diet, all his
surroundings, without the least care to remain himself. But the mind?

It is more difficult to get acquainted with Herbert than with an entire
stranger, for I have my prepossessions about him, and do not find him
in so many places where I expect to find him. He is full of criticism
of the authors I admire; he thinks stupid or improper the books I most
read; he is skeptical about the "movements" I am interested in; he has
formed very different opinions from mine concerning a hundred men and
women of the present day; we used to eat from one dish; we could n't
now find anything in common in a dozen; his prejudices (as we call
our opinions) are most extraordinary, and not half so reasonable as
my prejudices; there are a great many persons and things that I am
accustomed to denounce, uncontradicted by anybody, which he defends; his
public opinion is not at all my public opinion. I am sorry for him. He
appears to have fallen into influences and among a set of people foreign
to me. I find that his church has a different steeple on it from my
church (which, to say the truth, hasn't any). It is a pity that such a
dear friend and a man of so much promise should have drifted off into
such general contrariness. I see Herbert sitting here by the fire,
with the old look in his face coming out more and more, but I do not
recognize any features of his mind,--except perhaps his contrariness;
yes, he was always a little contrary, I think. And finally he surprises
me with, "Well, my friend, you seem to have drifted away from your old
notions and opinions. We used to agree when we were together, but I
sometimes wondered where you would land; for, pardon me, you showed
signs of looking at things a little contrary."

I am silent for a good while. I am trying to think who I am. There was
a person whom I thought I knew, very fond of Herbert, and agreeing with
him in most things. Where has he gone? and, if he is here, where is the
Herbert that I knew?

If his intellectual and moral sympathies have all changed, I wonder if
his physical tastes remain, like his appearance, the same. There has
come over this country within the last generation, as everybody knows,
a great wave of condemnation of pie. It has taken the character of a
"movement!" though we have had no conventions about it, nor is any one,
of any of the several sexes among us, running for president against it.
It is safe almost anywhere to denounce pie, yet nearly every