For some years prior to this odd experience I had been connected with a daily paper at the state capitol; and latterly a prolonged session of the legislature, where I specially reported, having told threateningly upon my health, I took both the advantage of a brief vacation, and the invitation of a young bachelor Senator, to get out of the city for awhile, and bask my respiratory organs in the revivifying rural air of Zekesbury—­the home of my new friend.

“It’ll pay you to get out here,” he said, cordially, meeting me at the little station, “and I’m glad you’ve come, for you’ll find no end of odd characters to amuse you.”  And under the very pleasant sponsorship of my senatorial friend, I was placed at once on genial terms with half the citizens of the little town—­from the shirt-sleeved nabob of the county office to the droll wag of the favorite loafing-place—­the rules and by-laws of which resort, by the way, being rudely charcoaled on the wall above the cutter’s bench, and somewhat artistically culminating in an original dialectic legend which ran thus: 

F’rinstance, now whar some folks gits To relyin’ on their wits.  Ten to one they git too smart, And spile it all right at the start!—­ Feller wants to jest go slow And do his thinkin’ first, you know:——­ Ef I can’t think up somepin’ good, I set still and chaw my cood!

And it was at this inviting rendezvous, two or three evenings following my arrival, that the general crowd, acting upon the random proposition of one of the boys, rose as a man and wended its hilarious way to the town hall.

“Phrenology,” said the little, old, bald-headed lecturer and mesmerist, thumbing the egg-shaped head of a young man I remembered to have met that afternoon in some law office; “Phrenology,” repeated the professor—­“or rather the term phrenology—­is derived from two Greek words signifying mind and discourse; hence we find embodied in phrenology-proper, the science of intellectual measurement, together with the capacity of intelligent communication of the varying mental forces and their flexibilities, etc., &c.  The study, then, of phrenology is, to wholly simplify it—­is, I say, the general contemplation of the workings of the mind as made manifest through the certain corresponding depressions and protuberances of the human skull, when, of course, in a healthy state of action and development, as we here find the conditions exemplified in the subject before us.”

Here the “subject” vaguely smiled.

“You recognize that mug, don’t you?” whispered my friend.  “It’s that coruscating young ass, you know, Hedrick—­in Cummings’ office—­trying to study law and literature at the same time, and tampering with ’The Monster that Annually,’ don’t you know?—­where we found the two young students scuffling round the office, and smelling of peppermint?—­Hedrick, you know, and Sweeney.  Sweeney, the slim chap, with the pallid face, and frog-eyes, and clammy hands!  You remember I told you ’there was a pair of ’em?’ Well, they’re up to something here to-night.  Hedrick, there on the stage in front; and Sweeney—­don’t you see?—­with the gang on the rear seats.”