture which 66 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 chil- 
dren, - 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 paren- 
tal emotions, and running to the side of the plain crib 
in which his alter ego, as he used to say, was swing- 
ing, 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 fa- 
ther at that tender period of his hard, dry life. There 
came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with clas- 
sical figures, and bearing on a shield the graver words, 
Ek 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 reali- 
ties 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 has mingled an extra THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
67 
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 rain- 
water. 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 68 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 prop- 
erly 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 part- 
ner 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 ten- 
dencies she derived from her othei' 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 twro 
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 for- 
ward impulse of variable intensity in some new and 
unforeseen direction. 
So it was with this child. She had glanced off from THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
69 
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 direc- 
tion 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 un- 
known 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 geo- 70 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
graphics, 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 por- 
traits 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 weari- 
ness 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 pos- 
sessed 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. Men- 71 
tion any good thing she had not done; I should like to 
see you try I 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 rela- 
tion to another, and rebounded from the stuffed cush= 
ion 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 light- 
ning zigzag line of genius running like a glittering 
vein through the marble whiteness of her virgin na- 
ture! 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 ser- 
viceable 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 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 72 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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, 
1 take it, is the mob-law of the features, - and pro- 
priety 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 per- 
fect laboratory of tests and reagents; every syllable 
you put into breath went into her intellectual eudiom- 
eter, and all your thoughts were recorded on litmus- 
paper. I think there has rarely been a more admi- 
rable 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 con- 
cert 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. 73 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 perfec- 
tion? 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 I 
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 oppres- 
sive 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 Pro- 
fessor 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 musi- 
cal 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 gamhrel-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. 74 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 box 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 carolling 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, ladj ! 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
75 
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-hand- 
kerchief, emotional excitement has to be sought in the 
dramas of real life. Christenings, weddings, and 
funerals, especially the latter, are the main depen- 
dence; but babies, brides, and deceased citizens can- 
not be had at a day's notice. Now, then, for a sur- 
prise-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 pri- 
vate theatrical exhibitions. The minister of the par- 
ish, 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: - 76 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
ON TUESDAY NEXT 
WILL BE PRESENTED 
THE AFFECTING SCENE 
CALLED 
THE SURPRISE-PARTY, 
OK 
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 Over- 
come, 
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 wel- 
come 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? 77 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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. 78 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 fight- 
ing 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 I The three-hilled city 
against the seven-hilled city! That is it, Sir, - no- 
thing 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 civili- 
zation 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 sys- 
tems 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, - look- 
ing on, Sir, with what organs I know not, to see 
which are going to melt in that fiery fusion, the acci- 
dents 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 whisper- 
ing that he thought there wras a little confusion of THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
79 
images between a galvanic battery and a charge of 
cavalry. 
But the Koh-i-noor - the gentleman, you remem- 
ber, 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 tone, 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 mous- 
tache 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 mas- 
ter 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, - set- 
tles 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. 80 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional com- 
plexions 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 marrowfat peas. One of my own class- 
mates has undergone a singular change of late years, 
- his hair losing its original tint, and getting a re- 
markable 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 sup- 
pression 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 81 
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 cos- 
mopolitan. 
I doubt if we have more practical freedom in Amer- 
ica than they have in England, - I said. - An Eng- 
lishman thinks as he likes in religion and politics. 
Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr. Chan- 
ning did, and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. 
Seward. 
Sir,-said he,-it isn'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 Amer- 
ican 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 dif- 
ferent 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 free- 
dom with the milk of the breast at which he hangs. 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 82 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
- 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 1 The Milesian wet-nurse is only 
a convenient vessel through which the American in- 
fant 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 them- 
selves with interpretation of prophecies, we have got 
the new heavens and the new earth over us and under 
us I 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. Any- 
how, 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 dif- 
ferent. 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 an- 
swered, - the red-crayon sketch of humanity laid on 83 
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 Lit- 
tle 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 provi- 
sional 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 Hu- 
ron 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 tome 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 spir- 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 84 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
itual 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 be- 
tween 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-na- 
turedly. - 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 cen- 
tre of something? 
Ah, indeed, to be sure you are. You are the gas- 
tronomic 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 Bat- 
tle 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 or- 85 
rery;- 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 par- 
ties;- for geological section of social strata, go to 
The, Club. -Good place to live in, -first-rate mar- 
ket, - 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 Ne' 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 Ven- 
ice did, though, for aught we know. - The order of 
its development is just this: - Wealth; architecture; 
upholstery; painting; sculpture. Printing, as a me- 
chanical art, -just as Nicholas Jenson 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 Croce, and ask out of whose 
loins Dante sprung! 
Oh, yes, to be sure, Venice built her Ducal Palace, 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 86 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
and her Church of St. Mark, and her Casa d' Oro, 
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 Ven- 
ice 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 thejeunesse doree whose names are on 
the Golden Book of our sumptuous, splendid, marble- 
palaced 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 popula- 
tion 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 Amer- 
ica? 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. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
87 
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 embla- 
zoned 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 dis- 
pelled 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 soci- 
eties, 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 hat- 
ing 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 isn'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 doesn'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 88 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 them- 
selves 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 
just outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
89 
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 them- 
selves, but still shouldering up against his inner con- 
sciousness 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 bal- 
lad, "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 grand- 
mother 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 fire, 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 laby- 
rinth 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 them- 
selves 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 oidy to look 90 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
on them, but, if I can, through them. You can get 
any man's or woman's secret, whose sphere is circum- 
scribed 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 sight- 
ing some distant object to which the passions or aspi- 
rations 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. 
7? (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 
hills! 
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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
91 
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. 92 
What it held will, perhaps, never be known, until 
they are dead and gone, and some 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 be- 
lieve, 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 sen- 
timental history, if I am not mistaken. I will tell 
you my reason for suspecting it. 
Like many other old women, she shows a great ner- 
vousness and restlessness whenever I venture to ex- 
press 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 "reli- 
gious." 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 con- 
stitutional 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 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 93 
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 dynamome- 
ter. 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, per- 
haps, 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! 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 94 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
Romance! Was there ever a boarding-house in the 
world where the seemingly prosaic table had not a liv- 
ing 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 bomba- 
zine and high-necked decorum of your neighbor, and 
no more think of the real life that underlies this de- 
spoiled 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 yel- 
low 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 
bulfinch; 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 lit- 
tle 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 fol- 
low 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 stum- 
bling upon the word "Paddy," - which I use rarely 
in my common talk. 
I have been worried to know whether this was ow= 
ing 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 polite- 
ness 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 El/pit, 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 inva- 
riably; doubtless intended for Agnes. Names are 
cheap. How can a man name an innocent new-born 
child, that never did him any harm, Hiram f - 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 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
95 96 
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 land- 
lady,- to look so? - There! you 've upset your tea- 
cup! 
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 I am sure that she can hide 
nothing from me. Iler 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 partic- 
ular 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 in- 
tention 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 
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97 
called for convenience the Koh-i-noor, (you under- 
stand 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 dia- 
mond 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 gentle- 
man 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' com- 
pany with should be offerin' tickets and try in' to send 
presents to them that he 'd never know'd till jest a lit- 
tle 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 I presents I - 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 Mu- 
seum, 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 98 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 him- 
self, 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 appro- 
priated it, rejoicing, and indulged in most unheard-of 
and inordinate ablutions in consequence, so that his 
hands were a frequent subject of maternal congratu- 
lation, 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 Laza- 
rus, 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 Model of all the Virtues and Iris THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
99 
before Ma'am undertook to see to her teacliin' 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 es- 
tablishment. 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 those 
fresh features and rising reliefs of half-sculptured 
womanhood, and, seeing its loveliness, forget her les- 
sons of neutral-tinted propriety, and open the cases 
that hold her own ornaments to find for her a neck- 
lace or a bracelet or a pair of ear-rings, - those 
golden lamps that light up the deep, shadowy dim- 
ples on the cheeks of young beauties, - swinging in 
a semibarbaric 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 state- 
ments, 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 col- 
lective 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. 100 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 hand- 
some 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 favorit- 
ism, 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 - THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
101 
this - young lady - we have here, talks like a sensi- 
ble 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 char- 
acter isn'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 day- 
light; 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 vir- 
tuous 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:-- 102 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 I THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
103 
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. 
1 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, affec- 
tions, 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 it- 
self upon the old litanies, so often warmed by the hu- 
man 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 affect- 
ing letter, which I have hesitated to answer, though 104 
the postmark upon it gave its direction, and the name 
is one which is known to all, in some of its represen- 
tatives. 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 dis- 
respect 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 mediaeval 
creeds, choosing one who wears upon his features the 
mark of inward and outward health, who looks cheer- 
ful, intelligent, and kindly, and see how all your pre- 
judices 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 long- 
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105 
ing 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 sleep- 
ing 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. Bar- 
barism, 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. 106 
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 appel- 
lant 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 opin- 
ions; 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 
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107 
which involves the primal instincts violated in these 
abominations and absurdities. - What if we are even 
now in a state of semi-barbarism? 
Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table 
about such things. - I am not so sure of that. Reli- 
gion 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 thou- 
sand million, perhaps ten or a hundred times as many, 
earth-born intelligences. Life,, as we call it, is no- 
thing 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 hun- 
dreds 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, al- 
bumen, 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 conversa- 
tions my friend and myself have reported, 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, 108 
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. - How- 
ever, 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 lit- 
tle 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 al- 
lusions relating to matters of religion into common 
discourse ? 
Danger to what ? - I asked. 
Danger to truth, - he replied, after a slight pause. 
I did n'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 run- 
ning 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 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
109 
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 bub- 
ble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day, 
like a football, and it will be round and full at even- 
ing. 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? 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. 110 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 peo- 
ple'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 chil- 
dren in the street, and give them books, which their 
parents, who have had them baptized into the Chris- 
tian 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 dis- 
cussion 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 sub- 
jects. Suppose a minister were to undertake to ex- 
press 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, - some- 
times 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. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
111 
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 in- 
serted according to the principles of dentistry adopted 
by this Society. 
I, for one, should want to discuss that before sign- 
ing 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 look- 112 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
ing 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 mis- 
fortune! 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 Xerophthalmia 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
113 
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 pub- 
lic, 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, Arch- 
bishop 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 114 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
elephant on a tortoise. One statement is as near the 
truth as the other. 
Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some na- 
tures 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 cen- 
tury 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 re- 
markable man for their clergyman, - a man with a 
brain as nicely adjusted for certain mechanical pro- 
cesses as Babbage's calculating machine. The com- 
mentary of the laymen on che preaching and practis- 
ing 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, com- 
pared to his primary relations with Nature and truth; 
and people have sense enough to find it out in the 
long run; they know what "logic" is worth. 
In that miserable delusion referred to above, the rev- 
erend Aztecs and Fijians argued rightly enough from 
their premises, no doubt, for many men can do this. 
But common sense and common humanity were unfor- 
tunately 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. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
115 
"Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their In- 
structions," he says, "and God will smite thro' the 
loins of those that rise up against them. I will re- 
port unto you a Thing which many Hundreds among 
us know to be true. The Godly Minister of a certain 
Town in Conhecticut, 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 Meehan- 
ick, 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 Beading 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 Prophecy Ings ' ; 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 "Remark- 
able Judgments of God, on Several Sorts of Offen- 
ders,"- and the next cases referred to are the Judg- 
ments 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 institu- 
tions ; - they are nothing but a coarse outside ma- 
chinery 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 hon- 116 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
est, 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 reli- 
gion should not be introduced. You'would not at- 
tack 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 pro- 
priety, 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 prop- 
osition 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-stu- 
dent, - 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 your- 
self? 
Certainly, - I replied, - if it gives you any pleas- 
ure to ask foolish questions. I think the ocean tele- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
117 
graph-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 ro- 
bust 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 Balti- 
more discourse and remember the shrieks of blas- 
phemy with which it was greeted, to satisfy yourself 
on this point. Time, time only, can gradually wean 
us from our Epcolatry, or word-worship, by spiritual- 
izing our ideas of the thing signified. Man is an idol- 
ater 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 Sleep- 
ers," hath it, "no doubt a thankless office, and a verie 
unthriftie occupation; veritas odium parity truth 
never goeth without a scratcht face; he that will be 
busie with vce vobis, let him looke shortly for coram 
nobis." 118 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 compar- 
ative 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-stu- 
dent, - 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
119 
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 anon- 
ymous 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 
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 pro- 
fessional public the damnable facts connected with the 
conveyance of poison from one young mother's cham- 
ber to another's,-for doing which humble office I 
desire to be thankful that I have lived, though no- 
thing else good should ever come of my life, - I had 
to bear the sneers of those whose position I had as- 
sailed, 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 120 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 quintain. 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 lec- 
ture, we will say, in some paper taken by the people 
in your kitchen. Your servants get saucy and neg- 
ligent. 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 Heze- 
kiah'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. 121 
Good! - said I. -Now let me give you some ax- 
ioms 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 school- 
men 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, 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 122 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
of their country, of truth, nay, even for simple man- 
hood'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 drink- 
ing his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's 
camp, or that old New England divine sitting com- 
fortably 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 in- 
credible that men talked as we sometimes hear them 
now. 
Pectus est quodfadt theologum. The heart makes 
the theologian. Every race, every civilization, either 
has a new revelation of its own or a new interpreta- 
tion of an old one. Democratic America has a dif- 
ferent humanity from feudal Europe, and so must 
have a new divinity. See, for one moment, how in- 
telligence 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 gener- 
ation dissolves something new and precipitates some- 
thing 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
123 
advance of the formulae that belong to their organiza- 
tions. 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 conversa- 
tion 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 hear- 
ing. 
