Stop! stop!—­I said,—­let me come to you.

The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with an ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair.  I walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his right hand, with the ring upon it.  The ring had been put on long ago, and could not pass the misshapen joint.  It was one of those funeral rings which used to be given to relatives and friends after the decease of persons of any note or importance.  Beneath a round bit of glass was a death’s head.  Engraved on one side of this, “L.B.  AEt. 22,”—­on the other, “Ob. 1692.”

My grandmother’s grandmother,—­said the little man.—­Hanged for a witch.  It doesn’t seem a great while ago.  I knew my grandmother, and loved her.  Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief Justice Sewall hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.—­That was Salem, though, and not Boston.  No, not Boston.  Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, it was that blew them all to——­

Never mind where he blew them to,—­I said;—­for the little man was getting red in the face, and I didn’t know what might come next.

This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.

——­A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in its shirt-sleeves,—­who makes bargains with deacons, instead of talking over texts with them,—­a man who has found out that there are plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,—­above all, who has found out, by living into the pith and core of life, that all of thy Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of throbbing human life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness in which the soul’s being consists,—­an incandescent point in the filament connecting the negative pole of a past eternity with the positive pole of an eternity that is to come,—­that all of the Deity which any human book can hold is to this larger Deity of the working battery of the universe only as the films in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams and curdled lumps of ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin placers,——­Oh!—­I was saying that a man who lives out-of-doors, among live people, gets some things into his head he might not find in the index of his “Body of Divinity.”

I tell you what,—­the idea of the professions’ digging a moat round their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, which you could put Park-Street Church on the bottom of and look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch another such spire across it without spanning the chasm,—­that idea, I say, is pretty nearly worn out.  Now when a civilization or a civilized custom falls into senile dementia, there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come, from a breath,—­as fires come, from a spark.