exceptional being. It is because you are just
like me that I talk and know that you will listen. We are all
splashed and streaked with sentiments,--not with precisely the same
tints, or in exactly the same patterns, but by the same hand and from
the same palette.

I don't believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for
the blue hyacinth which I have,--very certainly not for the crushed
lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are. You love
the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don't doubt;
but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with young memories as
it does me. For the same reason I come back to damask roses, after
having raised a good many of the rarer varieties. I like to go to
operas and concerts, but there are queer little old homely sounds that
are better than music to me. However, I suppose it's foolish to tell
such things.

----It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time,--said the
divinity-student;--saying it, however, in one of the dead languages,
which I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and therefore do not
bear quotation as such.

Well, now,--said I,--suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking
countryman's cart stops opposite my door.--Do I want any
huckleberries?--If I do not, there are those that do. Thereupon my
soft-voiced handmaid bears out a large tin pan, and then the wholesome
countryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his broad hands around
its lower arc to confine the wild and frisky berries, and so they run
nimbly along the narrowing channel until they tumble rustling down in
a black cascade and tinkle on the resounding metal beneath.--I won't
say that this rushing huckleberry hail-storm has not more music for me
than the "Anvil Chorus."

----I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.

----Where are your great trees, Sir? said the divinity-student.

Oh, all round about New England. I call all trees mine that I have put
my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham Young has
human ones.

----One set's as green as the other,--exclaimed a boarder, who has
never been identified.

They're all Bloomers,--said the young fellow called John.

[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our landlady's
daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by putting my
wedding-ring on a tree.]

Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear,--said I.--I have
worn a tape almost out on the rough