down there,--I said.--My friend the Professor
lived in that house at the left hand, next the further corner, for
years and years. He died out of it, the other day.--Died?--said the
schoolmistress.--Certainly,--said I.--We die out of houses, just as we
die out of our bodies. A commercial smash kills a hundred men's
houses for them, as a railroad crash kills their mortal frames and
drives out the immortal tenants. Men sicken of houses until at last
they quit them, as the soul leaves its body when it is tired of its
infirmities. The body has been called "the house we live in"; the
house is quite as much the body we live in. Shall I tell you some
things the Professor said the other day?--Do!--said the
schoolmistress.

A man's body,--said the Professor,--is whatever is occupied by his
will and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote
those papers you remember reading, was much more a portion of my body
than a paralytic's senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his.

The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like
the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First he
has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial
integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of
lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his
domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the
whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose
outside wrapper.

You shall observe,--the Professor said,--for, like Mr. John Hunter and
other great men, he brings in that _shall_ with great effect
sometimes,--you shall observe that a man's clothing or series of
envelopes do after a certain time mould themselves upon his individual
nature. We know this of our hats, and are always reminded of it when
we happen to put them on wrong side foremost. We soon find that the
beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with all its irregular bumps and
depressions. Just so all that clothes a man, even to the blue sky
which caps his head,--a little loosely,--shapes itself to fit each
particular being beneath it. Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets,
lovers, condemned criminals, all find it different, according to the
eyes with which they severally look.

But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer
natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of
it. There is a shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller she