which never failed their crews,--which, for all that man knows,
are as sound now as ever,--bear the names of peaceful adventure; the
"Hecla," the "Enterprise," and "Investigator," the "Assistance" and
"Resolute," the "Pioneer" and "Intrepid," and our "Advance" and "Rescue"
and "Arctic," never threatened any one, even in their names. And they
never failed the men who commanded them or who sailed in them.

FOOTNOTE:

[15] Tetrao lagopus.

MY DOUBLE, AND HOW HE UNDID ME

ONE OF THE INGHAM PAPERS.

[A Boston journal, in noticing this story, called it improbable I
think it is. But I think the moral important. It was first
published in the Atlantic Monthly for September, 1859.]

It is not often that I trouble the readers of the Atlantic Monthly. I
should not trouble them now, but for the importunities of my wife, who
"feels to insist" that a duty to society is unfulfilled, till I have
told why I had to have a double, and how he undid me. She is sure, she
says, that intelligent persons cannot understand that 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 behavior 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 heart's 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