ndscape for background according to season. Plants of each month got
up from botanical calendars.

"I should like much to see the composite novel. Why not apply Mr.
Galton's process, and get thirty-eight stories all in one? All the
Yankees would resolve into one Yankee, all the P----West Britons into
one Patrick, etc., what a saving of time it would be!

"I got along pretty well with my first few stories. I had some
characters around me which, a little disguised, answered well enough.
There was the minister of the parish, and there was an old schoolmaster
either of them served very satisfactorily for grandfathers and
old uncles. All I had to do was to shift some of their leading
peculiarities, keeping the rest. The old minister wore knee-breeches.
I clapped them on to the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster carried a tall
gold-headed cane. I put this in the minister's hands. So with other
things,--I shifted them round, and got a set of characters who, taken
together, reproduced the chief persons of the village where I lived, but
did not copy any individual exactly. Thus it went on for a while; but
by and by my stock company began to be rather too familiarly known,
in spite of their change of costume, and at last some altogether too
sagacious person published what he called a 'key' to several of my
earlier stories, in which I found the names of a number of neighbors
attached to aliases of my own invention. All the 'types,' as he called
them, represented by these personages of my story had come to be
recognized, each as standing for one and the same individual of my
acquaintance. It had been of no use to change the costume. Even changing
the sex did no good. I had a famous old gossip in one of my tales,--a
much-babbling Widow Sertingly. 'Sho!' they all said, that 's old Deacon
Spinner, the same he told about in that other story of his,--only
the deacon's got on a petticoat and a mob-cap,--but it's the same old
sixpence.' So I said to myself, I must have some new characters. I
had no trouble with young characters; they are all pretty much
alike,--dark-haired or light-haired, with the outfits belonging to their
complexion, respectively. I had an old great-aunt, who was a tip-top
eccentric. I had never seen anything just like her in books. So I said,
I will have you, old lady, in one of my stories; and, sure enough, I
fitted her out with a first-rate odd-sounding name, which I got from the
directory, and sent her forth to the wo