e that "our
denomination," or "our party," or "our class," or "our family," or
"our street," or "our town," or "our country," or "our state," should
be fully represented. And I fell back to that charming life which in
boyhood one dreams of, when he supposes he shall do his own duty and
make his own sacrifices, without being tied up with those of other
people. My rusty Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French,
Italian, Spanish, German and English began to take polish. Heavens!
how little I had done with them while I attended to my _public_
duties! My calls on my parishioners became the friendly, frequent,
homelike sociabilities they were meant to be, instead of the hard work
of a man goaded to desperation by the sight of his lists of arrears.
And preaching! what a luxury preaching was when I had on Sunday the
whole result of an individual, personal week, from which to speak to a
people whom all that week I had been meeting as hand-to-hand friend! I
never tired on Sunday, and was in condition to leave the sermon at
home, if I chose, and preach it extempore, as all men should do
always. Indeed, I wonder, when I think that a sensible people like
ours--really more attached to their clergy than they were in the lost
days, when the Mathers and Nortons were noblemen--should choose to
neutralize so much of their ministers' lives, and destroy so much of
their early training, by this undefined passion for seeing them in
public. It springs from our balancing of sects. If a spirited
Episcopalian takes an interest in the almshouse, and is put on the
Poor Board, every other denomination must have a minister there, lest
the poorhouse be changed into St. Paul's Cathedral. If a Sandemanian
is chosen president of the Young Men's Library, there must be a
Methodist vice-president and a Baptist secretary. And if a
Universalist Sunday-School Convention collects five hundred delegates,
the next Congregationalist Sabbath-School Conference must be as large,
"lest 'they'--whoever _they_ may be--should think 'we'--whoever _we_
may be--are going down."

Freed from these necessities, that happy year, I began to know my wife
by sight. We saw each other sometimes. In those long mornings, when
Dennis was in the study explaining to map-peddlers that I had eleven
maps of Jerusalem already, and to school-book agents that I would see
them hanged before I would be bribed to introduce their textbooks into
the schools--she and I were at work together,