us!"

"Precisely," says Leander. "I would that prayer were answered in your
case, my dear."

"I think you take pleasure in provoking me," says the lady.

"My dear, how silly and childish all this is!" says the gentleman. "Why
can't we let each other alone?"

"You began it."

"No, my dear, begging your pardon, I did not."

"Certainly, Leander, you did."

Now a conversation of this kind may go on hour after hour, as long as
the respective parties have breath and strength, both becoming secretly
more and more "set in their way". On both sides is the consciousness
that they might end it at once by a very simple concession.

She might say,--"Well, dear, you shall always have your salad as you
like"; and he might say,--"My dear, I will try to like your salad, if
you care much about it"; and if either of them would utter one of these
sentences, the other would soon follow. Either would give up, if the
other would set the example; but as it is, they remind us of nothing so
much as two cows that we have seen standing with locked horns in a
meadow, who can neither advance nor recede an inch. It is a mere
deadlock of the animal instinct of firmness; reason, conscience,
religion have nothing to do with it.

The questions debated in this style by our young couple were
surprisingly numerous: as, for example, whether their favorite copy of
Turner should hang in the parlor or in the library,--whether their pet
little landscape should hang against the wall, or be placed on an
easel,--whether the bust of Psyche should stand on the marble table in
the hall, or on a bracket in the library; all of which points were
debated with a breadth of survey, a richness of imagery, a vigor of
discussion, that would be perfectly astonishing to any one who did not
know how much two very self-willed argumentative people might
find to say on any point under heaven. Everything in classical
antiquity,--everything in Kugler's "Hand-Book of Painting,"--every
opinion of living artists,--besides questions social, moral, and
religious,--all mingled in the grand _melee_: because there is nothing
in creation that is not somehow connected with everything else.

Dr. Johnson has said,--"There are a thousand familiar disputes which
reason never can decide; questions that elude investigation, and make
logic ridiculous; cases where something must be done, and where little
can be said."

With all deference to the great moralist, we must say that this
stat