d closed with my last
drowsy incantation!

--Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and courteous acts,--a thousand faces
that melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow
melts, but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose
roots are memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams. I am not
ungrateful, nor unconscious of all the good feeling and
intelligence everywhere to be met with through the vast parish to
which the lecturer ministers. But when I set forth, leading a
string of my mind's daughters to market, as the country-folk fetch
in their strings of horses--Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow who
sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy lecturer, as if,
because he was decently paid for his services, he had therefore
sold his sensibilities.--Family men get dreadfully homesick. In
the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of
the logs in one's fireplace at home.

"There are his young barbarians all at play,"--

if he owns any youthful savages.--No, the world has a million
roosts for a man, but only one nest.

--It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always
made in all discussions. The men of facts wait their turn in grim
silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the
consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact or a
revolver gives the individual thus armed. When a person is really
full of information, and does not abuse it to crush conversation,
his part is to that of the real talkers what the instrumental
accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of vocalists.

--What do I mean by the real talkers?--Why, the people with fresh
ideas, of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them in.
Facts always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts
about facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the finger
on the key and the man of facts asserts his true dignity. I have
known three of these men of facts, at least, who were always
formidable,--and one of them was tyrannical.

--Yes, a man sometimes makes a grand appearance on a particular
occasion; but these men knew something about almost everything, and
never made mistakes.--He? Veneers in first-rate style. The
mahogany scales off now and then in spots, and then you see the
cheap light stuff--I found--very fine in conversational
information, the other day when we were in company. The talk ran
upon mountains. He was wonderfully well acqu