n the convent,--that he sometimes thought the living
tenants were the shadows, and the painted figures the realities,--I
have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great
unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one
ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I fled, and
coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the same sleepless
eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy incantation!

----Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and courteous acts,--a thousand faces
that melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow melts,
but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose roots are
memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams. I am not ungrateful, nor
unconscious of all the good feeling and intelligence everywhere to be
met with through the vast parish to which the lecturer ministers. But
when I set forth, leading a string of my mind's daughters to market, as
the country-folk fetch in their strings of horses----Pardon me, that
was a coarse fellow who sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy
lecturer, as if, because he was decently paid for his services, he had
therefore sold his sensibilities.--Family men get dreadfully homesick.
In the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of
the logs in one's fireplace at home.

"There are his young barbarians all at play,"--

if he owns any youthful savages.--No, the world has a million roosts for
a man, but only one nest.

----It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always made
in all discussions. The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence,
with that slight tension about the nostrils which the consciousness
of earning a "settler" in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the
individual thus armed. When a person is really full of information, and
does not abuse it to crush conversation, his part is to that of the real
talkers what the instrumental accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of
vocalists.

----What do I mean by the real talkers?--Why, the people with fresh
ideas, of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them in. Facts
always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts about
facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the finger on the key
and the man of facts asserts his true dignity. I have known three of
these men of facts, at least, who were always formidable,--and one of
them was tyrannical.

----Y