lantic the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at
Fort William Henry; all the dead people that have been in the dust so
long--even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry--are alive
again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils, and the
precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of heaven! And all
this for a bit of pie-crust!

----I will thank you for that pie,--said the provoking young fellow whom
I have named repeatedly. He looked at it for a moment, and put his hands
to his eyes as if moved.--I was thinking,--he said, indistinctly----

----How? What is't?--said our landlady.

----I was thinking--said he--who was king of England when this old pie
was baked,--and it made me feel bad to think how long he must have been
dead.

[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; _cela va
sans dire_. She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of corn
that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize itself by a
special narrative. There was the wooing and the wedding,--the start in
life,--the disappointment,--the children she had buried,--the struggle
against fate,--the dismantling of life, first of its small luxuries, and
then of its comforts,--the broken spirits,--the altered character of the
one on whom she leaned,--and at last the death that came and drew the
black curtain between her and all her earthly hopes.

I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but I
often cried,--not those pattering tears that run off the eaves upon our
neighbors' grounds, the _stillicidium_ of self-conscious sentiment, but
those which steal noiselessly through their conduits until they reach
the cisterns lying round about the heart; those tears that we weep
inwardly with unchanging features;--such I did shed for her often when
the imps of the boarding-house Inferno tugged at her soul with their
red-hot pincers.]

Young man,--I said,--the pasty you speak lightly of is not old, but
courtesy to those who labor to serve us, especially if they are of the
weaker sex, is very old, and yet well worth retaining. The pasty looks
to me as if it were tender, but I know that the hearts of women are so.
May I recommend to you the following caution, as a guide, whenever you
are dealing with a woman, or an artist, or a poet;--if you are handling
an editor or politician, it is superfluous advice. I take it from the
back of one of those little French toys which