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 intelli- 
gent 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 lit- 
tle too vivacious. I don't know that I shall report 
any more conversations on these topics; but I do in- 124 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
sist 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 mat- 
ters. You did n't think a man could sit at a break- 
fast-table doing nothing but making puns every morn- 
ing 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 talk- 
ing 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 ma- 
ternity, the sentiment of the paramount obligation of 
the parent to the child as having called it into exis- 
tence, 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 op- 
posite 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
125 
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 In- 
quisition which excommunicates those who ask to leave 
their communion in peace, and an Index Expurgato- 
rius 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 pos- 
sible 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 un- 
told 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 denoun- 
cing 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 main- 
tain 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 126 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 prem- 
ises, 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. An- 
anias, Shimei, and Rab-shakeh. 
[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 peace- 
ful and loving servant.] THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
127 
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 5 
One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed, - 
In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid 1 
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 
6' 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 ; 128 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 ? " THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
129 
O weary hour ! 0 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 sucks 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 lends, 
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. 130 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 di- 
vinity-student one morning. 
Of course every good man considers it a great sacri- 
fice 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 sur- 
prised 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 side- 
board. The image it returned to him had the color 
of a very young pea somewhat over-boiled. The scen- 
ery 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 think- 
ing 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 wait- 
ing for you ever since the birds or beasts made their 
tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
131 
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 with- 
out 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 form- 
less 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 sev- 
ered stones. 
They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his 
countenance. On the contrary, the Poor Relation's re- 
mark 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 direc- 
tion in which his downward path was tending. It 
was an honest little cough enough, so far as appear- 132 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
ances 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 ex- 
hibitin'. 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. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
133 
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 morn- 
ing on the manners of well-bred and ill-bred people. 
I began, - The whole essence of true gentle-breed- 
ing (one does not like to say gentility) lies in the wish 
and the art to be agreeable. Good-breeding is sur- 
face- Christianity. Every look, movement, tone, ex- 
pression, 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 accompa- 
nied our young friend, the Latin Tutor's daughter. 
I go politically for equality, - I said, - and so- 
cially 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 an- 
swer, - I said. - Nothing is better known than the 134 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
distinction of social ranks which exists in every com- 
munity, 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, per- 
manent, 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. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
135 
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 gen- 
eral 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 arti- 
sans 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 com- 
panions. The influence of a fine house, graceful fur- 
niture, good libraries, well-ordered tables, trim ser- 
vants, and, above all, a position so secure that one 
becomes unconscious of it, gives a harmony and re- 
finement 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 va- 
ried 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- 136 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
ladies better than the common kind even of literary 
ones. They haven'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 dog- 
mas. 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 ap- 
parel 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 igno- 
rant of something that you know, but an elegant wo- 
man 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? At- 
tention 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. 
[J/y reflection. Oh! oh! no wonder you didn't 
get married. Served you right.] My remark. 137 
Surely, Madam, - if you mean by flattery telling peo- 
ple 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 feel- 
ing and desire to make everybody contented, - an at- 
mosphere 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, is n'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 to- 
bacco. 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 com- 
mitting 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. 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 138 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
- 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 so- 
prano 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 personal- 
ity 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 trun- 
dling 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 conversa- 
tion 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
139 
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 lec- 
ture was delivered. But what shall I do now? He 
told us it was childish to lay down rules for deport- 
ment, - 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. Gener- 
ally a natural rhythm runs through the whole organiza- 
tion : quick pulse, fast breathing, hasty speech, rapid 
trains of thought, excitable temper. Stillness of per- 
son 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 appearing 
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 apol- 
ogy. It is mighty presumptuous on your part to sup- 
pose 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 commu- 
nions, - to be light in hand in conversation, to have 
ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, with- 140 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
out 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 individ- 
uality, 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 per- 
sonal 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 no- 
thing can hold back from their errands of mercy. 
They find out the red-handed, gloveless undergradu- 
ate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his corner, 
and distil their soft words upon him like dew upon 
the green herb. They reach even the poor relation, 
whose dreary apparition saddens the perfumed atmos- 
phere of the sumptuous drawing-room. I have known 
one of these angels ask, of her own accord, that a des- 
olate 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
141 
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 no- 
ble woman bending gracefully before the social men- 
dicant, - the white billows of her beauty heaving un- 
der the foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed 
them, - I should have wept with sympathetic emo- 
tion, 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 po- 
sition 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 popu- 
lar sentiment which carry straws and chips into the 
public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of the mon- 
archs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream 
to the gulf of political oblivion I 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 un- 
sunned cavern! No, -there will be angels of good- 
breeding then as now, to shield the victim of free in- 142 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
stitutions 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 ar- 
tifice, 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 Champol- 
lion of New England or Western or Southern barba- 
risms. She has learned that haow means what; that 
thinkin' 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, -fie as 
in the French le),-or that eheer 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 stand- 
ard, - 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 complex- 
ion is not a little faded, and so on, and then convey 
the fact to you, in the style in which the Poor Rela- 
tion 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 dis- 
tinction is one my friend or I drew long ago. No 
matter where you find such people; they are clowns. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
143 
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 man- 
ners, 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 ex- 
ample at the beginning of this particular record, which 
some young people who are going to choose profes- 
sional 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 ride, 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 imperti- 
nence which one human being can offer to another. 
"You have killed me," said a patient once to a phy- 
sician 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 con- 
dition as early as they ought to know it, and not be 
cheated out of their natural birthright of hope of re- 
covery, which is intended to accompany sick people as 144 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 cheer- 
ful 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 mis- 
erable, 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 per- 
sons 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 ques- 
tions? It was, Do you, Miss So and So, take this 
Gentleman? and, Do you, Mr. This or That, take THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
145 
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 ex- 
clude its impertinences, - the good man would have 
given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that su- 
perb 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 un- 
derstood 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 146 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
one by one as we sink through the social scale. For- 
tunately, the virtues are more tenacious of life, and 
last pretty well until we get down to the mud of ab- 
solute 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, in- 
volving 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 paingiv- 
ing 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
147 
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 embroider- 
ies, 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 con- 
trary, is an estimable and intelligent, nay, a particu- 
larly enlightened and exemplary member of society, 
fail to inspire interest, love, and devotion ? Because 
of the reversed current in the flow of thought and emo- 
tion. 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 vid 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 148 
banished her to the company of the great Unpresent- 
able. 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 be- 
friended repays her kindness with gratitude and re- 
spect, 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 lit- 
tle man on the other side of her, leaning and sway- 
ing 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 PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
" 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 Newfound- 
land, 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, - THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
149 
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, 
talking1 or writing1, with one of those babbling;, chat- 
tering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know 
enough even to keep out of print, and who are inter- 
esting to us only as specimens of arrest of develop- 
ment 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 
usefid, be honorable and honored, be just, be charita- 
ble, talk pure reason, and help to disenchant the world 
by the light of an achromatic understanding. Good- 
bye! 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 homo- 
geneous 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- 150 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 disposi- 
tions. Why does n't a man always strike out thej?rs£ 
of the two words, to gratify his diabolical love of in- 
justice? 
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 architec- 
ture, - 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 bet- 151 
ter 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 reali- 
ties, 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 in- 
tercourse. What business has a man who knows no- 
thing 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 fright- 
ful 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 chil- 
dren live and keep his memory green. 
I do not think there is much courage or originality 
in giving utterance to truths that everybody knows, 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 152 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 com- 
monplace 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 mil- 
lionnaires at once, by anything 1 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
153 
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 sido, 
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 154 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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, consid- 
ering various habits of the American people, also the 
little accidents which the best-kept sidewalks are lia- 
ble to, a lady who has swept a mile of them is not ex- 
actly 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 fac- 
tory-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 be- 
lieve 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 squeam- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
155 
ish, he has got a tough stomach. I wouldn't let one 
of 'em into my room without serving 'em as David 
served Said 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 sac- 
rifices 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 what- 
ever 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, ex- 
cepting 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. 156 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 multiply- 
ing instances to reach this generalization; every per- 
son 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 as- 
pect 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, up- 
right carriage, and an angular movement of the arm, 
that remind one of a pump and the working of its 
handle. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
157 
All this came in by accident, just because I hap- 
pened 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 cahnly into the amber eyes, rest- 
ing 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 seri- 158 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
ously at work to find out what was going on in these 
wild hearts and where their passionate lives were drift- 
ing. 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 toler- 
ably intelligible. There is a whiff of something float- 
ing 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 I 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 blow- 
ing 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 woifld 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
159 
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 to- 
gether, 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 Am, 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 feath- 
ers 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. 160 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 or love in it, she will glance off 
from him into some great passion or other. All ex- 
citements 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 cur- 
rent 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 lis- 
tening 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 sugges- 
tive of "imagination," to use a mild term, when re- 
lated 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. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
161 
- 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 witch- 
craft 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 some- 
thing 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 soit 
of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,-a 162 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 1 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 be- 
lieves, 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-peo- 
ple 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 didn'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 be- 
lieve one word of ghosts, - but then he knows, that, 
whether waking or sleeping, his imagination will peo- 
ple 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
163 
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 them- 
selves in some such simple way. And yet, for all 
that, I confess, that, when I woke up the other even- 
ing, and heard, first a sweet complaining cry, and 
then footsteps, and then the dragging sound, - no- 
thing 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. 164 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 fright- 
ened and lias 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 whis- 
per of her lips is full of mystery and fear. 
You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not be- 
lieve there is anything about this singular little neigh- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
165 
bor 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 uncom- 
fortable 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 num- 
ber of his room, he answered, that it was forty-'leven, 
sky-parlor floor, but that I should n'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 por- 
trait-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." 166 
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 
2.20.1 From five to ten seconds, then, in about a hun- 
dred 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? 
1 I will let these numbers stand as printed thirty years ago. 
Mr. Henry Sturgis Russell, than whom there is no better author- 
ity, has furnished me the following list: - 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
" Lady Suffolk 2.26| 
Flora Temple 2.19| 
Dexter 2.17| 
Goldsmith Maid 2.14 
Maud S 2.08J 
are the official records and show as clearly as any the progress 
made." 
There are those who believe that the record will come down 
to two minutes. 167 
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 sec- 
ond 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 "Z;m<7^-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 convolu- 
tions. So I reflected, standing and looking at the 
picture. 
- I say, Governor, - broke in the young man 
John, - them hosses 'll 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 state- 
ment. 
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 excel- 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 168 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
lent 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 ap- 
plicants 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 somnambu- 
lism, 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 pur- 
pose of comparing them, as it would seem. Among 
them was a repeater, belonging to our young Mary- 
lander. He happened to wake up while the somnam- 
bulist was in his chamber, and, not knowing his in- 
firmity, caught hold of him and gave him a dreadfid 
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 som- 
nambulism.] 
If you, my reader, will please to skip backward, 
over this parenthesis, you will come to our conversa- 
tion, 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
169 
got tough, 'n' turkeys have got strong, 'n' lamb 's got 
old, 'n' veal's pretty nigh beef, 'n' sparragrass 's grow- 
in' 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 sub' 
stance, 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 cornin' 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 
Al. 
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' 170 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
that 's the reason they turn a fellah's head, I sup- 
pose. 
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 mut- 
ton?- 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 sau- 
sage, 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 would n'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 long- 
sighted 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. Hoss- John and the Professor THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
171 
back-ridin' a'n't for them, - except once a year, - 
on Fast-day. And marryin' a'n't for them. Some- 
times 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 every- 
thing, 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 haven'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 cornin' 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 cham- 
ber, but he don't seem to want 'em. Biddy could 
tell somethin' about what she's seen when she 's been 172 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 hei' 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 gentle- 
man 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 cat- 
erpillar on a hot shovel. I only wished he hadn't, 
and had jest given her a little saas, 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 173 
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 
shoidd 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 curi- 
osity. 
Then, if I can get into this Little Gentleman's 
room under any fair pretext, I shall, no doubt, sat- 
isfy 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 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 174 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 some- 
times, 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 I 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 : - THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
175 
"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. 176 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 par- 
ticular 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 boarding- 
house 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
177 
their bodies, - if pangs that waste men to shadows 
and drive them into raving madness or moping mel- 
ancholy, - 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 re- 
member, 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 fan- 
cies, 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 wait- 
ing 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 intelli- 
gences, 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 com- 
plete sentence, in this life. I do not think it could 178 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
be; for I am disposed to consider our beliefs about 
such a possible disclosure rather as a kind of premo- 
nition 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 frag- 
ments 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 posi- 
tive element in our creed, so direct and palpable a 
revelation is it of the infinite purity and love. I re- 
member 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 ApoIlina, with some- 
thing of the same quality, - which I was sure had 
their prototypes in the world above ours. No won- 
der 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 ahnost 
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? THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
179 
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 illus- 
tration. 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 un- 
suspected 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 180 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 won- 
der, 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 nat- 
ural 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 pur- 
sued 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
181 
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 some- 
thing 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 expres- 
sion in a young girl's face. You forget what a mis- 
erable 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 scrib- 
bler'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 fea- 
tures. 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 182 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
the person with whom he converses about such mat- 
ters. 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 un- 
intelligibly, 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 phunb 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
183 
landlady, and sent another by the hand of Bridget to 
this old gentleman. 
- Sarvant, Ma'am! Much obleeged,-he said, 
and put it gallantly in his button-hole. - After break- 
fast he must see some of her drawings. Very fine per- 
formances, - very fine ! - truly elegant productions, 
■-truly elegant! -Had seen Miss Linwood's needle- 
work 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, paint- 
ing; 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 I 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 pro- 
foundly 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 184 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 I 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 lit- 
tle picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling 
of anybody that you don't want to see. - The old gen- 
tleman 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 1 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 185 
try the lock, which proved to be fast. We are all 
caricatured in it, I have n'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 shoifld 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 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 186 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 I So we finished our conversation on the land- 
ing. The next day, I mustered assurance enough to 
knock at his door, having a pretext ready. - No an- 
swer. - Knock again. A door, as if of a cabinet, was 
shut softly and locked, and presently I heard the pecul- 
iar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen boots. 
