een the pages.--Oh,
that is it!

What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my
soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants
came back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy
hills!

At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of those
stately upright cabinet-desks and cases of drawers which were not rare
in prosperous families during the last century. It had held the clothes
and the books and the papers of generation after generation. The hands
that opened its drawers had grown withered, shrivelled, and at last been
folded in death. The children that played with the lower handles had got
tall enough to open the desk,--to reach the upper shelves behind the
folding-doors,--grown bent after a while,--and then followed those who
had gone before, and left the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new
generation.

A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being a
quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for by the
smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk. Prying about
with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a spring, on pressing
which, a hidden drawer flew from its hiding-place. It had never been
opened but by the maker. The mahogany shavings and dust were lying in it
as when the artisan closed it,--and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if
that day finished.

Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which no
hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you seem
to have suspected? What does it hold?--A sin?--I hope not.

What a strange thing an old dead sin laid away in a secret drawer of the
soul is! Must it some time or other be moistened with tears, until it
comes to life again and begins to stir in our consciousness,--as the dry
wheel-animalcule, looking like a grain of dust, becomes alive, if it is
wet with a drop of water?

Or is it a passion? There are plenty of withered men and women walking
about the streets who have the secret drawer in their hearts, which,
if it were opened, would show as fresh as it was when they were in the
flush of youth and its first trembling emotions. What it held will,
perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and gone, and some curious
eye lights on an old yellow letter with the fossil footprints of the
extinct passion trodden thick all over it.

There is not a boarder at our table, I firmly bel