o 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 an old book, and looked as if it had not been
opened for a long time. What should drop out of it, one day, but a small
heart-shaped paper, containing a lock of that straight, coarse, brown
hair which sets off the sharp faces of so many thin-flanked, large-handed
bumpkins! I read upon the paper the name "Hiram."--Love! love!
love!--everywhere! everywhere!--under diamonds and housemaids'
"jewelry,"--lifting the marrowy camel's-hair, and rustling even the black
bombazine!--No, no,--I think she never was pretty, but she