forded me some grotesque specimens of artificial simplicity, and
could not, therefore, so far as I was concerned, be reckoned a failure.
In no one instance, however, did I voluntarily speak of my three
friends. They dwelt in a profounder region. The more I consider
myself as I then was, the more do I recognize how deeply my connection
with those three had affected all my being.

As it was already the epoch of annihilated space, I might in the time I
was away from Blithedale have snatched a glimpse at England, and been
back again. But my wanderings were confined within a very limited
sphere. I hopped and fluttered, like a bird with a string about its
leg, gyrating round a small circumference, and keeping up a restless
activity to no purpose. Thus it was still in our familiar
Massachusetts--in one of its white country villages--that I must next
particularize an incident.

The scene was one of those lyceum halls, of which almost every village
has now its own, dedicated to that sober and pallid, or rather
drab-colored, mode of winter-evening entertainment, the lecture. Of
late years this has come strangely into vogue, when the natural
tendency of things would seem to be to substitute lettered for oral
methods of addressing the public. But, in halls like this, besides the
winter course of lectures, there is a rich and varied series of other
exhibitions. Hither comes the ventriloquist, with all his mysterious
tongues; the thaumaturgist, too, with his miraculous transformations of
plates, doves, and rings, his pancakes smoking in your hat, and his
cellar of choice liquors represented in one small bottle. Here, also,
the itinerant professor instructs separate classes of ladies and
gentlemen in physiology, and demonstrates his lessons by the aid of
real skeletons, and manikins in wax, from Paris. Here is to be heard
the choir of Ethiopian melodists, and to be seen the diorama of Moscow
or Bunker Hill, or the moving panorama of the Chinese wall. Here is
displayed the museum of wax figures, illustrating the wide catholicism
of earthly renown, by mixing up heroes and statesmen, the pope and the
Mormon prophet, kings, queens, murderers, and beautiful ladies; every
sort of person, in short, except authors, of whom I never beheld even
the most famous done in wax. And here, in this many-purposed hall
(unless the selectmen of the village chance to have more than their
share of the Puritanism, which, however diversified with