The bolts and the lock of the inner door were unfas- 
tened, - 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 mer- 
chant-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 whimsi- 
cal 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 im- 
agination, - I mean, that gave me a distinct appre- 
hension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled 
round the neighborhood where I was born and bred. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
187 
The first was a series of marks called the "Devil's 
footsteps." These were patches of sand in the pas- 
tures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush black- 
berry, 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 exist- 
ence 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 un- 
pleasant affair; and I do not care to repeat the partic- 
ulars; but some young men had been using sacred 
things in a profane and unlawful way, when the oc- 
currence, 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 188 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 unten- 
anted, 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 dor- 
mitory 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 to- 
gether 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' ra- 
piers, - and the tall mirror in which they used to look 
at their red coats, - confound them for smashing its 
mate I - 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 
down-stairs 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 189 
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 con- 
tracts 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 dwell- 
ings, 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 could n'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, fig- 
ures, 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 peri- 
odical record this time. It was all the work of a 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 190 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 pur- 
chase. 
The sord, 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 obser- 
vers 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. With- 
out 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 docu- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
191 
ment. 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 ex- 
pect a friend who entertains you to recognize the like- 
ness 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 da- 
guerreotype 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 per- 
sons. 
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: - 192 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 bloom- 
ing? 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 smil- 
ing 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 fin- 
ishing 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 fea- 
tures as special and definite an expression of his sole THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
193 
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 re- 
quires 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 build- 
ing 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 tempo- 
rary possession and less and less as identified with our- 
selves. 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 biogra- 
phies, all alike in their essentials; the same "disin- 
clination 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 con- 194 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
stitutional unfitness for living, the most frequent of 
which I need not mention. They are like the beauti- 
ful, 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 
"footers," 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 cop- 
pers, "stick" knives, call names, throw stones, knock 
off hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, "cut be- 
hind" 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 over- 
flowing and exulting sense of vitality and the expe- 
riences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents? 
The time comes when we have learned to understand THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
195 
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 im- 
planted 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 tubercu- 
lous 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 re- 
mained to be phrenologized. A polite note from 
Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attend- 
ance at their Physiological Emporium, was too tempt- 
ing to be resisted. We repaired to that scientific 
Golgotha. 196 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 establish- 
ment. 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." Pro- 
fessor 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 oi THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
197 
other. Victuality, (organ at epigastrium,) some 
other number equally significant. 
Mild champooing of head now commences. Ex- 
traordinary revelations ! Cupidiphilous, 6! Hymeni- 
philous, 6 + ! Paediphilous, 5! Deipniphilous, 61 
Gelasmiphilous, 6! Musikiphilous, 5! Uraniphi- 
lous, 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 consider- 
ing that I was a (ZeacZ-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 no- 
menclature, with a self-adjusting arrangement, by 
which all positive evidence, or such as favors its doc- 
trines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such 
as tells against it, is excluded. It is invariably con- 
nected 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- 198 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
minded inquirers, poetical optimists, people who al- 
ways 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 al- 
most never a horse-jockey or a member of the detec- 
tive 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 valu- 
able 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 Pseu- 
do-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, prom- 
ises 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 sen- 
sible man who really believed in the bumps. It is 
observed, however, that persons with what the Phren- 
ologists 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 199 
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 caseous nature of our satellite, before I purchase. 
It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phren- 
ological 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 fore- 
head, 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 doesn't 
know anything about it. 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.) 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 200 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A. But 
B. has no bump at all over Acquisitiveness. Nega- 
tive 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 cov- 
ers 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 AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
201 
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 my- 
self 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 
Customer. 
Private Notes for my 
Pupil. 
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. 202 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
Approbativeness, 7 -|- 
Hat well brushed. Hair ditto. 
Mark the effect of that^Zus 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, Color, Lo- 
) 4 to 6. Average every- 
cality, Eventuality, etc., etc., 
j thing that can't be guessed. 
And so of the other faculties. 
Of course, you know, that isn't the way the Phren- 
ologists do. They go only by the bumps. - What do 
you keep laughing so for? (to the boarders.) I only 
said that is the way / 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 spir- 
itual danger is from the perpetual fl a ttery 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. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
203 
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 204 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 particu- 
lar classes of questioners. 
a. Not trying to be a gentleman. 
b. Self-respect underlying courtesy. 
c. Knowledge and observance of the fitness ofi 
things in social intercourse. 
d. £. 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
205 
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 nus- 
sin' 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, some- 
times ahnost 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 conversa- 
tion 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 else- 
where than at our table, and that there is a mystery, 
which is going to break upon us all of a sudden, in- 
volving 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 straightfor- 
ward, 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 206 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
city. In her, it is standing up for her little friend 
with the most queenly disregard of the code of board- 
ing-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 tooth- 
ache, - and that if she opens her mouth to the quar- 
ter 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: - THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
207 
- It must be done, Sir I - 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 American- 
izing 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 look- 
out ; - 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 In- 
quisitors have left us to help along "peace and good- 
will 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 advertise- 
ment 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. 208 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 I 
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 for- 
gets 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, - THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
209 
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 sen- 
sible 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 inde- 
pendence 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 "shoul- 
der-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 210 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 Arch- 
bishop 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 choices 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 de- 
velopment, 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 wor- 
ship; and when the doors were hospitably opened, 
she would often go meekly in by herself. It was a THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
211 
curious fact, that two churches as remote from each 
other in doctrine as could well be divided her affec- 
tions. 
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 fur- 
niture which gave it such a Romish aspect; but there 
were pictures, and inscriptions in antiquated charac- 
ters, and there were reading-stands, and flowers on 
the altar, and other elegant arrangements. Then 
there were boys to sing alternately in choirs respon- 
sive 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 contribu- 
tions. 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 dig- 
nified 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 ser- 
viceable 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 qual- 
ities, - 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 im- 
presses the common worshipper, and is often not with- 
out its effect upon those who think they hold outward 212 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
forms as of little value. Under the half-Romish as- 
pect 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, harmo- 
nized 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 Poly carp? 
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 tin- 
kled 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 PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
213 
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 Cu- 
pid and Psyche to theii* 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 cor- 
ner 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 chil- 
dren. 
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 stand- 
ard, 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 roof, - traces, 214 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
both, of that upward movement of ecclesiastical archi- 
tecture which soared aloft in cathedral-spires, shoot- 
ing into the sky as the spike of a flowering aloe from 
the cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below. 
This suggestion of mediaeval 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 suc- 
cession, 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 pal- 
aces 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
215 
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 Poly carp! 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 Sun- 
day- 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 con- 
gregations, 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 es- 
capes in all sorts of fidgety movements, so that a min- 
ister trying to keep his congregation still reminds one 216 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
of a boy with his hand over the nose of a pump whieh 
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 ad- 
vance, 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 sus- 
pect, 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 ob- 
ject, they would have found they had more in com- 
mon 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
217 
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 be- 
lief 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 Jeru- 
salem, 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. 218 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 didn't say a new faith, - said the Little Gentle- 
man;- 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 I 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
219 
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 wasn't deep enough, and the Tiber 
wasn't deep enough, and the Rhone wasn't deep 
enough, and the Thames was n't deep enough, - and 
perhaps the Charles isn'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 pro- 220 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
gress 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 every- 
day 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 no- 
thing 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 ob- 
serve 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 221 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
inwardly, or some hidden disease is at work upon 
him. 
- AV hat'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 nuss to take care of him. 
Them nusses 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? Leu 
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 per- 
sonal 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 w'ith her, I have found my- 
self becoming, I will not say intimate, but well ac- 
quainted 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 222 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 auda- 
city 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 six- 
teen. 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 charac- 
ter, 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 por- 
trayed 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 vari- 
ous 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 223 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 pas- 
sages 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 Na- 
ture's gendarmerie, clad in a complete suit of wrin- 
kles, 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 224 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 polit- 
ical 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-i- 
noor, as we called him, was in a corner with our land- 
lady's daughter. The young fellow John was smok- 
ing out in the yard. The gendarme was afraid of the 
evening air, and kept inside. The young Mary- 
lander came to the door, looked out and saw us walk- 
ing together, gave his hat a pull over his forehead and THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
225 
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 ! 226 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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. 
Ixr 33ook. 
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. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
227 
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 1 
Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken, 
Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken ? 
She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies, - 
W alked 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, 228 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 inno- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
229 
cent. 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 shap- 
ing capacity which through natural organs realizes 
itself in words. Only it had to talk with its face 
alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alterna- 
tions 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-Wonde 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 crea- 
tures 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 230 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 recol- 
lection, which is not peculiar to myself, but is shared 
by a certain number of my former townsmen. If 
you think I overcolor 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 Bisters. 
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 be- 
lieve ; 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 pass- 
ers-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 per- 
ennial articles of merchandise, of which my memory 
still has hanging among its faded photographs a kind THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
231 
of netted scarf and some pairs of thick woollen stock- 
ings. More articles, but not very many, were stored 
inside; and there was one drawer, containing- chil- 
dren'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 pres- 
ent head of the establishment.1] 
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 Sun- 
days, 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).2 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, 
1 This was a glass alembic, which hung up in Daniel Hench- 
man's apothecary shop, corner of Cambridge and Chambers 
Streets. 
2 Vide Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. 232 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
they were shapely and seemly personages, as I remem- 
ber 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, ob- 
jects of kindly attention to the good people round, 
leaving little or almost nothing, and nobody to in- 
herit 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 mer- 
cies 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
233 
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 pool* widow, fight- 
ing hard to feed and clothe and educate her children, 
had not forgotten the poorer ancient maidens. I re- 
membered 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 treas- 
ury by that other poor widow whose deed the world 
shall remember forever, and with the coats and gar- 
ments which the good women cried over, when Tab- 
itha, 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 sold of Iris in the one that lay open be- 
fore me. Sometimes it was a poem that held it, some- 
times a drawing, - angel, arabesque, caricature, or a 234 
mere hieroglyphic symbol of which I could make no- 
thing. 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 them- 
selves 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 dande- 
lions,- 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 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
235 
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 creep- 
ing plant which we call "knot-grass," and which loves 
its life so dearly that it is next to impossible to mur- 
der 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 inter- 
pret 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, anx- 
ious 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 236 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 Gladi- 
ator,"- the "e/ezme lleros comb att ant" 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 per- 
fection 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 crea- 
tures ! 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 ser- 
pents; 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 her- 
ons standing on one foot like cripples, and looking 
at life round them with the cold stare of monumen- 
tal effigies. -A very odd page indeed! Not a crea- 
Cure in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
237 
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 deform- 
ity, 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 symmet= 
rical 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 con- 
nected with her friend whom Nature has warped in 
the moulding. - That is nothing to another transcen- 
dental fancy of mine. I believe her soul thinks it- 
self 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 board- 
ers 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 fore- 
head. 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 238 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 trem- 
bled, and might have fallen but for me; - the pool 
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 Pira- 
nesi 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 moulder- 
ing bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscrip- 
tions." 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 start- 
ing. There were all sorts of faces among the ara- 
besques which laughed and scowled in the borders 
that ran round the pages. They had mostly the out- 
line of childish or womanly or manly beauty, without 
very distinct individuality. But at last it seemed to 239 
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 com- 
mon 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 f - for such there are, 
though they are not the ones who think themselves 
uncomprehended women. 
Poets are never young, in one sense. Their deli- 
cate 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 mo- 
ment'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 pro- 
found melancholy of those lines of Shelley, 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
" 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,'* 240 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
'- 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 abso- 
lutely submitted to the will, and therefore more dis- 
tinctly 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. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
241 
And yet, to look at it in another light, is not even 
the lowest instinct more truly divine than any volun- 
tary human act done by the suggestion of reason? 
What is a bee's architecture but an zmobstructed 
divine thought? - what is a builder's approximative 
rule but an obstructed thought of the Creator, a muti- 
lated and imperfect copy of some absolute rule Divine 
Wisdom has established, transmitted through a hu- 
man soul as an image through clouded glass? 
Talent is a very common family-trait; genius be- 
longs 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 some- 
body's vested ideas, -blasphemy against somebody's 
(Xm, 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 ge- 
nius, and very likely do not want to know any more. 
For a divine instinct, such as drives the goose south- 
ward and the poet heavenward, is a hard thing to 
manage, and proves too strong for many whom it pos- 
sesses. 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. 242 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 ob- 
viously utterly incompetent. It conies up, as a South- 
ern 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 with- 
out losing the color and fragrance into which their 
lives would have blossomed in the latitude of myrtles 
and oranges. Strange effects are produced by suffer- 
ing 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, - over- 
grown larva? or embryos; nay, I am afraid we Prot- 
estants should look on a considerable proportion of 
the Holy Father's one hundred and thirty-nine mil- 
lions as spiritual larva?, sculling about in the dark by 
the aid of their caudal extremities, instead of stand- 
ing 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? THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
243 
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 com- 
plex 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 sec- 
ond natural birth; - for I do not speak of those pe- 
culiar 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 shoifld remember them as they remember 
those in peril through travel or sickness or in war- 
fare. 
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 beau- 
ties, 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 ele- 
ments her growing nature requires? 
I do not know. The magnolia grows and comes into 244 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
full flower on Cape Ann, many degrees out of its 
proper region. 1 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, resplen- 
dent 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 pat- 
terns all trodden out and the colored fringe worn from 
all its border. 
If the magnolia can bloom in northern New Eng- 
land, why should not a poet or a painter come to his 
full growth here just as well? Yes, but if the gor- 
geous 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 every- 
where. 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 im- 
ages 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 sug- 
gestive one. Which our common New England life THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
245 
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 Berk- 
shire Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads. 
