ou shall observe,' the Professor said, for like Mr. John Hunter and
other great men, he brings in that 'shall' with great effect
sometimes, 'you shall observe that a man's clothing or series of
envelopes after a certain time mold themselves upon his individual
nature. We know this of our hats, and are always reminded of it when
we happen to put them on wrong side foremost. We soon find that the
beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with all its irregular bumps and
depressions. Just so all that clothes a man, even to the blue sky
which caps his head--a little loosely--shapes itself to fit each
particular being beneath it. Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets,
lovers, condemned criminals, all find it different, according to the
eyes with which they severally look.

"'But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer
natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it.
There is a shellfish which builds all manner of smaller shells 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 the years I was planted there. Why, there wasn't a nook or
a corner that some fiber 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
fixt 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
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 the