nd resolve that you will
come again. They are nice people; they like you; at last you have got to
feeling at home with them.

Three months after, you go to see them again, when, lo! there you are,
back again just where you were at first. The little spot which you had
thawed out is frozen over again, and again you spend all your visit in
thawing it and getting your hosts limbered and in a state for
comfortable converse.

The first evening that I spent in the wide, roomy front-parlor, with
Judge Evans, his wife, and daughters, fully accounted for the change in
Emmy's letters. Rooms, I verily believe, get saturated with the aroma of
their spiritual atmosphere; and there are some so stately, so correct,
that they would paralyze even the friskiest kitten or the most impudent
Scotch terrier. At a glance, you perceive, on entering, that nothing but
correct deportment, an erect posture, and strictly didactic conversation
is possible there.

The family, in fact, were all eminently didactic, bent on improvement,
laboriously useful. Not a good work or charitable enterprise could put
forth its head in the neighborhood, of which they were not the support
and life. Judge Evans was the stay and staff of the village and township
of ----; he bore up the pillars thereof. Mrs. Evans was known in the
gates for all the properties and deeds of the virtuous woman, as set
forth by Solomon; the heart of her husband did safely trust in her. But
when I saw them, that evening, sitting, in erect propriety, in their
respective corners each side of the great, stately fireplace, with its
tall, glistening brass andirons, its mantel adorned at either end with
plated candlesticks, with the snuffer-tray in the middle,--she so
collectedly measuring her words, talking in all those well-worn grooves
of correct conversation which are designed, as the phrase goes, to
"entertain strangers," and the Misses Evans, in the best of grammar and
rhetoric, and in most proper time and way possible, showing themselves
for what they were, most high-principled, well-informed, intelligent
women,--I set myself to speculate on the cause of the extraordinary
sensation of stiffness and restraint which pervaded me, as if I had been
dipped in some petrifying spring and was beginning to feel myself
slightly crusting over on the exterior.

This kind of conversation is such as admits quite easily of one's
carrying on another course of thought within; and so, as I found myself
l