t as the original. The
misery was and is, as we found out, I and Polly, before long, that,
besides the vision, and besides the usual human and finite failures in
life (such as breaking the old pitcher that came over in the
Mayflower, and putting into the fire the alpenstock with which her
father climbed Mont Blanc)--besides, these, I say (imitating the style
of Robinson Crusoe), there were pitchforked in on us a great
rowen-heap of humbugs, handed down from some unknown seed-time, in
which we were expected, and I chiefly, to fulfil certain public
functions before the community, of the character of those fulfilled by
the third row of supernumeraries who stand behind the Sepoys in the
spectacle of the _Cataract of the Ganges_. They were the duties, in a
word, which one performs as member of one or another social class or
subdivision, wholly distinct from what one does as A. by himself A.
What invisible power put these functions on me, it would be very hard
to tell. But such power there was and is. And I had not been at work a
year before I found I was living two lives, one real and one merely
functional--for two sets of people, one my parish, whom I loved, and
the other a vague public, for whom I did not care two straws. All this
was in a vague notion, which everybody had and has, that this second
life would eventually bring out some great results, unknown at
present, to somebody somewhere.

Crazed by this duality of life, I first read Dr. Wigan on the _Duality
of the Brain_, hoping that I could train one side of my head to do
these outside jobs, and the other to do my intimate and real duties.
For Richard Greenough once told me that, in studying for the statue of
Franklin, he found that the left side of the great man's face was
philosophic and reflective, and the right side funny and smiling. If
you will go and look at the bronze statue, you will find he has
repeated this observation there for posterity. The eastern profile is
the portrait of the statesman Franklin, the western of Poor Richard.
But Dr. Wigan does not go into these niceties of this subject, and I
failed. It was then that, on my wife's suggestion, I resolved to look
out for a Double.

I was, at first, singularly successful. We happened to be recreating
at Stafford Springs that summer. We rode out one day, for one of the
relaxations of that watering-place, to the great Monsonpon House. We
were passing through one of the large halls, when my destiny was
f