in fact is, very probably, the same thing as palsy, in
another form. The worst of it is that the subjects of it never seem to
suspect that they are intellectual invalids, stammerers and cripples
at best, but are all the time hitting out at their old friends with the
well arm, and calling them hard names out of their twisted mouths.

It was a real delight to have one of those good, hearty, happy,
benignant old clergymen pass the Sunday, with us, and I can remember
some whose advent made the day feel almost like "Thanksgiving." But
now and then would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a
wailing voice, which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead
up stairs, who took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as
being in a bad way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize
us with his woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish
in the other direction. I remember one in particular, who twitted me so
with my blessings as a Christian child, and whined so to me about the
naked black children who, like the "Little Vulgar Boy," "had n't got no
supper and hadn't got no ma," and hadn't got no Catechism, (how I wished
for the moment I was a little black boy!) that he did more in that one
day to make me a heathen than he had ever done in a month to make a
Christian out of an infant Hottentot. What a debt we owe to our friends
of the left centre, the Brooklyn and the Park Street and the
Summer street ministers; good, wholesome, sound-bodied, one-minded,
cheerful-spirited men, who have taken the place of those wailing
poitrinaires with the bandanna handkerchiefs round their meagre throats
and a funeral service in their forlorn physiognomies! I might have been
a minister myself, for aught I know, if this clergyman had not looked
and talked so like an undertaker.

All this belongs to one of the side-shows, to which I promised those who
would take tickets to the main exhibition should have entrance gratis.
If I were writing a poem you would expect, as a matter of course, that
there would be a digression now and then.

To come back to the old house and its former tenant, the Professor of
Hebrew and other Oriental languages. Fifteen years he lived with his
family under its roof. I never found the slightest trace of him until a
few years ago, when I cleaned and brightened with pious hands the brass
lock of "the study," which had for many years been covered with a thick
coat of pa