t,--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 fore, 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 labyrinth 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 themselves 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 only to look on them, but,
if I can, through them. You can get any man's or woman's secret, whose
sphere is circumscribed 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 sighting some distant object to which the passions or
aspirations 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. B (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 bills!

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 after generation. The hand