pressure upon
public servants which alone drives any man into the employment of a
double. And while I fear she thinks, at the bottom of her heart, that my
fortunes will never be remade, she has a faint hope, that, as another
Rasselas, I may teach a lesson to future publics, from which they may
profit, though we die. Owing to the behaviour of my double, or, if you
please, to that public pressure which compelled me to employ him, I have
plenty of leisure to write this communication.

I am, or rather was, a minister, of the Sandemanian connection. I was
settled in the active, wide-awake town of Naguadavick, on one of the
finest water-powers in Maine. We used to call it a Western town in the
heart of the civilization of New England. A charming place it was and
is. A spirited, brave young parish had I; and it seemed as if we might
have all "the joy of eventful living" to our hearts' content.

Alas! how little we knew on the day of my ordination, and in those
halcyon moments of our first housekeeping! To be the confidential friend
in a hundred families in the town,--cutting the social trifle, as my
friend Haliburton says, "from the top of the whipped-syllabub to the
bottom of the sponge-cake, which is the foundation,"--to keep abreast of
the thought of the age in one's study, and to do one's best on Sunday to
interweave that thought with the active life of an active town, and to
inspirit both and make both infinite by glimpses of the Eternal Glory,
seemed such an exquisite forelock into one's life! Enough to do, and all
so real and so grand! If this vision could only have lasted!

The truth is, that this vision was not in itself a delusion, nor,
indeed, half bright enough. If one could only have been left to do his
own business, the vision would have accomplished itself and brought out
new paraheliacal visions, each as bright as the original. The misery was
and is, as we found out, I and Polly, before long, that, besides the
vision, and besides the usual human and finite failures in life, (such
as breaking the old pitcher that came over in the "Mayflower," and
putting into the fire the Alpenstock with which her father climbed Mont
Blanc,)--besides these, I say, (imitating the style of Robinson Crusoe,)
there were pitch-forked in on us a great rowen-heap of humbugs, banded
down from some unknown seed-time, in which we were expected, and I
chiefly, to fulfil certain public functions before the community, of the
character of