So everywhere Indian arrowheads. Whether a hun- 
dred 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 hold- 
ing 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 un- 
known generations, finds nothing to breathe or fly in; 
he meets 
" A vast vacuity ! all unawares, 
Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops 
Ten thousaiul 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 pave- 
ment 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 new-comer, as we 
contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls 
of Fiesole or Volterra. It makes a man human to 246 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 swell- 
ings, 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-tor- 
turing 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 Uis 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 Adins, even more full of mean- 
ing 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 
1 It is now gone, and there is nothing to mark the place where 
it stood. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
247 
things our memory and our affections attach them- 
selves ! 1 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 Txilly 
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 innu- 
merable 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 tal- 
ismans 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 248 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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; 
theii' 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 "skele- 
ton hand " at the window opposite, drawing her cur- 
tains, - "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, with- 
out an answer! Yes, - pray for her, and for all The Professor in the Garden THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
249 
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, Laen- 
nec. 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, 250 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
for an atmosphere fit to breathe nowadays. Did not 
worthy Mr. Higginson say that a breath of New Eng- 
land's air is better than a sup of Old England's ale? 
I ought to have died when 1 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 Philadel- 
phia, 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 com- 
monly 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 de- 
gree 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 ap- 
proaching 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 con- 
jectures 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, THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
251 
I know how to interpret, that his heart was in trou- 
ble ; 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 I 
Never thought of his failin' so suddin. A compli- 
cation 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 our- 
selves, with children to keep filled, covered, and 
taught, - rents high, - beef eighteen to twenty cents 
per pound,) - after this first squeak of selfishness, fol- 
lowed 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 
jnay happen to be mentioned as ill, - the worthy 252 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 un- 
dergo, 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 coidd 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, THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
253 
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. 254 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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, how- 
ever, 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 at- 
tack the "Critical Notices" of the last Quarterly and THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
255 
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 sub- 
ject, 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 irresist- 
ible; as when, for instance, one looking at the sun 
going down says, "I will count fifty before it disap- 
pears"; 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 count- 
ing. 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 May- 
flower. All this is just what I mean to find out while 256 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
I am looking at the Little Gentleman, who has sud- 
denly 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 philo- 
sophical contemplations than boys of less favored re- 
gions 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 imbed- 
ded 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 spring- 
time, 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
257 
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 rela- 
tively 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. 258 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
Don't talk, - I said, - except to answer my ques- 
tions.- 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 I- 
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 itI eighty or ninety in the min- 
ute, 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 dis- 
placement 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 I 
It is hard to draw the line between scientific curios- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
259 
ity 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 isn'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 rim away with the life 
of the other limbs, -a common trick enough of Na- 
ture'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 (pro- 
fessional terms you need not attend to). - What the 
deuse is that long case for? Got his witch grand- 
mother 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 an- 
other look at his hand, to see if there are any calluses. 260 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 I 
What do those mean? 
All this seems longer in the telling, of course, than 
it was in fact. While I was making these observa^ 
tions of the objects around me, I was also forming my 
opinion as to the kind of case with which 1 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 descrip- 
tion 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 Gen- 
tleman's bed, aftei' giving him some henbane to quiet THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
261 
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 fel- 
low 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 Bos- 
ton, 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 262 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
few pictures of any merit painted in New England be. 
fore 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 them- 
selves, after the fashion of young opossums, to these 
little excrescences. "Witch-marks" were good evi- 
dence 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
263 
with chalk on the board-fences. They said the doc- 
tors 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 whis- 
per, - 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-crea- 
tures and burning them with red-hot irons, any more 
than it improves them to hold the blinding-white cau- 
tery 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 264 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
readily as some gentler office. Yet, while I am writ- 
ing 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 tender- 
hearted 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.1 
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 sci- 
ence. 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- 
1 The surgeon referred to was the late Solomon Davis Towns- 
end, M. D. 265 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 doesn'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 flut- 
tered 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 some- 266 
thing 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 to- 
wards 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 over- 
heard 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 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
267 
in their arms, as we sigh away our last upon their 
faithful breasts I 
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 wax- 
taper, 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 know- 
ledge 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 pupUlorum" 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 Level's, in memory of that immortal mo- 
ment ! Would it wake her from her trance? and 
would she see me in the flush of my stolen triumph, 268 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 1 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 Victo- 
ria, or Eugenie, would do as much by him, if she hap- 
pened 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 Ital- 
ian beauty, who, 1 believe, did not think to leave her 
card by the side of the slumbering youth, but has be- 
queathed the memory of her pretty deed to all coming THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
269 
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 philo- 
sophical 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 col- 
ored, - 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 morn- 
ing. There was nothing to be said, for I spoke with 
authority; and the young girl glided away with noise- 
less 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 per- 
plexing mysteries of my little neighbor's chamber. 270 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 cham- 
ber. Suppose, for instance, that the narrow book- 
shelves 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 at- 
tracting 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 would n't want an inner cham- 
ber to herself. A live woman, with a valuable so- 
prano voice, would n'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, sit- 
ting 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
271 
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 Re- 
lation, - and pulled in her social tentacles to concen- 
trate her thoughts on this fact of human history. 
- If there was anything a fellah could do, - said 272 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 isn't fair to question how he 
would like sitting up without the punch and the com- 
pany and the songs and smoking. He means what 
he says, and it would be a more considerable achieve- 
ment 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 uncomfort- 
able, by finding fault with all their cheerful enjoy- 
ments, 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 them- 
selves 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; -• THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
273 
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 depend- 
ing 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 al- 
ways 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 did n'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 ot the young girl and her nearest 
neighbor's on the right. But the next morning, to 
our great surprise, that good-looking young Mary- 
lander 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 274 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 cheer- 
ing 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 cir- 
cumstances. But there are certain persons whose 
existence is so out of parallel with the larger laws in THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
275 
the midst of which it is moving, that life becomes to 
them as death and death as life. - How am I get- 
ting 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, complex- 
ion, 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 flut- 
ters 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 conven- 
iences it offers him, and thinks little of its wants and 
imperfections. But once having made up his mind to 276 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
move to a better, every inconimodity 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 cir- 
cumstances, 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 be- 
fore 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 familial* 
to those who have been often called upon to witness 
the last period of life. Almost always there is a prep- 
aration made by Nature for unearthing a soul, just as 
on the smaller scale there is for the removal of a milk- 
tooth. 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 le- 
gend, 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 fain hurry toward it, as 
the caravan moves faster over the sands when the fore- 
most 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
277 
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 inso- 
lently and cruelly forced upon those who are attacked 
by illness, on the strength of that odious foreknow- 
ledge often imparted by science, before the white fruit 
whose core is ashes, and which we call deaths has set 
beneath the pallid and drooping flower of sickness. 
There is a singular sagacity very often shown in a pa- 
tient'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 some- 
body'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 278 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 state- 
ments, - 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 un- 
pleasant 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 re- 
plied, by asking if the other meant to insult him. - 
Whereto the young man John rejoined that he had no 
particid'r intentions one way or t'other. -The Koh- 
i-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, 279 
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 boarding-house was pro- 
vided with that vegetable. It was a signal illustra- 
tion 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." 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 280 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
We are in the habit of handling our faces so care- 
fully, 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 see- 
ing 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 pugil- 
istic gestures does not instantly recover from this sur- 
prise. The Koh-i-noor, exasperated by his failure, 
and still a little confused by the smart hit he had re- 
ceived, 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 doesn't do, if the other fellow is only 
cool, moderately quick, and has a very little science. 
It did n'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 direc- 
tion, 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 sat- 
isfied, 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
281 
bluish, oblong, rounded elevation occasioned by run- 
ning one's forehead or eyebrow against another's 
knuckles.) The young fellow was particularly pleased 
that he had had an opportunity of trying his profi- 
ciency 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 ren- 
dered 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 fel- 
lah not half his size," induced the landlady's daugh- 
ter to take that decided step which produced a change 
in the programme of her career I may hereafter al- 
lude 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 282 
the air and glorifies that humble sheet with a fine dis- 
play of provincial rainbows. 
- I cannot fulfil my promise in this number. I 
expected to gratify your curiosity, if you have be- 
come 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. 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 ? THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
283 
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 every- 
where, means sufficient to educate him thoroughly 
without taking away the stimulus to vigorous exer- 
tion, 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 su- 
preme beauty. Their close curls, their elegantly set 
heads, column-like necks, straight noses, short, curled 
lips, firm chins, deep chests, light flanks, large mus- 
cles, 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 ne- 
cessity 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 284 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 con- 
dition of the young American of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. 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 
that fly with him day and night, so that he counts his 
journey not in miles, but in degrees, and sees the sea- 
sons 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 con- 
tinent 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 opin- 
ions 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 civili- 
zation which deserve a certain respectful consideration 
at his hands. 285 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
The combing and clipping of this shaggy wild com 
tinent 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 un- 
American weakness. The apron-strings of an Amer- 
ican mother are made of India-rubber. Her boy 
belongs where he is wanted; and that young Mary- 
lander 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, when- 
ever 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? 286 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
- 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 gener- 
ous 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 I 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 grand- 
mother 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 some- 
times 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 con- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
287 
quer the faults of the one beloved, and make the fit- 
ness 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 guid- 
ing 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 char- 
acter. 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 pecidiarity 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 288 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
than character can have for genius. To be sure, ge- 
nius gets the world's praise, because its work is a tan- 
gible 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 youthfid 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
289 
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 fit- 
ful 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 no- 
bler, unknown, save by some faint reflected ray, bor- 
rowed 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 tow- 
line, 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 drag- 
ging it bravely on; and I knew, that, if the little 
steam-tug untwined her arms and left the tall ship, it 
woidd 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, 290 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 some- 
times 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 pass- 
ing between a beatified human soul and an archan- 
gel 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 compan- 
ion 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
291 
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 sud- 
den 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, per- 
haps, as much as his better traits, to make ready for 
that long journey which is easier to the cripple than 
to the strQng man, and on which none enters so will- 
ingly as he who has borne the life-long load of infirm- 
ity 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 read- 
ers may think for themselves a little, before they 
accuse me of hasty expressions. 
The Roman Catholic Church has certain formulae 
for its dying children, to which almost all of them at- 
tach the greatest importance. There is hardly a crim- 292 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
inal 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 conse- 
crated wafer proves nothing in favor of the Real Pres- 
ence, 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 Ae 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 him- 
self. 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 min- 
ister, 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 ta- 
bleau and utters an admirable sentiment, - or some- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
293 
body 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 spir- 
itual 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 ad- 
justments 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 294 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
proceed to the story of the Little Gentleman's leav- 
ing 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 com- 
petent 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 senti- 
ment, 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 re- 
marked a singular timidity on his part lest somebody THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
295 
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-combat- 
ant; 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 unlaw- 
ful and dangerous, we had better undeclare our inde- 
pendence 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 keep- 
ing 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 unim- 
peded 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 Mary- 
lander, for instance, understood it. He could not get 
rid of that notion of private property in truth, with 296 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 edu- 
cated 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 297 
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 indi- 
vidual minds must always differ just as sulphates and 
carbonates do, I cannot see ground for expecting the 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 298 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
Broad Church to be founded on any fusion of intel- 
lectual 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. Freema- 
sonry 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 under- 
stand it. I am afraid the only Broad Church possi- 
ble 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 com- 
munion 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 Chris- 
tendom. 
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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
299 
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 "out- 
sider," you know; only it doesn't do very well for a 
nest of Hingham boxes to talk too much about out- 
siders 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 Poly- 
carp on the great Church festival-days; so that, be- 
tween 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 un- 
beknown to her; but she thought he must be doing 
well, and rather guessed he woidd 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 would n't think of 
bein' married this five year. They was good board- 
ers, 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 be- 
fore, - 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 ether 300 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
folks and their crowd were wrong, - he determined 
to bring the Little Gentleman round to his faith be- 
fore 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. 
Ue 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 my- 
self an object of pity, or a sight to show. The first 
strange child I ever remember hid its face and would THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
301 
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 long- 
ings. My life is the dying pang of a worn-out race, 
and I shall ffo 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 suffer- 
ing. 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 punish- 
ment 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. 302 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
- 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, turn- 
ing 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 predomi- 
nate 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 303 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 vis- 
ited the sins of the fathers upon this their child. Oh, 
turn away from him the penalties of his own transgres- 
sions! 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 way side, 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 hu- 
manity, and cared more about consoling his fellow- 
man than making a proselyte of him. 
This was the last prayer to which the Little Gentle- 
man 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 be- 
fore 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, com- 
mending him to the Father through his Son's interces- 304 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
sion, lie turned to look upon him before leaving his 
chamber. His face was changed. - There is a lan- 
guage of the human countenance which we all under- 
stand 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 dilat- 
ing 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 vel- 
vet, against which stood in white relief an ivory cruci- 
fix. 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
305 
right hand in his left. So they remained, until pres- 
ently his eyes lost their meaning, though they still re- 
mained 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 mus- 
cular 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 tor- 
tures of the Inquisition she was suffering, and she 
coidd not stir from her place. Then, in her great an- 
guish, 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 tender office, 
but dried the dying man's moist forehead with her 
handkerchief, even while the dews of agony were glis- 
tening on her own. How long this lasted she never 
coidd 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 coidd 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 306 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 suf- 
ferer 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 ex- 
plain 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 THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
307 
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 Gen- 
tleman 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 move- 
ments of which had been the source of such odd fan- 
cies 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 308 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 sug- 
gested, 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 Guamerius. 
