terms with Rev. Shearjashub Scrimgour, present pastor of the Baptist Society in Jaalam.  Yet I think it was never unpleasing to him that the church edifice of that society (though otherwise a creditable specimen of architecture) remained without a bell, as indeed it does to this day.  So much seemed necessary to do away with any appearance of acerbity toward a respectable community of professing Christians, which might be suspected in the conclusion of the above paragraph.—­J.H.]

In lighter moods he was not averse from an innocent play upon words.  Looking up from his newspaper one morning, as I entered his study, he said, ’When I read a debate in Congress, I feel as if I were sitting at the feet of Zeno in the shadow of the Portico.’  On my expressing a natural surprise, he added, smiling, ’Why, at such times the only view which honorable members give me of what goes on in the world is through their intercalumniations.’  I smiled at this after a moment’s reflection, and he added gravely, ’The most punctilious refinement of manners is the only salt that will keep a democracy from stinking; and what are we to expect from the people, if their representatives set them such lessons?  Mr. Everett’s whole life has been a sermon from this text.  There was, at least, this advantage in duelling, that it set a certain limit on the tongue.  When Society laid by the rapier, it buckled on the more subtle blade of etiquette wherewith to keep obtrusive vulgarity at bay.’  In this connection, I may be permitted to recall a playful remark of his upon another occasion.  The painful divisions in the First Parish, A.D. 1844, occasioned by the wild notions in respect to the rights of (what Mr. Wilbur, so far as concerned the reasoning faculty, always called) the unfairer part of creation, put forth by Miss Parthenia Almira Fitz, are too well known to need more than a passing allusion.  It was during these heats, long since happily allayed, that Mr. Wilbur remarked that ’the Church had more trouble in dealing with one sheresiarch than with twenty heresiarchs,’ and that the men’s conscia recti, or certainty of being right, was nothing to the women’s.

When I once asked his opinion of a poetical composition on which I had expended no little pains, he read it attentively, and then remarked ’Unless one’s thought pack more neatly in verse than in prose, it is wiser to refrain.  Commonplace gains nothing by being translated into rhyme, for it is something which no hocus-pocus can transubstantiate with the real presence of living thought.  You entitle your piece, “My Mother’s Grave,” and expend four pages of useful paper in detailing your emotions there.  But, my dear sir, watering does not improve the quality of ink, even though you should do it with tears.  To publish a sorrow to Tom, Dick, and Harry is in some sort to advertise its unreality, for I have observed in my intercourse with the afflicted that the deepest grief instinctively hides its face