one dreams of, when he supposes he shall do his own duty and make his own sacrifices, without being tied up with those of other people.  My rusty Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and English began to take polish.  Heavens! how little I had done with them while I attended to my public duties!  My calls on my parishioners became the friendly, frequent, homelike sociabilities they were meant to be, instead of the hard work of a man goaded to desperation by the sight of his lists of arrears.  And preaching! what a luxury preaching was when I had on Sunday the whole result of an individual, personal week, from which to speak to a people whom all that week I had been meeting as hand-to-hand friend;—­I, never tired on Sunday, and in condition to leave the sermon at home, if I chose, and preach it extempore, as all men should do always.  Indeed, I wonder, when I think that a sensible people, like ours,—­really more attached to their clergy than they were in the lost days, when the Mathers and Nortons were noblemen,—­should choose to neutralize so much of their ministers’ lives, and destroy so much of their early training, by this undefined passion for seeing them in public.  It springs from our balancing of sects.  If a spirited Episcopalian takes an interest in the almshouse, and is put on the Poor Board, every other denomination must have a minister there, lest the poorhouse be changed into St. Paul’s Cathedral.  If a Sandemanian is chosen president of the Young Men’s Library, there must be a Methodist vice-president and a Baptist secretary.  And if a Universalist Sunday-School Convention collects five hundred delegates, the next Congregationalist Sabbath-School Conference must be as large, “lest ’they’—­whoever they may be—­should think ’we’—­whoever we may be—­are going down.”

Freed from these necessities, that happy year I began to know my wife by sight.  We saw each other sometimes.  In those long mornings, when Dennis was in the study explaining to map-peddlers that, I had eleven maps of Jerusalem already, and to school-book agents that I would see them hanged before I would be bribed to introduce their text-books into the schools,—­she and I were at work together, as in those old dreamy days,—­and in these of our log-cabin again.  But all this could not last,—­and at length poor Dennis, my double, overtasked in turn, undid me.

It was thus it happened.  There is an excellent fellow, once a minister,—­I will call him Isaacs,—­who deserves well of the world till he dies, and after, because he once, in a real exigency, did the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, as no other man could do it.  In the world’s great football match, the ball by chance found him loitering on the outside of the field; he closed with it, “camped” it, charged it home,—­yes, right through the other side,—­not disturbed, not frightened by his own success,—­and breathless found himself a great man, as the Great