Are you tired of my trivial personalities,—­those splashes and streaks of sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which you may see when I show you my heart’s corolla as if it were a tulip?  Pray, do not give yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot whose conceit it is to treat himself as an exceptional being.  It is because you are just like me that I talk and know that you will listen.  We are all splashed and streaked with sentiments,—­not with precisely the same tints, or in exactly the same patterns, but by the same hand and from the same palette.

I don’t believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for the blue hyacinth which I have,—­very certainly not for the crushed lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are.  You love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don’t doubt; but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with young memories as it does me.  For the same reason I come back to damask roses, after having raised a good many of the rarer varieties.  I like to go to operas and concerts, but there are queer little old homely sounds that are better than music to me.  However, I suppose it’s foolish to tell such things.

——­It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time,—­said the divinity-student;—­saying it, however, in one of the dead languages, which I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and therefore do not bear quotation as such.

Well, now,—­said I,—­suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking countryman’s cart stops opposite my door.—­Do I want any huckleberries?—­If I do not, there are those that do.  Thereupon my soft-voiced handmaid bears out a large tin pan, and then the wholesome countryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his broad hands around its lower arc to confine the wild and frisky berries, and so they run nimbly along the narrowing channel until they tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on the resounding metal beneath.—­I won’t say that this rushing huckleberry hail-storm has not more music for me than the “Anvil Chorus.”

——­I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.

——­Where are your great trees, Sir? said the divinity-student.

Oh, all round about New England.  I call all trees mine that I have put my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham Young has human ones.

——­One set’s as green as the other,—­exclaimed a boarder, who has never been identified.

They’re all Bloomers,—­said the young fellow called John.

[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our landlady’s daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by putting my wedding-ring on a tree.]

Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear,—­said I.—­I have worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New England elms and other big trees.—­Don’t you want to hear me talk trees a little now?  That is one of my specialties.