almost any other class. "I cannot dig,
to beg I am ashamed."

I think it is unpopular in this country to talk much about gentlemen and
gentlewomen. People are touchy about social distinctions, which no doubt
are often invidious and quite arbitrary and accidental, but which it
is impossible to avoid recognizing as facts of natural history. Society
stratifies itself everywhere, and the stratum which is generally
recognized as the uppermost will be apt to have the advantage in easy
grace of manner and in unassuming confidence, and consequently be
more agreeable in the superficial relations of life. To compare these
advantages with the virtues and utilities would be foolish. Much of the
noblest work in life is done by ill-dressed, awkward, ungainly persons;
but that is no more reason for undervaluing good manners and what we
call high-breeding, than the fact that the best part of the sturdy labor
of the world is done by men with exceptionable hands is to be urged
against the use of Brown Windsor as a preliminary to appearance in
cultivated society.

I mean to stand up for this poor lady, whose usefulness in the world
is apparently problematical. She seems to me like a picture which has
fallen from its gilded frame and lies, face downward, on the dusty
floor. The picture never was as needful as a window or a door, but it
was pleasant to see it in its place, and it would be pleasant to see
it there again, and I, for one, should be thankful to have the Lady
restored by some turn of fortune to the position from which she has been
so cruelly cast down.

--I have asked the Landlady about the young man sitting near her, the
same who attracted my attention the other day while I was talking, as
I mentioned. He passes most of his time in a private observatory, it
appears; a watcher of the stars. That I suppose gives the peculiar look
to his lustrous eyes. The Master knows him and was pleased to tell me
something about him.

You call yourself a Poet,--he said,--and we call you so, too, and so
you are; I read your verses and like 'em. But that young man lives in a
world beyond the imagination of poets, let me tell you. The daily
home of his thought is in illimitable space, hovering between the two
eternities. In his contemplations the divisions of time run together,
as in the thought of his Maker. With him also,--I say it not
profanely,--one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one
day.

This account of his occupa