y), you must remember the worthy old citizen, in his
advanced age, going about the streets, a most gentlemanly bundle of
infirmities,--only he always cocked his hat a little too much on
one side, as they do here and there along the Connecticut River, and
sometimes on our city sidewalks, when they've got a new beaver; they got
him, I say, to give us boys and girls lessons in dancing and deportment.
He was as gray and as lively as a squirrel, as I remember him, and used
to spring up in the air and "cross his feet," as we called it, three
times before he came down. Well, at the end of each term there was what
they called an "exhibition ball," in which the scholars danced cotillons
and country-dances; also something called a "gavotte," and I think one
or more walked a minuet. But all this is not what--I wanted to say. At
this exhibition ball he used to bring out a number of hoops wreathed
with roses, of the perennial kind, by the aid of which a number of
amazingly complicated and startling evolutions were exhibited; and also
his two daughters, who figured largely in these evolutions, and whose
wonderful performances to us, who had not seen Miss Taglioni or Miss
Elssler, were something quite bewildering, in fact, surpassing the
natural possibilities of human beings. Their extraordinary powers were,
however, accounted for by the following explanation, which was accepted
in the school as entirely satisfactory. A certain little bone in the
ankles of each of these young girls had been broken intentionally,
secundum artem, at a very early age, and thus they had been fitted to
accomplish these surprising feats which threw the achievements of
the children who were left in the condition of the natural man into
ignominious shadow.

--Thank you,--said I,--you have helped out my illustration so as to make
it better than I expected. Let me begin again. Every poem that is worthy
of the name, no matter how easily it seems to be written, represents
a great amount of vital force expended at some time or other. When you
find a beach strewed with the shells and other spoils that belonged once
to the deep sea, you know the tide has been there, and that the winds
and waves have wrestled over its naked sands. And so, if I find a poem
stranded in my soul and have nothing to do but seize it as a wrecker
carries off the treasure he finds cast ashore, I know I have paid at
some time for that poem with some inward commotion, were it only an
excess of