“Oh, I belong to the Universal Brotherhood.”

“What’s that?” he asked,—­“Sons o’ Temperance?”

Finally, filling our pockets with doughnuts, which he was pleased to find that we called by the same name that he did, and paying for our entertainment, we took our departure; but he followed us out of doors, and made us tell him the names of the vegetables which he had raised from seeds that came out of the Franklin.  They were cabbage, broccoli, and parsley.  As I had asked him the names of so many things, he tried me in turn with all the plants which grew in his garden, both wild and cultivated.  It was about half an acre, which he cultivated wholly himself.  Besides the common garden-vegetables, there were Yellow-Dock, Lemon-Balm, Hyssop, Gill-go-over-the-ground, Mouse-ear, Chickweed, Roman Wormwood, Elecampane, and other plants.  As we stood there, I saw a fish-hawk stoop to pick a fish out of his pond.

“There,” said I, “he has got a fish.”

“Well,” said the old man, who was looking all the while, but could see nothing, “he didn’t dive, he just wet his claws.”

And, sure enough, he did not this time, though it is said that they often do, but he merely stooped low enough to pick him out with his talons; but as he bore his shining prey over the bushes, it fell to the ground, and we did not see that he recovered it.  That is not their practice.

Thus, having had another crack with the old man, he standing bareheaded under the eaves, he directed us “athwart the fields,” and we took to the beach again for another day, it being now late in the morning.

It was but a day or two after this that the safe of the Provincetown Bank was broken open and robbed by two men from the interior, and we learned that our hospitable entertainers did at least transiently harbor the suspicion that we were the men.

* * * * *

CHARLES LAMB’S UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS.

THIRD PAPER.

“I remember,” says “The Spectator,” “upon Mr. Baxter’s death, there was published a sheet of very good sayings, inscribed, ’The Last Words of Mr. Baxter.’  The title sold so great a number of these papers that about a week after there came out a second sheet, inscribed, ’More Last Words of Mr. Baxter.’” And so kindly and gladly did the public—­or at least that portion of the public that read the “Atlantic Monthly”—­receive the specimens of Charles Lamb’s uncollected writings, published somewhile since in these pages, that I am induced to print another paper on the same pleasant and entertaining subject.

The success of that piece of “ingenious nonsense,” that gem of biographical literature, the unique and veracious “Memoir of Liston,” over which the lovers of wit and the lovers of Charles Lamb have had many a good laugh, was so great that Lamb was encouraged to try his hand at another theatrical memoir, and produced a mock and mirthful autobiography of his old friend and favorite comedian, Munden, whom he had previously immortalized in one of the best and most admired of the “Essays of Elia.”