arance in select circles is no test. The amount of writing
against it is no more test of its desuetude, than the number of
religious tracts distributed in a given district is a criterion of
its piety. We are apt to assume that certain regions are
substantially free of it. Herbert and I, traveling north one summer,
fancied that we could draw in New England a sort of diet line, like
the sweeping curves on the isothermal charts, which should show at
least the leading pie sections. Journeying towards the White
Mountains, we concluded that a line passing through Bellows Falls,
and bending a little south on either side, would mark northward the
region of perpetual pie. In this region pie is to be found at all
hours and seasons, and at every meal. I am not sure, however, that
pie is not a matter of altitude rather than latitude, as I find that
all the hill and country towns of New England are full of those
excellent women, the very salt of the housekeeping earth, who would
feel ready to sink in mortification through their scoured kitchen
floors, if visitors should catch them without a pie in the house.
The absence of pie would be more noticed than a scarcity of Bible
even. Without it the housekeepers are as distracted as the
boarding-house keeper, who declared that if it were not for canned
tomato, she should have nothing to fly to. Well, in all this great
agitation I find Herbert unmoved, a conservative, even to the
under-crust. I dare not ask him if he eats pie at breakfast. There
are some tests that the dearest friendship may not apply.

"Will you smoke?" I ask.

"No, I have reformed."

"Yes, of course."

"The fact is, that when we consider the correlation of forces, the
apparent sympathy of spirit manifestations with electric conditions,
the almost revealed mysteries of what may be called the odic force,
and the relation of all these phenomena to the nervous system in man,
it is not safe to do anything to the nervous system that will--"

"Hang the nervous system! Herbert, we can agree in one thing: old
memories, reveries, friendships, center about that:--is n't an open
wood-fire good?"

"Yes," says Herbert, combatively, "if you don't sit before it too
long."

III

The best talk is that which escapes up the open chimney and cannot be
repeated. The finest woods make the best fire and pass away with the
least residuum. I hope the next generation will not accept the
reports of "interviews" as specimens of the