little narcotic with carbonic acid.  Bright women’s faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the front—­(pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that).  Here and there a countenance sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about.  An indefinite number of pairs of young people,—­happy, but not always very attentive.  Boys in the back-ground, more or less quiet.  Dull faces here, there,—­in how many places!  I don’t say dull people, but faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression.  They are what kill the lecturer.  These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;—­that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over.  They render latent any amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds as those cold-blooded creatures I was talking about act on our hearts.

Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated,—­a great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two mammals of the same species are like each other.  Each audience laughs, and each cries, in just the same places of your lecture; that is, if you make one laugh or cry, you make all.  Even those little indescribable movements which a lecturer takes cognizance of, just as a driver notices his horse’s cocking his ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place of your lecture, always.  I declare to you, that, as the monk said about the picture in the convent,—­that he sometimes thought the living tenants were the shadows, and the painted figures the realities,—­I have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I fled, and coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy incantation!

——­Oh, yes!  A thousand kindly and courteous acts,—­a thousand faces that melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow melts, but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose roots are memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams.  I am not ungrateful, nor unconscious of all the good feeling and intelligence everywhere to be met with through the vast parish to which the lecturer ministers.  But when I set forth, leading a string of my mind’s daughters to market, as the country-folk fetch in their strings of horses——­Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow who sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy lecturer, as if, because he was decently paid for his services, he had therefore sold his sensibilities.—­Family men get dreadfully homesick.  In the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of the logs in one’s fireplace at home.

  “There are his young barbarians all at play,”—­

if he owns any youthful savages.—­No, the world has a million roosts for a man, but only one nest.