body eats
it on occasion. A great many people think it savors of a life abroad to
speak with horror of pie, although they were very likely the foremost
of the Americans in Paris who used to speak with more enthusiasm of
the American pie at Madame Busque's than of the Venus of Milo. To talk
against pie and still eat it is snobbish, of course; but snobbery, being
an aspiring failing, is sometimes the prophecy of better things.
To affect dislike of pie is something. We have no statistics on the
subject, and cannot tell whether it is gaining or losing in the country
at large. Its disappearance in select circles is no test. The amount of
writing against it is no more test of its desuetude, than the number of
religious tracts distributed in a given district is a criterion of its
piety. We are apt to assume that certain regions are substantially free
of it. Herbert and I, traveling north one summer, fancied that we could
draw in New England a sort of diet line, like the sweeping curves on the
isothermal charts, which should show at least the leading pie sections.
Journeying towards the White Mountains, we concluded that a line passing
through Bellows Falls, and bending a little south on either side, would
mark northward the region of perpetual pie. In this region pie is to
be found at all hours and seasons, and at every meal. I am not sure,
however, that pie is not a matter of altitude rather than latitude, as
I find that all the hill and country towns of New England are full of
those excellent women, the very salt of the housekeeping earth, who
would feel ready to sink in mortification through their scoured kitchen
floors, if visitors should catch them without a pie in the house. The
absence of pie would be more noticed than a scarcity of Bible even.
Without it the housekeepers are as distracted as the boarding-house
keeper, who declared that if it were not for canned tomato, she should
have nothing to fly to. Well, in all this great agitation I find Herbert
unmoved, a conservative, even to the under-crust. I dare not ask him
if he eats pie at breakfast. There are some tests that the dearest
friendship may not apply.

"Will you smoke?" I ask.

"No, I have reformed."

"Yes, of course."

"The fact is, that when we consider the correlation of forces, the
apparent sympathy of spirit manifestations with electric conditions, the
almost revealed mysteries of what may be called the odic force, and the
relation of all these pheno