the meeting; just turned of twenty now,—­he said.  He made various youthful proposals to me, including a duet under the landlady’s daughter’s window.  He had just learned a trick, he said, of one of “the boys,” of getting a splendid bass out of a door-panel by rubbing it with the palm of his hand,—­offered to sing “The sky is bright,” accompanying himself on the front-door, if I would go down and help in the chorus.  Said there never was such a set of fellows as the old boys of the set he has been with.  Judges, mayors, Congress-men, Mr. Speakers, leaders in science, clergymen better than famous, and famous too, poets by the half-dozen, singers with voices like angels, financiers, wits, three of the best laughers in the Commonwealth, engineers, agriculturists,—­all forms of talent and knowledge he pretended were represented in that meeting.  Then he began to quote Byron about Santa Croce, and maintained that he could “furnish out creation” in all its details from that set of his.  He would like to have the whole boodle of them, (I remonstrated against this word, but the Professor said it was a diabolish good word, and he would have no other,) with their wives and children, shipwrecked on a remote island, just to see how splendidly they would reorganize society.  They could build a city,—­they have done it; make constitutions and laws; establish churches and lyceums; teach and practise the healing art; instruct in every department; found observatories; create commerce and manufactures; write songs and hymns, and sing ’em, and make instruments to accompany the songs with; lastly, publish a journal almost as good as the “Northern Magazine,” edited by the Come-outers.  There was nothing they were not up to, from a christening to a hanging; the last, to be sure, could never be called for, unless some stranger got in among them.

——­I let the Professor talk as long as he liked; it didn’t make much difference to me whether it was all truth, or partly made up of pale Sherry and similar elements.  All at once he jumped up and said,—­

Don’t you want to hear what I just read to the boys?

I have had questions of a similar character asked me before, occasionally.  A man of iron mould might perhaps say, No!  I am not a man of iron mould, and said that I should be delighted.

The Professor then read—­with that slightly sing-song cadence which is observed to be common in poets reading their own verses—­the following stanzas; holding them at a focal distance of about two feet and a half, with an occasional movement back or forward for better adjustment, the appearance of which has been likened by some impertinent young folks to that of the act of playing on the trombone.  His eyesight was never better; I have his word for it.

MARE RUBRUM.

  Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!—­
    For I would drink to other days;
  And brighter shall their memory shine,
    Seen flaming through its crimson blaze. 
  The roses die, the summers fade;
    But every ghost of boyhood’s dream
  By Nature’s magic power is laid
    To sleep beneath this blood-red stream.