s 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 elsewhere than at our table, and that there is a mystery,
which is going to break upon us all of a sudden, involving 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 straightforward, 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
city. In her, it is standing up for her little friend with the most
queenly disregard of the code of boarding-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
toothache,--and that if she opens her mouth to the quarter 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:

-It must be done, Sir!--he was saying,--it must be done! Our religion
has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has been Oriental