f, or cakes more utterly satisfactory. It is the very ultimate
crystallization of cereals, the poetry and rhythm of bread, brown and
golden to the eye, like the lush loveliness of October, crumbling to
the touch, un-utterable to the taste. It has all the ethereal,
evanishing fascination of a spirit. Eve might have set it before
Raphael. You scarcely dare touch it lest it disappear and leave you
disappointed and desolate. It is melting, insinuating,--a halo,
hovering on the border-land of dream and reality, beautiful but
uncertain vision, a dissolving view. I said something of the sort to
Halicarnassus one morning, and he said, Yes, it was--on my plate. And
yet I have never had as much as I wanted of it,--never. The others
were perpetually finishing their breakfast and compelling me, by a kind
of moral violence, to finish mine. I made an attempt one morning, the
last of my sojourn among the Delectable Mountains, when the opposing
elements had left the table prematurely to make arrangements for
departure, and startled the waiter by ordering an unlimited supply of
corn-cake. Like a thunder-bolt fell on my ear the terrible answer:
"There isn't any this morning. It is brown bread." Me miserable!

As we went to dinner, in a large dining-room, upon our arrival at the
Glen House, it seemed to me that the guests were the most refined and
elegant in their general appearance of any company I had seen since my
departure, and I had a pleasant New-English feeling of
self-gratulation. But we were drawn up into line directly opposite a
row of young girls, who really made me very uncomfortable. They were
at an advanced stage of their dinner when we entered, and they devoted
themselves to making observations. It was not curiosity, or
admiration, or astonishment, or horror. It was simply fixedness. They
displayed no emotion whatever, but every time your glance reached
within forty-five degrees of them, there they were "staring right on
with calm, eternal eyes," and kept at it till the servants created a
diversion with the dessert. Now, if there is any thing that annoys and
disconcerts me, it is to be looked at. Some women would have put them
down, but I never can put anybody down. It is as much as I can do to
hold my own,--and more, unless I am with well-bred people who always
keep their equilibriums. One of these girls was the companion of a
venerable and courtly gentleman; and the thought arose, how is it
possible for