The vox humana of the great Haerlem organ is very 
lifelike, and the same stop in the organ of the Cam- 
bridge chapel might be mistaken in some of its tones 
for a human voice; but I think you never heard any- 
thing 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 cham- 
ber, 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. THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
309 
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 cir- 
cumstance 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 shoidd 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 ex- 
pensive 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, - un- 
less the majority of his people change with him or in 
advance of him. A hard case, to which nothing 
could reconcile a man, except that the faithful dis- 
charge of daily duties in his personal relations with 
his parishioners will make him useful enough in his 310 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
way, though as a thinker he may cease to exist before 
he has reached middle age. 
- Iris went into mourning for the Little Gentle- 
man. 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 in- 
strument 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 remem- 
brance, 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 311 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
eyes of men and women, - and hardest of all to dis- 
place 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 dia- 
mond, 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 miss- 
ing, as were his limited wardrobe and the trunk that 
held it. Three empty bottles of Mrs. Allen's cele- 
brated 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 meet- 
in' 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 Sab- 312 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
bath 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 be- 
lieve, on her part, and attended with a great improve- 
ment 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 coun- 
tenance, 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 gentle- 
man who sat opposite to me is growing older, as old 
men will, but still smiles benignantly on all the board- 
ers, and has come to be a kind of father to all of 
them, - so that on his birthday there is always some- 
thing like a family festival. The Poor Relation, even, 
has warmed into a filial feeling towards him, and on 313 
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 fust- 
rate fettle." I saw him spar, not long since, at a pri- 
vate exhibition, and do himself great credit in a set-to 
with Henry Finnegass, Esq., a professional gentle- 
man of celebrity. I am pleased to say that he has 
been promoted to an upper clerkship, and, in conse- 
quence 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-nour- 
ished 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 stead- 
ily on him, as she used to look upon the Little Gen- 
tleman, 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 "sen- 
timental" 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 over- 
rated by the Teacher of Nazareth, whose whole life, 
as I said before, was full of sentiment, loving this or 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 314 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
that young man, pardoning this or that sinner, weep- 
ing 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 her- THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
315 
self 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 go- 
ing,- "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 with- 
out 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 no- 
thing better than hold out his hand to finish his 
broken sentence? 
The poor girl said nothing, but quietly laid her um 
gloved 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 316 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
was describing. Those two young people would in- 
sist 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 con- 
structions of his native State, - where he was grow- 
ing 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 on 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 recog- 
nized my old friend, the young fellow whom we called 
John. He was delighted to see me, introduced me to THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
317 
"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 board- 
ing-house? - I asked. 
A 1,-he answered.-Painted and papered as 
good as new. Gahs in all the rooms up to the sky- 
parlors. 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 prop- 
erly, the painted shades, were not down. And so I 
stood there and looked in along the table where the 318 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
boarders sat at the evening meal, - our old break- 
fast-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 fore- 
head, 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 Profes- 
sor has talked less than his predecessor, but he has 319 
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. 
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 utter- 
ance 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 I 
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 I 
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. INDEX. 
Aborigines, called the provisional races, 
82. See also Indians. 
Abstinence, total, better than brutali- 
ties, 33. 
Abuse, flattery of, 202. 
Acts, good and bad, may not be forgot- 
ten, 233. 
Adams, Samuel, at Commencement, 41; 
as governor, 42. 
Addison's dying sentiment, 292. 
Advertisement, imaginary, of imple- 
ments of torture, 207. 
Affections, need of the soul for, 249. 
Affinity in love, 159; manifestations of, 
182, 291. 
Age, impressions of, in poets and chil- 
dren, 239. 
Agreeable, the wish to be, is essence of 
gentle breeding, 133. 
Ails and grievances, talking of, 139. 
Air of Old World used up, 249; New 
England's air better than Old Eng- 
land's ale, 250. 
Albiness, 80. 
Aldiborontiphoscophornio, 19. 
Alembic, in Henchman's shop, 231. 
Allein's "Alarm," 277. 
Allen, Ethan, strength of teeth, 46. 
Allen, Mrs., her hair-restorer, 79, 311. 
American, every, owns all America, 86. 
American idea of freedom is congenital, 
81. 
American young man, opportunities of, 
283. 
Americanization of religion, 207. 
Ananias, supposed critic of lecture, 120. 
Anges, a vulgar error for Agnes, 95. 
Animals, eccentrically formed, 236. 
Anonymous scribblers, 118. 
Ant, red, 245. 
Aphorism, by the Professor, 57. 
Apologizing, egotism wrong side out, 
139. 
Apron strings of American mother made 
of India rubber, 285. 
Archimedes, grave of, 247. 
Architecture, an imperfect copy of some 
divine rule, 241. 
Ark, Christianity compared to an, 218. 
Arm, beautiful cast of, 48; fine arm of 
cripple, 100, 259 ; sketch of fine, 236 ; 
strength momentarily centred in, 237. 
Arrowheads, Indian, 245. 
Artistic nature, frankness of, 221. 
Artist's method of securing portrait, 
191. 
Assimilation of ourselves to external 
object of interest, 156 ; further illus- 
tration of, 190. 
Atmosphere, moral effects upon char- 
acter, 242. 
Atrophy of heart, women subject to, 
249. 
Audacity, in young girls, 222. 
Auto-da-fe, the last, 208. 
Autocrat, 17, 18, 21, 22. 
Averages, close law of, 166. 
Balaklava, Capt. Nolan at, 251. 
Balloon, toy, 108. 
Balloon-voyagers, 228. 
Baltimore, called the gastronomic me- 
tropolis of the Union, 84. 
Barbarisms in medicine, 105; in law, 
106; in religion, 106. 
Barnum presenting Ossian B. Dodge to 
Jenny Lind, picture of, 165. 
Bartolozzi's peppery burin, 29. 
Baskerville quarto of Virgil, 61. 
Basle, Dance of Death at, 266. 
Battle of the Standard for liberty to 
each soul, 78. 
Beauty, human, 283. 
Bee's architecture, 241. 
Being, great end of, 1, 4. 
Benjamin Franklin, the Landlady's son, 
4, 21, etc. 
Bentham's logic against ghosts, 189. 
Berkshire mountains, 245. 
Bible, a seeming defense of right to have 
three wives derived from, 5; scepti- 
cism afraid of new translations, 7; re- 
sorted to from different motives, 122. 
Bigelow, George Tyler, 49. 
Billiard-ball, the Model of all the Vir- 
tues compared to, 71. 322 
INDEX. 
Birds, which have no fear, 96; sketch 
of solitary, 238. 
Canary, 94. 
Heron, 236. 
Purple finch, 294. 
Birth, a second natural, 243. 
Biscuit, called " crackers " in Boston, 
169. 
Blackberry, low bush, 187. 
Blessed Virgin, torturing-implement, 
208. 
Blondes, " positive " variety of, 54,222; 
the " negative " variety, 222; spiritual 
transparency of, 229. 
Blood, enormous number of swimming 
glands in, 59. 
Bloomer costume, 155. 
Boarders, peculiar, 168. 
Boarding - house, the, arrangements of 
boarders in, 21; unprotected girls in, 
223. 
Boarding-house fare, 168; limitations as 
to quantity, 169. 
Bodies, looked on only as a temporal 
possession, 193. 
Bombazine, a sobriquet for the Poor 
Relation, which see. 
Book of the three maiden sisters, 230. 
Books, their greeting, 29; old books, 
210. 
Boot, cast-iron, 207. 
Boston, the Little Gentleman's pride in, 
3 ; has opened turnpikes to free 
thought and speech, 3 ; early patriots 
in, 15; great macadamizing place, 16; 
has much of England about it, 45 ; tiie 
battle of the three-hilled against the 
seven-hilled city, 78; sunsets in, 82; 
thinking centre of the planet, 83; 
wealth and influence in, fairly divided, 
84; evil results of sneering at, 281; 
heart of the world under it, 301. 
Localities mentioned : 
Christ Church, 307. 
Common, 42, 316. 
Copp's Hill burying-ground, 3, 306, 
316. 
Faneuil Hall, 3. 
Frog-pond, 3. 
Hancock house, 42. 
North End, 3. 
Park Street Church, 11. 
Quincy Market, 196. 
State House, 55, 217. 
West Boston Bridge, 2. 
Boy, a healthy, finds nothing in com- 
mon with child of weakened vitality, 
194. 
"Boy of Windermere," Wordsworth's, 
160. 
Boys, The, 49. 
Braham, anecdote of his forgetting a 
song, 24. 
Brain, possibility of running dry, 22; 
Byron's small brain, 200 ; soul in core 
of, according to Descartes, 247; a 
wick of the lamp of life, 260. 
Brainey, Professor, his phrenological 
analysis of faculties, 201. 
Brains, close resemblance, 167. 
Breathing, difficult in heart disease, 
257. 
Breeding, gentle, lies in the wish to be 
agreeable, 133; takes everything cool- 
ly, 142. 
Bridget, maidservant in Boarding-house, 
insists that Little Gentleman was a 
Catholic, 309. 
Brinvilliers, Marchioness de, 305. 
Britons' stockades, 245. 
Broad church, 296; must have its creed 
in the heart and not in head, 298. 
Bryant, 109. 
Buffaloes, 236. 
Bumps. See Phrenology. 
Bumpus and Crane, Messrs., their Phy- 
siological emporium of phrenology, 
196. 
Bun, 'lection, 42; offered before dinner 
as a test of age, 57. 
Burns, 241. 
Burns centenary, 26. 
Burroughs, George, 262. 
Buttercups, 231. 
Byron's small brain, 200; his deformity, 
278. 
Cabinet, mysterious, contents of, 304. 
Cabinet desk, discovery of a secret 
drawer in, 91. 
Cadenus, captivating Stella and Vanessa, 
89. 
Calef, Robert, burning of his book on 
witchcraft, 8. 
Callouses, 259. 
Calomel, efficacy in creed of supposed 
medical society, 112. 
Calvin, in a state of religious barbarism, 
106. 
Camel, 236. 
Canoe Meadow, in Berkshire mountains, 
245. 
Cantabridge, three maiden sisters at, 
230 ; arrowheads found there, 245. 
Cape Ann, magnolia on, 244. 
Caravan hastening over desert, dying 
compared to, 276. 
Catalepsy, 237. 
Cavern, sunless, under road, 179. 
Chamber, the Little Gentleman's, the 
Professor's entrance into. 255; solu- 
tion of the mysteries in, 307-309. 
Chancery, court of, 106. 
Channing, 16; his Baltimore discourse, 
117. 
Character, must have a weak spot or 
two before we can love it, 72; study 
of by triangulation, 90; genius should 
marry, 287 ; its force in life, 288. 
Charles River, 246. 
Charter. Alain, kiss given, 268. 
Chatterton, 241. 
Check-book, Autocrat's experience with, 
22. 323 
Cheerfulness, desirable in a doctor, 143; 
in a clergyman, 144. 
Chelsea beach, gathering of animals on, 
164. 
Chelsea ferry-boats, 289. 
Chemist's shop, library compared to, 25. 
Chess-players, evenly matched, 167. 
Childhood, impressions of, 186-189. 
Children, their disgust for heaven, 185 ; 
indifference to earthly things, 193; 
some are like windfalls, 194 ; disgust 
excited in healthy childhood by in- 
stances of early spiritual development, 
194, 195; directness of logic, 209; 
aged features in some, 239. 
Chinese gentlemen, talking without 
meaning, 30. 
Christ, liis fondness for talking at meat, 
32 ; loved healthy as well as sickly 
children, 195; life full of sentiment, 
313. 
Christ Church, Boston, 307. 
Christabel, Coleridge's, quoted, 208. 
Christian equality, alone can prevent 
social divisions, 134. 
Christianity, compared to an ark, 218; 
slow work launching it, 219; full of 
sentiment, 302. 
Church, impossibility of a universal, 
296; compared to a garden, 296. 
Church of Saint Polycarp, 211. 
Church of the Galileans, its simple wor- 
ship, 213. 
Cigars, 137. 
Cities, American, comparisons of, 84-87. 
Civilization, as influenced by clergy, 8 ; 
in danger of senile dementia, 11 ; con- 
fronting of two civilizations, 36; ne- 
cessities of modern, 283. 
Clark, William, his epitaph, 306. 
Clarke, James Freeman, 49. 
Classes, spiritual standard of different, 
121. 
Clergy, their part in civilization, 8 ; re- 
spect expressed for, 104; should be 
cheerful, 144. See also Ministers. 
Clowns, melancholy people, 312. 
Club-foot, 9. 
Coarse people in the professions, 2C3. 
Coffin, Admiral Sir Isaac, 52. 
Coincidences, 56; curious instance of, 
58. 
Coleridge's Christabel quoted, 208. 
College dormitory, strange breach in 
walls of, 187. 
College libraries, fated to burn up, 62. 
College theatricals, 17. 
College trick, 58. 
Comedians, melancholy people, 312. 
Common sense, watchfulness of, 89. 
Commons boarders at Harvard College, 
a trick of, 58. 
Comparison of merits in American cit- 
ies, 86. 
Compensation, an instance of, in the sen- 
sibility accompanying early decay, 
195. 
INDEX. 
Complexion, fresh, 45. 
Congregational singing, 215; imperfec- 
tions of, 216. 
Conscience, its approval or disapproval, 
209. 
Conservative, a bad sort portrayed, 15. 
Consistent people apt to contradict 
themselves, 34. 
Consolations of religion, 292. 
Conspirators painted of dark hue, 229. 
Contagion in sickness, 119. 
Contracts written in blood, 189. 
Conversation, with a stranger, 30; me- 
chanical talk of pretty women, 30 ; 
women can keep their minds detached 
from their talk, 31; skirmishing at 
beginning of, 35; easiness in, 139. 
See also Talking. 
Copley, 183; dressing-gown affected in 
his pictures, 186. 
