over a rich gentleman’s bones, and one to the grave without a stone where nothing but a man is buried,—­and there they grow, looking down on the generations of men from mouldy roofs, looking up from between the less-trodden pavements, looking out through iron cemetery-railings.  Listen to them, when there is only a light breath stirring, and you will hear them saying to each other,—­“Wait awhile!” The words run along the telegraph of those narrow green lines that border the roads leading from the city, until they reach the slope of the hills, and the trees repeat in low murmurs to each other,—­“Wait awhile!” By-and-by the flow of life in the streets ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants—­the smaller tribes always in front—­saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to be picked out of the granite to find them food.  At last the trees take up their solemn line of march, and never rest until they have encamped in the market-place.  Wait long enough and you will find an old doting oak hugging a huge worn block in its yellow underground arms; that was the corner-stone of the State-House.  Oh, so patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!

—­Let us cry!—­

But all this has nothing to do with my walks and talks with the schoolmistress.  I did not say that I would not tell you something about them.  Let me alone, and I shall talk to you more than I ought to, probably.  We never tell our secrets to people that pump for them.

Books we talked about, and education.  It was her duty to know something of these, and of course she did.  Perhaps I was somewhat more learned than she, but I found that the difference between her reading and mine was like that of a man’s and a woman’s dusting a library.  The man flaps about with a bunch of feathers; the woman goes to work softly with a cloth.  She does not raise half the dust, nor fill her own eyes and mouth with it,—­but she goes into all the corners, and attends to the leaves as much as the covers.—­Books are the negative pictures of thought, and the more sensitive the mind that receives their images, the more nicely the finest lines are reproduced.  A woman, (of the right kind,) reading after a man, follows him as Ruth followed the reapers of Boaz, and her gleanings are often the finest of the wheat.

But it was in talking of Life that we came most nearly together.  I thought I knew something about that,—­that I could speak or write about it somewhat to the purpose.