and recommenced:

"Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn't have no
tail, only just a short stump like a bannanner, and--"

"Oh! hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!" I muttered good-naturedly, and,
bidding the old gentleman good-day, I departed.

THE CHARMING FRENCHMAN

BOSSUET
[Sidenote: _Sainte-Beuve_]

As for the happiness itself, of which he would give us a just idea, the
purely spiritual and internal happiness of the soul in the other life,
he sums it up in an expression which concludes a happy development of
the subject, and he defines it: _Reason always attentive and always
contented_. Take reason in its liveliest and most luminous sense, the
pure flame disengaged from the senses.

ROUSSEAU
[Sidenote: _Sainte-Beuve_]

It is from him that the sentiment of nature is reckoned among us, in the
eighteenth century. It is from him also that is dated, in our
literature, _the sentiment of domestic life; of that homely, poor,
quiet, hidden life, in which are accumulated so many treasures of virtue
and affection_. Amid certain details, in bad taste, in which he speaks
of robbery and of eatables, how one pardons him on account of that old
song of childhood, of which he knows only the air and some words
stitched together, but which he always wished to recover, and which he
never recalls, old as he is, without a soothing charm!

JOUBERT
[Sidenote: _Sainte-Beuve_]

Taste, for him, is the literary conscience of the soul....

M. Joubert was, in his day, the most delicate and the most original type
of that class of honest people which the old society alone
produced,--spectators, listeners who had neither ambition nor envy, who
were curious, at leisure, attentive, and disinterested, who took an
interest in everything, the true amateurs of beautiful things. "To
converse and to know--it was in this, above all things, that consisted,
according to Plato, the happiness of private life." This class of
connoisseurs and of amateurs, so fitted to enlighten and to restrain
talent, has almost disappeared in France since every one there has
followed a profession. "We should always," said M. Joubert, "have a
corner of the head open and free, that we may have a place for the
opinions of our friends, where we may lodge them provisionally. It is
really insupportable to converse with men who have, in their brains,
only compartments which are wholly occupied, and into which nothing
external can enter. Let