The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer.  I try every questionable proposition on her.  If she winces, I must be prepared for an outcry from the other old women.  I frightened her, the other day, by saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first.  So she sent me a book to read which was to cure me of that error.  It was an old book, and looked as if it had not been opened for a long time.  What should drop out of it, one day, but a small heart-shaped paper, containing a lock of that straight, coarse, brown hair which sets off the sharp faces of so many thin-flanked, large-handed bumpkins?  I read upon the paper the name “Hiram.”—­Love! love! love!—­everywhere! everywhere!—­under diamonds and Attleboro’ “jewelry,”—­lifting the marrowy camel’s-hair, and rustling even the black bombazine!—­No, no,—­I think she never was pretty, but she was young once, and wore bright ginghams, and, perhaps, gay merinos.  We shall find that the poor little crooked man has been in love, or is in love, or will be in love before we have done with him, for aught that I know!

Romance!  Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background, where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-out passions?  You look on the black bombazine and high-necked decorum of your neighbor, and no more think of the real life that underlies this despoiled and dismantled womanhood than you think of a stone trilobite as having once been full of the juices and the nervous thrills of throbbing and self-conscious being.  There is a wild creature under that long yellow pin which serves as brooch for the bombazine cuirass,—­a wild creature, which I venture to say would leap in his cage, if I should stir him, quiet as you think him.  A heart which has been domesticated by matrimony and maternity is as tranquil as a tame bulfinch; but a wild heart which has never been fairly broken in flutters fiercely long after you think time has tamed it down,—­like that purple finch I had the other day, which could not be approached without such palpitations and frantic flings against the bars of his cage, that I had to send him back and get a little orthodox canary which had learned to be quiet and never mind the wires or his keeper’s handling.  I will tell you my wicked, but involuntary experiment on the wild heart under the faded bombazine.

Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not touch the infirm spot?  I confess the most frightful tendency to do just this thing.  If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself imitating it.  If another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that, go before him, limping.  I could never meet an Irish gentleman—­if it had been the Duke of Wellington himself—­without stumbling upon the word “Paddy,”—­which I use rarely in my common talk.