would have been so
nearly what I am that I should have loved him like a brother,--always
provided that I did not hate him for his resemblance to me, on the same
principle as that which makes bodies in the same electric condition repel
each other.

For, perhaps after all, my One Reader is quite as likely to be not the
person most resembling myself, but the one to whom my nature is
complementary. Just as a particular soil wants some one element to
fertilize it, just as the body in some conditions has a kind of
famine--for one special food, so the mind has its wants, which do not
always call for what is best, but which know themselves and are as
peremptory as the salt-sick sailor's call for a lemon or a raw potato,
or, if you will, as those capricious "longings," which have a certain
meaning, we may suppose, and which at any rate we think it reasonable to
satisfy if we can.

I was going to say something about our boarders the other day when I got
run away with by my local reminiscences. I wish you to understand that
we have a rather select company at the table of our boarding-house.

Our Landlady is a most respectable person, who has seen better days, of
course,--all landladies have,--but has also, I feel sure, seen a good
deal worse ones. For she wears a very handsome silk dress on state
occasions, with a breastpin set, as I honestly believe, with genuine
pearls, and appears habitually with a very smart cap, from under which
her gray curls come out with an unmistakable expression, conveyed in the
hieratic language of the feminine priesthood, to the effect that while
there is life there is hope. And when I come to reflect on the many
circumstances which go to the making of matrimonial happiness, I cannot
help thinking that a personage of her present able exterior, thoroughly
experienced in all the domestic arts which render life comfortable, might
make the later years of some hitherto companionless bachelor very
endurable, not to say pleasant.

The condition of the Landlady's family is, from what I learn, such as to
make the connection I have alluded to, I hope with delicacy, desirable
for incidental as well as direct reasons, provided a fitting match could
be found. I was startled at hearing her address by the familiar name of
Benjamin the young physician I have referred to, until I found on
inquiry, what I might have guessed by the size of his slices of pie and
other little marks of favoritism, that he was her s