thing in common in a dozen;
his prejudices (as we call our opinions) are most extraordinary, and
not half so reasonable as my prejudices; there are a great many
persons and things that I am accustomed to denounce, uncontradicted
by anybody, which he defends; his public opinion is not at all my
public opinion. I am sorry for him. He appears to have fallen into
influences and among a set of people foreign to me. I find that his
church has a different steeple on it from my church (which, to say
the truth, hasn't any). It is a pity that such a dear friend and a
man of so much promise should have drifted off into such general
contrariness. I see Herbert sitting here by the fire, with the old
look in his face coming out more and more, but I do not recognize any
features of his mind,--except perhaps his contrariness; yes, he was
always a little contrary, I think. And finally he surprises me with,
"Well, my friend, you seem to have drifted away from your old notions
and opinions. We used to agree when we were together, but I
sometimes wondered where you would land; for, pardon me, you showed
signs of looking at things a little contrary."

I am silent for a good while. I am trying to think who I am. There
was a person whom I thought I knew, very fond of Herbert, and
agreeing with him in most things. Where has he gone? and, if he is
here, where is the Herbert that I knew?

If his intellectual and moral sympathies have all changed, I wonder
if his physical tastes remain, like his appearance, the same. There
has come over this country within the last generation, as everybody
knows, a great wave of condemnation of pie. It has taken the
character of a "movement!" though we have had no conventions about
it, nor is any one, of any of the several sexes among us, running for
president against it. It is safe almost anywhere to denounce pie,
yet nearly everybody eats it on occasion. A great many people think
it savors of a life abroad to speak with horror of pie, although they
were very likely the foremost of the Americans in Paris who used to
speak with more enthusiasm of the American pie at Madame Busque's
than of the Venus of Milo. To talk against pie and still eat it is
snobbish, of course; but snobbery, being an aspiring failing, is
sometimes the prophecy of better things. To affect dislike of pie is
something. We have no statistics on the subject, and cannot tell
whether it is gaining or losing in the country at large. Its
disappe