in the
dormitory? Why do you want to people the minds of everybody that reads
your good-for-nothing libel which you call a "biography" with your
impudent caricatures of a man who was a better-looking fellow than
yourself, I 'll bet you ten to one, a man whom his Latin tutor called
fommosus puer when he was only a freshman? If that's what it means to
make a reputation,--to leave your character and your person, and the
good name of your sainted relatives, and all you were, and all you had
and thought and felt, so far as can be gathered by digging you out
of your most private records, to be manipulated and bandied about and
cheapened in the literary market as a chicken or a turkey or a goose is
handled and bargained over at a provision stall, is n't it better to be
content with the honest blue slate-stone and its inscription informing
posterity that you were a worthy citizen and a respected father of a
family?

--I should like to see any man's biography with corrections and
emendations by his ghost. We don't know each other's secrets quite so
well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don't always know our own secrets
as well as we might. You have seen a tree with different grafts upon it,
an apple or a pear tree we will say. In the late summer months the fruit
on one bough will ripen; I remember just such a tree, and the early
ripening fruit was the Jargonelle. By and by the fruit of another
bough will begin to come into condition; the lovely Saint Michael, as
I remember, grew on the same stock as the Jargonelle in the tree I am
thinking of; and then, when these have all fallen or been gathered,
another, we will say the Winter Nelis, has its turn, and so out of the
same juices have come in succession fruits of the most varied aspects
and flavors. It is the same thing with ourselves, but it takes us a
long while to find it out. The various inherited instincts ripen in
succession. You may be nine tenths paternal at one period of your life,
and nine tenths maternal at another. All at once the traits of some
immediate ancestor may come to maturity unexpectedly on one of the
branches of your character, just as your features at different periods
of your life betray different resemblances to your nearer or more remote
relatives.

But I want you to let me go back to the Bunker Hill Monument and the
dynasty of twenty or thirty centuries whose successive representatives
are to sit in the gate, like the Jewish monarchs, while the peo