h of those
narrow green lines that border the roads leading from the city, until
they reach the slope of the hills, and the trees repeat in low murmurs
to each other,--"Wait awhile!" By-and-by the flow of life in the
streets ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants--the smaller tribes always
in front--saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very
tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each
other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to be
picked out of the granite to find them food. At last the trees take up
their solemn line of march, and never rest until they have encamped in
the market-place. Wait long enough and you will find an old doting oak
hugging a huge worn block in its yellow underground arms; that was the
corner-stone of the State-House. Oh, so patient she is, this
imperturbable Nature!

--Let us cry!--

But all this has nothing to do with my walks and talks with the
schoolmistress. I did not say that I would not tell you something
about them. Let me alone, and I shall talk to you more than I ought
to, probably. We never tell our secrets to people that pump for them.

Books we talked about, and education. It was her duty to know
something of these, and of course she did. Perhaps I was somewhat more
learned than she, but I found that the difference between her reading
and mine was like that of a man's and a woman's dusting a library. The
man flaps about with a bunch of feathers; the woman goes to work
softly with a cloth. She does not raise half the dust, nor fill her
own eyes and mouth with it,--but she goes into all the corners, and
attends to the leaves as much as the covers.--Books are the _negative_
pictures of thought, and the more sensitive the mind that receives
their images, the more nicely the finest lines are reproduced. A
woman, (of the right kind,) reading after a man, follows him as Ruth
followed the reapers of Boaz, and her gleanings are often the finest
of the wheat.

But it was in talking of Life that we came most nearly together. I
thought I knew something about that,--that I could speak or write
about it somewhat to the purpose.

To take up this fluid earthly being of ours as a sponge sucks up
water,--to be steeped and soaked in its realities as a hide fills its
pores lying seven years in a tan-pit,--to have winnowed every wave of
it as a mill-wheel works up the stream that runs through the flume
upon its float-boards,--to have curle