stately procession which
accompanied it, and heard the music which discoursed of its happiness.

* * * * *

THE GREAT AIR-ENGINE.

There is an odd collection of houses, and a stretch of green, with half
a dozen old elms, raspberry-bushes, and pruned oaks growing on it,
opening out from this window where I work; this morning, they blended
curiously with this old story that I want to tell you, helping me to
understand it better. And the story, too, explained to me one reason why
people always choose to look at those trees rather than the houses: at
any trees before any houses. Because, you see, whatever grows out of
Nature is itself, and says so: has its own especial little soul-sap, and
leafs that out intact, borrows no trait or trick or habit from its
neighbor. The sunshine is sunshine, and the pine-burr a pine-burr,
obstinately, through and through. So Nature rests us. But whatever grows
out of a man's brain is like the brain, patched, uncertain: a perverse
streak in it somewhere, to spoil its thorough good or ill meaning.

There is a little Grecian temple yonder, back of the evergreens, with a
triangular stove-funnel revolving at its top; and next door a
Dutch-built stable, with a Turk's turban for a cupola; and just beyond
that, a _chalet_-roof, sprouting without any provocation whatever out of
an engine-house. I do not think they are caricatures of some characters.
I knew a politician once, very low down in even that scale; Quilp they
nicknamed him; the cruelest husband; quarter-dollarish in his views and
principles, and greedy for bribes even as low as that: yet I have seen
that man work with a rose-bush as long and tenderly as a mother with her
baby, and his eyes glow and grow wet at the sight of a new and delicate
plant. Near him lived a woman,--a relative of his, I believe: one of
those women who absorb so much of the world's room and air, and have a
right to do it: a nature made up of grand, good pieces, with no mean
bits mortared in: fresh and child-like, too, with heat or tears ready
for any tale of wrong, or strongly spoken, true word. But strike against
one prejudice that woman had, her religious sect-feeling, and she was
hard and cruel as Nero. It was the stove-funnel in that temple.

Human nature is full of such unaccountable warts and birth-marks and
sixth fingers; and the best reason that I know of why all practical
schemes for a perfect social system have failed is