Copp's Hill burying-ground, 3, 306, 316. 
Coral-reef island, if inhabited by one 
man, pretty woman would soon appear 
upon, 51. 
Cosmetic, Mrs. Allen's, 79. 
Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, 288. 
Coughs, ingratitude of, 132. 
Counterpart, precise, not necessary for 
marriage, 287. 
Counting on time excites nervousness, 
255. 
Country boy, apt to betray his early 
ways of life, 44. 
Cowper quoted, 183. 
" Crackers," word used in Boston for 
biscuit, 169. 
Crazy people, most of them found where 
the battle of intelligence is fought, 
218. 
Creation, Usher's precise date of, 113, 
210. 
Creatures, an Eden of humped and 
crooked, 236. 
Creed, a child's, 210 ; all have much in 
common, 216; of the heart, 298. 
Creed of supposed medical society, 111, 
112. 
Critics, the chips left after authors were 
manufactured, 25; their painful duty 
of reminding authors of their decline 
of power, 26. 
Crooked Footpath, 102. 
Crowninshield, Francis Boardman, 49. 
Crows' nests, 222. 
Crucifix, ivory, 304. 
Curiosity, invariable in mature females, 
252; resembles fear, 255. 
Curtis, Benjamin Robbins, 1809-1874,50. 
Daguerreotype, give features one par* 
ticular look, 191. 
Daisies, 234. 
Dance of Death at Basle, 266. 
Dandelions, 231. 
Dark, its effect upon tadpoles, 242. 
Darwin, Dr., 82. 
Davis, George Thomas, 49. 324 
INDEX. 
Dead, the, interest in their destiny, 
107. 
Dead man's hand, swelling cured by, 
246. 
Deaf mute child, 229. 
Death, idea of rest inseparable from, 
276; making ready for, 291-293; pres- 
ence of, 304. 
Death-bed literature, 291. 
Death of Latin tutor, 65. 
Deborah, less agreeable than Queen 
Esther, 136. 
Declaration of Independence, meaning 
of, 295. 
Deformity, idealization of, 236 ; life-long 
suffering from, 263, 265, 301. 
Deity, human life as compared to, 10. 
Dentists, 112. 
Depolarization, of religious thought, 
6 ; of sacred books, 117 ; further men- 
tioned, 126. 
De Quincey's Opium-Eater, 238. 
De Sauty, 26. 
Descartes, his location of the soul, 247. 
" Devil's footsteps " in pastures, 187. 
Dewberry, 187. 
Diagnosis, the Professor's, of the Little 
Gentleman, 258. 
Diaphragm, moral effects of disease 
above and below, 293. 
Diary, pathetic minuteness of a, 232. 
Dictionaries, English, " Webster's Un- 
abridged," 40; rivalry of various, 44. 
Dido, 61. 
Dinners, wine a specific against dull, 32. 
Discobolus, 283. 
Discussion, fear of, 109. 
Disease, dismantling process of, 130. 
Distinctions, social, 134. 
Divinity student, a character who gen- 
erally argues with the Professor more 
abstruse questions which arise at the 
Boarding-house table ; prays with the 
Little Gentleman while dying, 302; 
finally engaged to marry the sister of 
the Schoolmistress, 309. 
Doctor, childish fear of a, 69; should 
always inspire hope, 143. 
Dorcas, death of, 233. 
Dorchester burying-ground, 263. 
Dorchester, pudding-stone at, 256. 
Dowdyism, an expression of imperfect 
vitality, 136. 
Dragon, fire compared to, 158. 
Drawing, early childish efforts of Iris, 
69. 
Drawing-book of Iris, 173, 184; disclos- 
ure of its contents, 228. 
Dromedary, 236. 
Drugs, a bad thing, 12. 
Dry crying, 76. 
Dull people, 290. 
Dying, compared to moving, 276 ; much 
sagacity shown in patient's estimate 
of his condition, 277. See also Death. 
Dying, the, testimony of, to be received 
with caution, 292 ; torturing for evi- 
dence in favor of certain belief, 293; 
in the worst position to give opinions, 
293. See also Death. 
Ear-rings, 99. 
Early piety, instance of, 67. 
Earth, sweet smell of fresh, 265. 
Eating, readiness for, at any hour, a test 
of youth, 57. 
Eccentrically formed animals, 236. 
Ectopia cordis, 259. 
Eden, an, of humped and crooked crea= 
tures, 236. 
Edwards, Jonathan, the elder, 114. 
Egg-pop, on holidays in Boston, 3. 
Ehud, 119. 
Election bun, 42. 
Elective character of social position, 135. 
Elpit, a boy christened Lord Pitt, called, 
95. 
Elsie Venner, illustrates author's theory 
of the will, 35 n. 
Engagements, 286. 
Englishman, lives and dies under pro- 
test, 81. 
Epileptics, nitrate of silver for, 105. 
Equality and the quality, 133; only an 
ideal Christian equality can prevent 
social divisions, 134. 
Equilibrium, human beings cannot long 
rest in state of, 275. 
Essex county, 244. 
Esther, queen, 136. 
Everlasting, herb, 187. 
Evil, prophet of, dreadful business of 
being, 252. 
Execution of Holloway and Haggerty, 
crush at, 188. 
Eyes of a cripple, 88. 
Faces, some women's, a revelation of a 
great secret, 178; influence of a girl's 
face, 181; we have different ones for 
different persons, 191; analysis of, in 
ancestral elements, 193 ; face or figure, 
which the more attractive, 204; 
sketched on borders of drawing-book, 
238. 
Facts, remote, collision of, 56. 
Fair, English, properly conducted fight 
at, 52. 
Faith, is self-reliance, 93. 
Fancies, beliefs frighten less than, 162. 
Fashion, intensely alive, 136, 150 ; an 
attempt to realize art in living forms, 
151; foolish talk about, 152. See also 
Society. 
Fashionable people. See Society. 
Fat man, 132. 
Fear, resemblance of nervousness to, 
255. 
Ferry-boats, Chelsea, 289. 
Fight, between a Marylander and a 
butcher, 51; well-conducted fight at 
English fair, 52 ; all of us have a little 
speck of, 52; between John and the 
Koh-i-noor, 279. 325 
Fighting-boj' of school, his paleness 
before contest, 268. 
Fighting gladiator, 236. 
Figure or face, which the more attrac- 
tive, 204. 
Finch, purple, in cage, 94. 
Finnegass, Henry, Esq., 313. 
Fire, compared to a dragon, 158. 
First old age, an infant's life has char- 
acter of, 66. 
Fishes, in sunless cavern, 179 ; trans- 
parency of small kinds, 229. 
Fists, rotary motion of, 18. 
Flattery, more agreeable when acted 
than when spoken, 136; a woman's 
subtle method of, 137 ; of abuse, 202. 
Florence, 85. 
Flournoy, J. J., his dissertation on the 
marrying of three wives, 5. 
Flowers in church, 214 ; sketches of in 
drawing-book, 234; in old garden, 248. 
Flowers and plants, namely: 
Blackberry, 187. 
Buttercups, 231. 
Daisies, 234. 
Dandelions, 231. 
Honeysuckle, 248. 
Mignonette, 182. 
Fluid as typifying the mobility of re- 
stricted will, 34. 
Folly often teaches wisdom, 13. 
Forests, built up mainly from air cur- 
rents, 67. 
Fork, trick of impaling meat with, at 
Harvard Commons table, 58. 
Fountain, genius compared to, 288. 
Foxglove, 261. 
Fra Angelico, two faces by, 178. 
Franklin, not ashamed to be bom in 
Boston, 15; ballad by, mentioned, 
306. 
Free thought and speech, Boston's in- 
fluence for, 3. 
Freedom, in America and England, 81; 
religious and political must be main- 
tained, 125. 
Freemasonry, 298. 
Freethinker, a term of reproach in Eng- 
land, 81. 
Frog-pond, 3, 281. 
Fuller's " Holy War," 235. 
's Gahs," Boarding-house lighted with, 
317. 
Gambrel-roofed house, 188; mention of 
another, 230. 
Genius, an end of, when its special af- 
finities are worked out, 25 ; a union of 
strength and sensibility, 223; com- 
pared with talent, 240; should marry 
character, 287; wife of, compared to 
tug invisibly drawing tall ship, 289; 
truthfulness is essence of, 290. 
Gentility, humanity comes before, 145; 
pretensions to, 153. 
Gentleman, misuse of the word, 144; 
what constitutes, 204. 
INDEX. 
Ghosts, Bentham's logic against, 189; 
false, 257. 
Girls, a beautiful girl is a terrible fact, 
176; influence of a girl's face, 181; 
strange audacity often blended with 
delicacy in young girls, 222; unpro- 
tected girls in boarding-houses, 223; 
depths of their nature, 228; revela- 
tions of soul of a girl through her 
poems and drawings, 229-240. 
Goldsmith's Madam Blaize borrowed 
from the French, 231. 
Golden book of Venice, 86. 
Gracchi, 288. 
Gravel, clean, an anodyne, 265. 
Great secret, a, intimations of in many 
person, 177; it is not the secret of 
love, 180. 
Great Teacher, the, 32. 
Greek young men, beauty of, 283. 
Groom, Yorkshire, fight with sophomore, 
53. 
Guarnerius violin, 308. 
Gulf Stream, 14. 
Gulliver, 247. 
Hair, variety of, 80. 
Hairspring of watch, meddling with, 43. 
Hancock house, Boston, 42. 
Hand, influence of a cold, damp, 71; of 
dead man cures swellings, 246. 
Harry, a handsome Marylander, 51; in 
fight with butcher on muster-day, 52. 
Harvard College, burning of Calef's 
book in yard, 8; Samuel Adams at 
Commencement, 41; trick at Com- 
mons table, 58; mysterious breach in 
wall of dormitory, 187. 
Haunted house, fear of, 162. 
Head, double walls of, unfavorable to 
phrenology, 199. 
Healing art, its professional hardness, 
263. 
Heart, wild, hidden under outer deco- 
rum, 94, 158; full of combustibles, 
159; our own hearts held to home 
by innumerable fibres, 247 ; a wick of 
lamp of life, 260; women subject to 
atrophy of, 249; displacement of, 259 ; 
creed of the heart, 298. 
Heart disease, 251; difficult breathing 
in, 257. 
Heathen, goodness of, 12. 
Heaven, inward disgust for, in children, 
185. 
Henchman's apothecary shop, 231. 
Hercules, 89. 
Heredity, some qualities not easily ac- 
counted for in, 68. 
Heresy, a word fallen into disuse, 118. 
Heretic hung in painted hogshead, 208. 
Heroic will, the, 205. 
Heroism of fashionable people, 140. 
Herons, 236. 
Hezekiah's advice, 23. 
Higginson, Francis, saying of 250. 
Hingham boxes, 299. 326 
INDEX. 
"Hiram," name written on old piece 
of paper, 93; uncouthness of name, 
95. 
Hollow beneath a road, 179. 
Holloway and Haggerty, crush at execu- 
tion of, 188. 
Holmes house in Cambridge, 188. 
Holyoke, Dr., 8. 
Home, poets want a, 246; associations 
with, 247. 
Homoeopathy, 12. 
Honeysuckle, 248. 
Hopkins, Samuel, 16. 
Horse-mackerel, taken for sea-serpent, 
257. 
Horses, friskiness of, in cool morning, 
14; two sent to Massachusetts by Ad- 
miral Coffin, 53 ; close average of fast 
time in trotters, 166; list of official 
records, 166 n. ; Norman breed, 236. 
Dexter, 166 n. 
Ethan Allen, 166. 
Flora Temple, 166. 
Goldsmith Maid, 166n. 
Lady Suffolk, 166. 
Maud S., 166 n. 
Hottentot, peculiar hair of, 80. 
Houbraken, print by, 29. 
House, old gambrel-roofed, 188; another, 
230; fear of the old house, 262. 
House on fire, 158. 
Hue's anecdote of Chinese gentleman, 
30. 
Human being, to tell whether it is young 
or old, 57. 
Humanity, America has a different one 
from Europe, 122 ; comes before gen- 
tility, 145; tenderness for, 217. 
Hurry, vulgar to be in a, 139. 
Husbands and wives grow to look alike, 
156; the sort of men women take for, 
157 ; those of women of genius must 
be true, not great men, 290. 
Hyperbola, 237. 
Hymn of Trust, 282. 
Hysteric ball, 96. 
" I love you," all that many women have 
to tell, 180. 
Iceberg, slight effect of sun on, 288. 
Iconoclasm, only way to get at truth, 
117. 
Ideas, difficulty of transmission does 
not imply lack of, 25; interpenetra- 
tion of, better than mere courtesy, 
36. 
Impressions, enormous number of, 58; 
of childhood, 186-189. 
Independence and Union, two hard 
words to spell, 41. 
Indians, only a provisional race, 83 ; no 
individuality in their history, 245. 
Individuality, good breeding does not 
overestimate, 140; none in history of 
Indians, 245. 
Infirmity, liable to leave injurious ef- 
fects on the race, 20. 
Insanity, great amount of, wherever the 
battle of intelligence is fought, 218. 
Instinct, more divine than reason, 241. 
Intellect in a woman should travel to 
lips through the heart, 147 ; no fusion 
of, likely, 297. 
Interpenetration of ideas, better than 
mere courtesy, 36. 
Iris, daughter of the Latin tutor; a de- 
scription of, 54; her story told by 
Professor, 60-73 ; John's summary of 
her character, 169; her drawing-book, 
173; the Marylander tells his love to 
her, 315. 
Iris, her Book, 226. 
Irish servant, good manners of, 143. 
Italy, 245. 
Jeddo, moat at, 11. 
Jewelry, a mother's, 99. 
Jews, fable of their sweating gold, 163. 
