amber-drop
enwraps a bee'), and then he began to recite an old Scotch song,
stopping at the first rude couplet, 'The beginning words are merely to
set the tune, they tell me'--and then again at the couplet about--or,
to the effect that--'give me' (but in broad Scotch) 'give me but my
lass, I care not for my cogie.' '_He says_,' quoth Carlyle
magisterially, 'that if you allow him the love of his lass, you may
take away all else, even his cogie, his cup or can, and he cares not,'
just as a professor expounds Lycophron. And just before I left
England, six months ago, did not I hear him croon, if not certainly
sing, 'Charlie is my darling' ('my _darling_' with an adoring
emphasis), and then he stood back, as it were, from the song, to look
at it better, and said 'How must that notion of ideal wondrous
perfection have impressed itself in this old Jacobite's "young
Cavalier"--("They go to save their land, and the _young
Cavalier_!!")--when I who care nothing about such a rag of a man,
cannot but feel as he felt, in speaking his words after him!' After
saying which, he would be sure to counsel everybody to get their heads
clear of all singing! Don't let me forget to clap hands, we got the
letter, dearly bought as it was by the 'Dear Sirs,' &c., and
insignificant scrap as it proved, but still it is got, to my
encouragement in diplomacy.

Who told you of my sculls and spider webs--Horne? Last year I petted
extraordinarily a fine fellow, (a _garden_ spider--there was the
singularity,--the thin clever-even-for-a-spider-sort, and they are
_so_ 'spirited and sly,' all of them--this kind makes a long cone of
web, with a square chamber of vantage at the end, and there he sits
loosely and looks about), a great fellow that housed himself, with
real gusto, in the jaws of a great scull, whence he watched me as I
wrote, and I remember speaking to Horne about his good points.
Phrenologists look gravely at that great scull, by the way, and hope,
in their grim manner, that its owner made a good end. He looks
quietly, now, out at the green little hill behind. I have no little
insight to the feelings of furniture, and treat books and prints with
a reasonable consideration. How some people use their pictures, for
instance, is a mystery to me; very revolting all the same--portraits
obliged to face each other for ever,--prints put together in
portfolios. My Polidoro's perfect Andromeda along with 'Boors
Carousing,' by Ostade,--where I found her,