lls
into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have
crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own
past. See what these are, and you can tell what the occupant is.

I had no idea,--said the Professor,--until I pulled up my domestic
establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of roots I had
been making during the years I was planted there. Why, there wasn't a
nook or a corner that some fibre had not worked its way into; and when
I gave the last wrench, each of them seemed to shriek like a mandrake,
as it broke its hold and came away.

There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably,
and which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable
aspect and in all dimensions. The infinite galleries of the Past await
but one brief process and all their pictures will be called out and
fixed forever. We had a curious illustration of the great fact on a
very humble scale. When a certain bookcase, long standing in one
place, for which it was built, was removed, there was the exact image
on the wall of the whole, and of many of its portions. But in the
midst of this picture was another,--the precise outline of a map
which had hung on the wall before the bookcase was built. We had all
forgotten everything about the map until we saw its photograph on the
wall. Then we remembered it, as some day or other we may remember a
sin which has been built over and covered up, when this lower universe
is pulled away from before the wall of Infinity, where the wrongdoing
stands self-recorded.

The Professor lived in that house a long time,--not twenty years, but
pretty near it. When he entered that door, two shadows glided over the
threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for
the last time,--and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be
longer than his own. What changes he saw in that quiet place! Death
rained through every roof but his; children came into life, grew to
maturity, wedded, faded away, threw themselves away; the whole drama
of life was played in that stock-company's theatre of a dozen houses,
one of which was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever
entered his dwelling. Peace be to those walls, forever,--the Professor
said,--for the many pleasant years he has passed within them!

The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been
with him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in