—­I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human character and feeling I am winding.  I meant to tell my thoughts, and to throw in a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured themselves for me from day to day.  Chance has thrown together at the table with me a number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean not only to look on them, but, if I can, through them.  You can get any man’s or woman’s secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your own, if you will only look patiently on them long enough.  Nature is always applying her reagents to character, if you will take the pains to watch her.  Our studies of character, to change the image, are very much like the surveyor’s triangulation of a geographical province.  We get a base-line in organization, always; then we get an angle by sighting some distant object to which the passions or aspirations of the subject of our observation are tending; then another:—­and so we construct our first triangle.  Once fix a man’s ideals, and for the most part the rest is easy. A wants to die worth half a million.  Good. B (female) wants to catch him,—­and outlive him.  All right.  Minor details at our leisure.

What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all your misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of acts of consciousness which make up your past life?  What should you most dislike to tell your nearest friend?—­Be so good as to pause for a brief space, and shut the pamphlet you hold with your fingers between the pages.—­Oh, that is it!

What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants came back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy hills!

At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of those stately upright cabinet-desks and cases of drawers which were not rare in prosperous families during the last century.  It had held the clothes and the books and the papers of generation after generation.  The hands that opened its drawers had grown withered, shrivelled, and at last been folded in death.  The children that played with the lower handles had got tall enough to open the desk,—­to reach the upper shelves behind the folding-doors,—­grown bent after a while,—­and then followed those who had gone before, and left the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new generation.

A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being a quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for by the smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk.  Prying about with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a spring, on pressing which, a hidden drawer flew from its hiding-place.  It had never been opened but by the maker.  The mahogany shavings and dust were lying in it as when the artisan closed it,—­and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if that day finished.