Joe, a handsome Marylander, 51. 
John, a character who interjects re- 
marks, usually somewhat disrespect- 
ful ; invites the Professor to his room, 
165; fight with the Koh-i-noor, 279; 
his wife and baby. 316. 
Judas, Leonardi's picture of, 229. 
Justice, a rare virtue, 149; respect of 
good man for, 150. 
Keats's Lamia, 163. 
Kisses, a stolen one meditated, 267; mem- 
orable ones, 268 ; Iris kisses the Little 
Gentleman when he is dying, 302. 
Knife, as an instrument for conveyance 
of food, 142. 
Knights, called " prize-fighters with 
iron pots on their heads," 135. 
Knocking a man down, difficulty of 
carrying out the threat, 279. 
Knot-grass, 235. 
Knowledge cannot be confined by pro- 
fessions, 15. 
Koh-i-noor, a vulgarly dressed charac- 
ter, who wears a large diamond (?) pin, 
4; his fight with John, 279; leaves 
the Boarding-house in disgrace, 311. 
Kuyper, Jan, 29. 
" L. B.," 9, 20. See also Leah. 
Ladies, of " the quality," preferred, 
136. 
Lady, misuse of word, 144. 
Lady's portrait with sword-thrusts 
through it, 188. 
Laennec, 249. 
Lamia, Keats's, 163. 
La Monnoye's Monsieur de la Palisse, 
231. 
Landlady's daughter, is thought to favor 
the company of the Koh-i-noor ; after 
his thrashing by John, she discards 
him, 311; is to marry a young under- 
taker, 312. 
Language, the blood of the soul. 41 ; 
grows out of life, 43; compared to a INDEX. 
327 
watch, with hair-spring, 43; its in- 
effectiveness at times, 181. 
Larvae, spiritual, Roman Catholics con- 
sidered as, 242. 
Latent caloric of character, 288. 
Latin tutor, the father of Iris; his se- 
lection of her name, 60-62 ; his wife, 
63; death, 65. 
Laudanum, overdose of, 105. 
Laugh, grand, elemental, 17 ; the mob- 
law of the features, 72; of a girl, 
138. 
Launching of the ark of Christianity, 
219. 
Law, barbarisms of, 106. 
Lay - sermon, gives the parallax of 
thought and feeling, 7; punishment 
of mechanic for preaching one, 115. 
Leah, the witch ancestor of Little Gen- 
tleman, 261; her portrait, 262. See 
also L. B. 
Lecture, exhaustion of ideas by a schol- 
ar when half delivered, 24; supposed 
effect of adverse criticism of, by 
Ananias and Shimei, 120. 
Leonardo's picture of Judas, 229. 
Letter, case of lady who used only one 
page in writing a, 204. 
Letter to the Professor expressing fear 
as to his opinions, 104. 
Liberty, spiritual, battle for, 78. 
Libraries, college, fated to burn up, 62. 
Library, a sort of mental chemist's 
shop, 25. 
Life, a great bundle of little things, 1; 
getting into the pith and core of, 10; 
only the edge of the ocean of exist- 
ence, 107; obstacles in, 179; as a 
mighty sculptor, 193; in New Eng- 
land, may be lean and impoverished, 
244; better adjusted to warts of men, 
249; three wicks to lamp of, 260 ; op- 
portunities in America for large, noble, 
284; the dying not in condition to 
judge fairly of, 293. 
Linwood's, Miss, needlework, 183. 
Listener, a good, 17. 
Literary people, amiable relations be- 
tween, 75. 
Little Boston, a nickname of the Little 
Gentleman, which see. 
Little Gentleman, a cripple, who ac- 
tively defends Boston and Boston 
ways; mysterious noises in his room, 
161; attempt of Professor to visit his 
room, 186; his dying hours, 301-306; 
his burial place, 306, 307. 
" Little King Pippin," 231. 
Lives, the truest, cut with many facets, 
Localism, dwarfing to mind, 87. 
Lord Level's grave, 267. 
Love, the universal experience, 93 ; 
women's choice in, 159; at certain 
age all excitements run to, in women, 
160; is the one secret most women 
have to tell, 180; indications of, 285; 
not essential that all pairs should be 
" bom for each other," 286. 
Loyalty of English not understood by 
Americans, 36. 
Lucerne, bridge at, 266. 
Lucretia, 60. 
Lungs, one wick of the lamp of life, 
260. 
Ma'am Allen, nickname for character 
usually called the Koh-i-noor, 79. 
Madam Blaize, 231. 
Madeira wine, 123. 
Maelzel's Turk, 16. 
Magnolia on Cape Ann, 244. 
Malcolm, Capt. Daniel, his grave on 
Copp's Hill, 3, 306. 
Margaret of Scotland, her kissing Alain 
Chartier, 268. 
Man as man, so thought of in America, 
36 ; man is a symbolic worshipper by 
nature, 117. 
Manners, a few points of, taken up, 139; 
among the highly bred, 140; vulgar, 
142. 
Marriage, difficulties in the way of, for a 
young man, 170; for money, Land- 
lady's opinion of, 204. 
Marriage service, vulgar alteration in, 
145. 
Marylander, the, gradually becomes the 
lover of Iris; his looks, 45; tells his 
love, 315. 
Marylanders, two manly specimens of, 
51. 
Mather, Cotton, quotation from one of 
his sermons, 115. 
Mather, Increase, orders Calef's book to 
be burnt, 8. 
Mathers, grave of the, 306. 
Mechanical talk of women, 30. 
Medical society, supposed creed of, 111. 
Medicine, errors of, 11-13; barbarisms 
in, 105 ; Ministers' opinion about, 110; 
effect upon the sympathies, 263. See 
also Homoeopathy. 
Mediocrity, genius an insult to, 241. 
Meeting-house Hill at Dorchester, 256. 
Meetings, mysterious, 56. 
Men, life adjusted to wants of, 249. 
Mental soprano, barytone, and basso, 
37. 
Mermaids, 257. 
Messiah of a new revelation, woman is, 
125. 
Microcosm, beginning of life in, 257. 
Midsummer, 225. 
Mignonette, 182. 
Milkmen, pump-like movement of their 
arms, 156. 
Milton, his season for writing, 24; kisses 
given him, 268. 
Mind, with thoughts, compared to cir- 
cus-rider with horses, 38. 
Minister, underpaid, emotion at surprise 
party, 76; should be cheerful, 144, 
See also Clergy. 328 
INDEX. 
Ministers, opinion about medicine, 110. 
Ministration, genius of, among women, 
274. 
Ministry, barbarisms in, 106. 
Model of all the virtues, a lady who 
brought up Iris; of many but irrita- 
ting excellences, 70; hatred expressed 
for her merits, 101; reasons why not 
lovable, 146-149; return to the Board- 
ing house, 314. 
Mollusk, spawn of, 257. 
Money, power of, 135; nothing earthly 
lasts so well, 151. 
Monsieur de la Palisse, of De la Mon- 
noye, 231. 
Moon, boy's idea of, 109. 
Moral surgery, its brutality, 114. 
Mother, young, memory of an old man 
for, 183; apron strings of American 
mother made of India rubber, 285. 
Mother's secret, A, 127. 
Motivation of human will, 35 n. 
Mouse, technical term in pugilism, 280. 
Moving from a house compared to dying, 
276. 
Muggletonian sect, 294. 
Murderers, pious frame of mind at 
death, 292. 
Musk-deer, 287. 
My Lady Bountiful, 231. 
Mysteries, common everywhere, 257. 
Names, uncouth, 95. 
Narrow church, 298. 
Natural selection, conservative principle 
in creation, 19. 
Nature, fertile in variety, 80; in her 
mysterious moods, 164; makes no 
leaps, 167. 
Navy Yard, Charlestown, 3. 
Needlework, Miss Linwood's, 183. 
Neighbor Walrus, his garden, 248. 
Nervousness, its resemblance to fear, 
255. 
New England, women of, 148; large 
number of crazy people in, 217; effect 
of its moral atmosphere upon sensi- 
tive characters, 242; has an insuffi- 
cient flavor of humanity, 245; its air 
better than Old England's ale, 250. 
New Englanders, many of them hard 
and unimaginative, 248. 
New York, compared to Venice, 85; 
something higher demanded of it, 86. 
New Yorkers, peculiar pronunciation of, 
142. 
Night, noises in, 163. 
Nitrate of silver for epileptics, 105. 
Noises in the night, 163. 
Nolan, Captain, at Balaklava, 251. 
Norman horse, 236. 
Northampton, its experience with Jona- 
than Edwards, 114. 
Nursery, Americaanew, for the race, 83. 
Oak, 67. 
Ocean cable literature, 26. 
Old age, an infant's life has the charac- 
ter of a first, 66 ; appearance of, pro- 
duced by a few lines in face, 192. 
Old Gentleman opposite. See Venerable 
Gentleman. 
Old house, fear of, 262. 
Old men's first children, 66. 
Old World folks, American feeling about, 
35; seem childlike, 36. 
Old World, evidences of the past in, 
245; air of, good for nothing, 249; 
its system one of intellectual locks 
and canals, 295. 
O'm, sacred word of Hindoo mythology, 
Opening of the Piano, 73. 
Opinions, of more value than arguments, 
116; if unattacked, beneath con- 
tempt, 119 ; right to hold one's own 
opinion defended, 123, 124. 
Opium of the heart, foxglove called, 
261. 
Opium-Eater, De Quincey's, 238. 
Orion, nebula of, 78. 
Otis, James, 15. 
Overcome family, their r61es in the af- 
fecting scene called the Surprise par- 
ty, 76. 
"Paddy," liability of using the word 
before an Irish gentleman, 95 
Paduasoy, 262. 
Paleness of fighting-boy before contest, 
268. 
Papin's digester, 149. 
Parabola, 237. 
Parallax of thought given by lay-ser- 
mons, 7. 
Park Street Church, 11. 
Passions, secret, 91 ; the pale ones the 
fiercest, 268. 
Past, effect of the, 246. 
Peculiarity, tendency to touch upon 
another's, 94. 
Peirce, Benjamin, 49. 
Peonies, 248. 
Percy, Lord, arm-chair in which he used 
to sit, 188. 
Philadelphia, 84. 
Phillips, hanging of, 3. 
Philosophers, class of, who exhibit a 
small truth bandaged to look large, 
39. 
Photograph, give features one particu- 
lar look, 191. 
Phrenology, visit to emporium of, 195; 
result of examination, 197 ; short lec- 
ture on phrenology and its resem- 
blance to a pseudo-science, 197; its 
truth cannot be proved by reason of 
the double walls of head, 199; cases 
which prove nothing, 200. 
Physicians. See Doctors. 
Pigment, dark, of certain animals, 229, 
" Pious and painefull," 146. 
Plainness of speech and manners, 145- 
Plantain, 235. 329 
Poe, Edgar A., 281 
Poets, never young in a sense, 239; 
flight unerring like that of goose, 
240; find material everywhere, 244; 
want a home, 246. 
Poisoners, painted of dark hue, 229. 
Politics, common people of New Eng- 
land will not stop talking, 118; Amer- 
icanized, 207', 208. 
Poor Relation of the Landlady, a woman 
past youth, and of pronounced opin- 
ions usually counter to others, 21, etc. 
Poor relations, social attentions to, 140. 
Population of earth-born intelligences, 
107. 
Portrait, lady's, with sword - thrust 
through it, 188 ; one's own apt to be 
a surprise to him, 190 ; artist's method 
of securing, 191 ; resemblances to va- 
rious relatives, 192; of Leah the 
witch, 262. 
Position. See Social position. 
Potter, Paulus, 29. 
Prayer for the dying, 303. 
President of the United States, 115; 
supposed case of one who is not a gen- 
tleman, 141. 
Principle, dying for a, higher than scold- 
ing for it, 121. 
Privileged class of gentlemen and ladies, 
inevitable, 134. 
" Prize-fighters with iron pots on their 
heads," knights called, 135. 
Prodigal son, sermon on, 117 ; consola- 
tion of parable, 302. 
Professions, digging a moat round their 
corporations, 13; knowledge cannot be 
limited by, 14 ; the learned, 105. 
Pronunciation, peculiar, in New York, 
142. 
Professor, a, tends towards conserva- 
tism, 14. 
Prophet of evil, dreadful business of 
being, 252. 
Protestantism, the having no woman to 
be worshipped makes it unpoetical, 
178. 
Provisional races, aborigines called, 82. 
Pseudo-science, definition of, 197 ; not 
wholly a lie, 198. 
Pudding, sent by widow to some elderly 
ladies, 232. 
Pudding-stone, 256. 
Puffing, anonymous, 75. 
Pugilistic encounter, 279. 
Pulpit, spiritualism as a Nemesis of the, 
13. 
Pump, a full, impatience of a congrega- 
tion compared to restraint placed on, 
216. 
Punch, whiskey, 132. 
Pundit, his awe of word O'm, 7. 
Pyramids, preferable to railroad village, 
246. 
Quality, the, definition of, 133 ; quality- 
ladies preferred, 136. 
INDEX. 
Questions submitted to the Professor, 
203. 
Quincy Market, 196. 
Quintain, riding at the, 120. 
Rack, 207. 
Railroad village, attractiveness of, 246. 
Raphael, early death of, 157; his Santa 
ApoIlina, 178. 
Reformers, their danger is from the 
flattery of abuse, 202. 
Religion, its currency consists of polar» 
ized words, 6; should belong to the 
common people, 107 ; science not an 
enemy of, 113; women more religious 
than men, 124, 209 ; time for it to be 
Americanized, 207. See also Creed; 
Soul; Spiritualism. 
Religious opinions, difficulty of holding 
one's own, 92; each man has some 
peculiar to himself, 297. 
Religious spirit, 212. 
