lay
down out there on the Common, and was found cold the next morning,
with the night dews and the death dews mingled on his forehead.

"Let us have one look at poor Benjamin's grave," said I. "His bones
lie where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone says they
lie--which is more than can be said of most of the tenants of this and
several other burial grounds....

"Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman's sigh over poor
Benjamin's dust. Love killed him, I think. Twenty years old, and out
there fighting another young fellow on the common, in the cool of that
old July evening; yes, there must have been love at the bottom of it."

The schoolmistress dropt a rosebud she had in her hand through the
rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woolbridge. That was all her comment
upon what I told her. "How women love Love!" said I; but she did not
speak.

We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from
the main street. "Look down there," I said; "my friend, the Professor,
lived in that house, at the left hand, next the further corner, for
years and years. He died out of it, the other day." "Died?" said the
schoolmistress. "Certainly," said I. "We die out of houses, just as we
die out of our bodies. A commercial smash kills a hundred men's homes
for them, as a railroad crash kills their mortal frames and drives out
the immortal tenants. Men sicken of houses until at last they quit
them, as the soul leaves its body when it is tired of its infirmities.
The body has been called 'the house we live in'; the house is quite
as much the body we live in. Shall I tell you some things the
Professor said the other day?" "Do!" said the schoolmistress.

"'A man's body,' said the Professor, 'is whatever is occupied by his
will and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote
those papers you remember reading, was much more a part of my body
than a paralytic's senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his.

"'The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes around it,
like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First,
he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then his artificial
integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of
lighter tissues, and their variously tinted pigments. Third, his
domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the
whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose
outside wrapper.

"'Y