ieve, excepting the
young girl, who has not a story of the heart to tell, if one could only
get the secret drawer open. Even this arid female, whose armor of black
bombazine looks stronger against the shafts of love than any cuirass of
triple brass, has had her sentimental history, if I am not mistaken. I
will tell you my reason for suspecting it.

Like many other old women, she shows a great nervousness and
restlessness whenever I venture to express any opinion upon a class of
subjects which can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of men
as their strictly private property,--not even to the clergy, or the
newspapers commonly called "religious." Now, although it would be a
great luxury to me to obtain my opinions by contract, ready-made, from a
professional man, and although I have a constitutional kindly feeling
to all sorts of good people which would make me happy to agree with all
their beliefs, if that were possible, still I must have an idea, now and
then, as to the meaning of life; and though the only condition of peace
in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least, not to express them,
with reference to such subjects, I can't afford to pay quite so much as
that even for peace.

I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on the
shores of Sir Isaac Newton's Ocean of Truth, that _salt fish_, which
have been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and dried,
are the only proper and allowable food for reasonable people. I
maintain, on the other hand, that there are a number of live fish still
swimming in it, and that every one of us has a right to see if he cannot
catch some of them. Sometimes I please myself with the idea that I have
landed an actual living fish, small, perhaps, but with rosy gills and
silvery scales. Then I find the consumers of nothing but the salted and
dried article insist that it is poisonous, simply because it is alive,
and cry out to people not to touch it. I have not found, however, that
people mind them much.

The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer. I try every
questionable proposition on her. If she winces, I must be prepared for
an outcry from the other old women. I frightened her, the other day, by
saying that _faith, as an intellectual state, was self-reliance_, which,
if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a
paradox as it sounds at first. So she sent me a book to read which was
to cure me of that error. It was