Regulus returning to Carthage, 122. 
" Remarkable judgment," quoted from 
Cotton Mather, 115. 
Rembrandt, 29. 
Resistance, Sam. Adams's word, 41. 
Rest, idea of, inseparable from death, 
276. 
Reversed current in flow of mind, 147. 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 29. 
Rich people, more apt to be agreeable 
than others, 133; their refinement 
and delicacy, 135. 
Richardson, G. W., 49. 
Ring, once property of a Salem witch, 9. 
River of Life, dreamed of by the dying, 
277. 
Robinson of Leyden, 174. 
Roman Catholic church, its consolations, 
291. 
Roman Catholics, looked upon by Prot- 
estants as spiritual larvae, 242. 
Romance, materials for, in boarding- 
house, 94. 
Rome, battle of three-hilled city, against 
seven-hilled city, 78 ; active mind of 
century tending either to Rome or 
Reason, 128 ; age of, 245. 
Romulus, 82. 
" Rookery, The," 310. 
Rousseau, effect of the past upon, 246. 
Roxbury pudding-stone, 256. 
Russell, Henry Sturgis, 166. 
Sabbath, word misused for Sunday, 312. 
Sabbath face, mournful suggestions of, 
215. 
Saint Anthony the reformer, 202. 
Saints, three among women to one 
among men, 121. 
Saltfish, constant diet of, compared to 
fixity of opinions in some people, 93. 
Savate, French method of boxing, 53. 
Schoolmistress, the, 309. 
Science not the enemy of religion, H3> 
Scribblers, anonymous, 118. 330 
INDEX. 
Sculpin, a nickname for the cripple, 
usually called the Little Gentleman, 
which see; the fish, described, 2. 
Sea-anemones, 145. 
Sea-serpent, horse-mackerel taken for, 
257. 
Second childhood, counterpoised by a 
first old age, 66. 
Second sight, 250. 
Second natural birth, 243. 
Secret, any one's, is open, if waited for 
long enough, 90. 
Secret drawer, discovery of, in old cabi- 
net desk, 91. 
Secret, a great, intimation of among 
many persons, 177; it is not the se- 
cret of love, 180. 
Seed, southern, in northern soil, 242. 
Self-assertion, little of among ladies, 136. 
Seminaries, called young-lady factories, 
239. 
Senile dementia of civilization, 11. 
Sentiment defended, 124; Christianity 
full of, 302; Christ's life animated 
with, 313. 
Sermons, hearers of, entitled to opinions 
on theology, 111; a few famous, 117. 
See also Lay sermon. 
Sextons, cheerful people, 312. 
Shell-fish, very minute eggs of, 257. 
Shelley, lines of, quoted, 239. 
Shimei, supposed critic of lecture, 120. 
Ship drawn by tug, compared to hus- 
band and wife, 289. 
Shop, displaying perennial articles for 
sale, 231. 
Siek-rooms, conduct of the underbred in, 
144. 
Sin, old dead, in secret drawer of soul, 
91. 
Sincerity, dangers of, 30. 
Singing, congregational, 215; imperfec- 
tions of, 216. 
Sixth sense in women, 266. 
Smibert, 262. 
Smith, Samuel Francis, 50. 
Smithate of truth, 297. 
Smithite, Smith is always a, 297. 
Soap, perfumed, 98. 
Social position, 134; elective character 
of, 134; settled mostly by women, 
135. 
Society for the propagation of intelli- 
gence among the comfortable classes, 
56. 
Society, tries to grind lives to single flat 
surface, 33; high society contains 
much real equality, 140 ; heroism 
in, 140 ; its love for abundant vitality, 
150; has place for every form of tal- 
ent, 285. 
Socrates, drinking his hemlock, 122. 
Solomon, 214. 
Somnambulist boarder, 168. 
Song for a temperance celebration, 33. 
Soul, is to look for truth with its own 
eyes, 6; its being an infinite, instan- 
taneous consciousness, 10 ; a little se- 
cret drawer in, 91; conception of how 
it appears, 131; it thinks to know the 
body it inhabits, 190; disquiet in, 217; 
need of transplanting some souls, 243; 
according to Descartes, is in the core 
of the brain, 247. 
Speeches of dying men, little value of, 
292, 293. 
Spiritual transparency of golden blondes, 
229. 
Spiritual standard of different classes, 
121. 
Spiritualism, is undermining accepted 
ideas, 12 ; as a Nemesis of the pulpit, 
13; has made the destiny of the race 
a matter of common reflection, 107. 
Star-of-Bethlehem, flower, 247. 
Stars and stripes, 87. 
Starvation the natural end of tutors, 62. 
State House, Boston, 55,281; view from, 
217. 
Steam-tug. See Tug. 
Stillness, vulgar persons cannot pre- 
serve it, 139. 
Stockings, perennially displayed for sale, 
231. 
Stone, with whitish band, 247 ; large, to 
keep wolves from graves, 263. 
Stoops, charms of. 224. 
Store-room, dark, 188. 
Strong, the, hate the weak, 19. 
Stylish women, 155. 
Succory, 234. 
Suffering, professional hardness to, 263. 
Suicides, 166. 
" Summons, A, for sleepers," sermon, 
quoted, 117. 
Sun, slight effect on iceberg, 288. 
Sun-day hymn, 319. 
Sunsets in Boston, 82. 
Superstitions, 186, 270. 
Surface-Christianity, good breeding is, 
133. 
Surgeon, hardness in a, 263; a tender- 
hearted instance, 264. 
Surgery, moral, its brutality, 114. 
Surprise party, description of, 75. 
Swans, 236. 
Sweating gold, fable of the Jews', 163. 
Swellings, cured by dead man's hand, 
246. 
Swift, as Cadenus, 89. 
Swimming glands in blood, 58. 
Symbols, reverence for, 292. 
Sympathies of surgeons, compared with 
those of theologians, 263. 
Tadpoles, effect of dark upon, 242. 
Talent and genius compared, 240; so- 
ciety has place for every form of, 285. 
Talipes varus, 9. 
Talkers, apt to say unwise things, 18. 
Talking, uselessness of, with some 
women, 274. See also Conversation. 
Tartini's " Devil's sonata," 308. 
Tea-kettle, death of children from INDEX. 
331 
drinking hot water from spouts of, 
166. 
Teeth, 46 ; supposed article of a medi- 
cal creed concerning, 111. 
Temperance, excess better than hypoc- 
risy, 33. 
Temperance celebration, song for, 33. 
Tennent, Rev. William, trance of, 178. 
Testimony of the dying to be received 
with caution, 292. 
Thames, Briton's stockades in, 245. 
Theatricals, college, 17. 
Thirst, in torture, 305. 
Thomas, Francis, 49. 
Thornton, Abraham, claims wager by 
battle, 106. 
Thought, the excretion of mental res- 
piration, 24 ; runs in layers, 37 ; 
scheme of movement of three inde- 
pendent consciousnesses in one mind 
at once, 37; continuity of thought 
and action, 38 ; mind among thoughts 
compared to circus-rider with horses, 
38; a word the saddle of, 38; recur- 
rence of same thoughts, 56; multitude 
of, compared with blood globules, 
59. 
Three maiden sisters, the book of, 230. 
Three Words, The, 180. 
Thumbscrews, 207. 
Tiber, 246. 
Time and space, 39. 
Tobacco, 137. 
Torture, implements and methods of, 
207 ; thirst excited by, 305. 
Torturing instinct, 95. 
Townsend, Solomon Davis, 264 n. 
Traceries in margin of drawing-book, 
234. 
Tracts, religious, 110. 
Trains to dresses, vulgar use of, 154. 
Trance, 237 ; mostly peculiar to women, 
238 ; instance of, 267. 
Transparency, spiritual, of golden- 
blondes, 229. 
Transplanting, necessary for souls as 
for plants, 243. 
Trigamy, seemingly advocated in the 
Bible, 5. 
Trilobite, fossil, 94. 
Tripod of life, the brain, heart, and 
lungs, 260. 
Trot, picture of a, 165. 
Trotting horses. See Horses. 
Trust, Hymn of, 282. 
Truth, soul must look for, with its own 
eyes, 6; is tough, 109; iconoclasm, 
only way to get at, 117 ; private prop- 
erty in, 295. 
Tug, ship drawn by, compared to hus- 
band and wife, 289. 
Turk, Maelzel's, 16. 
Turtle, and his shell, 28. 
Tutor, starvation is natural end of a, 
62. 
Twins, in the birth of thought, 56. 
Two Streams, The, 153. 
Uncomfortable people, finally take spite 
against themselves, 272. 
Under the violets, 253. 
Underbred people, their conduct to- 
wards the sick, 144. 
Undertaker, the young, 312, 318. 
Undertakers, cheerful people, 312. 
Unwise things apt to be said by talkers, 
18. 
Usher, Archbishop, precise date of cre- 
ation given by, 113, 210. 
Variety, Nature fertile in, 80. 
Venerable Gentleman, a character who 
has had a past romance, 21, etc. 
Venice, New York compared to, 85. 
Vesalius, 29. 
Vessels, collision of, 56. 
Village, railroad, attractiveness of, 246. 
Violin, Guarnerius, 308. 
Virgil, 61. 
Virginia's death, 60. 
Visscher, Cornelius, 29. 
Vitality, fashion full of, 136; fondness 
of society for, 150. 
Voice, potent influence of a child's, 45; 
mysterious woman's voice heard in 
night, 174; proves to be a violin, 308. 
Voltaire, called " wicked Mr. Arouet," 
69. 
Voting, independent, 207. 
Vox-humana of the organ, 308. 
Vulgar people. See Underbred people. 
Vulgarity, making believe to be what 
you are not, is essence of, 154. 
Wager by battle, 106. 
Wall-flowers, kindness to, 140. 
Walpurgis night, 164. 
Walrus, Neighbor, his garden, 248. 
Warren, Joseph, 15. 
Washington's Farewell address, 87. 
Washington societies, 87. 
Watch, meddling with hairspring of, 
43. 
Watching with sick, 272. 
We will not speak of tears to-night, 77. 
Weak, the, hated by the strong, 19. 
Wealth, durability of, 151; foolish talk 
about, 152. 
Webster, Noah, his spelling, 41; grati- 
tude owed him, 44. 
Webster's Unabridged, criticised, 40. 
Weeds, not too humble for artist's eye, 
234. 
Wesley's " sulphur and supplication," 
110. 
Whiskey punch, 132. 
" White man's foot," Indian name for 
plantain, 235. 
Wicks, three, to lamp of life, 260. 
Widow's pudding, a, sent to some el- 
derly ladies, 232. 
Wife, faithful little, of genius, compared 
to tug drawing tall ship, 289. 
Wild creature dormant in each heart, 
94. 332 
INDEX. 
Wilkes, John, his saying about cutting 
out the handsomest man, 89. 
Will, misunderstandings in regard to the 
limitations of, 34; bias decides choice 
in motivation, 35 n. ; steps from one 
moving thought to another, 39. 
Wine, a specific against dull dinners, 
32; its use should be open, 33. 
Wink, called a palpebral spasm, 14. 
Wisdom, often learned by folly, 13. 
Witch, portrait of, 262. 
Witch-marks, 262. 
Witchcraft, Calef's book on, 8; sou- 
venir, 9 ; repeal of statutes against, 
106; clergymen rejoicing in the de- 
lusion, 122. 
Wives, the marrying of three, seemingly 
advocated in the Bible, 5. 
Wolves, great stone on graves to keep 
them away, 263. 
Woman's voice, heard in the night, 174; 
proved to be a Guarnerius violin, 308. 
Women, some are mechanical talkers, 
30; can keep their minds detached 
from their talk, 31; creation of, 50; 
judicial character not captivating in, 
101; three saints among, to one among 
men, 121; the messiah of a new reve- 
lation, 125; they mostly settle matters 
of social position, 135; intellectual 
process should not be too evident in, 
147 ; brain-women do not interest like 
heart-women, 148; elegance of, 150; 
stylish, 155 ; the men whom they 
marry, 157 ; their choice of love, 159 ; 
love-magnets, 160; the.r effect upon 
men, 177 ; faces sometimes portray a 
great secret, 178; often their one se- 
cret is " I love you," 180 ; more reli- 
gious than men, 209 ; effect of genius 
in, 241; more subject to atrophy of 
heart, 249; immovability of some, 
274; some good ones have no right to 
marry perfectly good men, 287 ; hap- 
piness of marriage of women of gen- 
ius with truthful, simple men, 287. 
Word, the saddle of a thought, 38; 
worth of words, 41 ; words, not looks, 
win women, 89 ; mean little as com- 
pared to features, 181. 
Words and phrases, namely : - 
Bo'kays, 185. 
Bread-basket, technical term in pu- 
gilism, 280. 
Carapace, 28. 
Cherry-pictorial, 132. 
Cuss, 21. 
Dynamometer, 93. 
Edulcorated, 62. 
Endosmosis, 95. 
Epeolatry, 117. 
Eudiometer, 72. 
Haow, 44. 
Museum, 97. 
Palpebral spasm, a wink, 14. 
Pimpant, 136. 
Shooing hens, 248. 
Straw in the bung-hole of the uni. 
verse, 24. 
Wordsworth, his Boy of Windermere, 
160 ; seems to have solved some of the 
great secrets of life, 180. 
Works of art in Professor's room enu- 
merated, 29. 
Worthylakes, graves of the, 3, 306. 
Wrinkles, cheapest coat-of-mail against 
Cupid, 223. 
Yankee appellations, 95. 
Yankees are a kind of gypsies, 246. 
Yorkshire groom, fight with a sopho- 
more, 53. 
Young fellow. See John. 
Young-lady factories, 239. 
Young men, American, opportunities of, 
283; bdauty of Greek, 283.