Crazed by this duality of life, I first read Dr. Wigan on the “Duality of the Brain,” hoping that I could train one side of my head to do these outside jobs, and the other to do my intimate and real duties.  For Richard Greenough once told me, that, in studying for the statue of Franklin, he found that the left side of the great man’s face was philosophic and reflective, and the right side funny and smiling.  If you will go and look at the bronze statue, you will find he has repeated this observation there for posterity.  The eastern profile is the portrait of the statesman Franklin, the western of Poor Richard.  But Dr. Wigan does not go into these niceties of this subject, and I failed.  It was then, that, on my wife’s suggestion, I resolved to look out for a Double.

I was, at first, singularly successful.  We happened to be recreating at Stafford Springs that summer.  We rode out one day, for one of the relaxations of that watering-place, to the great Monsonpon House.  We were passing through one of the large halls, when my destiny was fulfilled!  I saw my man!

He was not shaven.  He had on no spectacles.  He was dressed in a green baize roundabout and faded blue overalls, worn sadly at the knee.  But I saw at once that he was of my height, five feet four and a half.  He had black hair, worn off by his hat.  So have and have not I. He stooped in walking.  So do I. His hands were large, and mine.  And—­choicest gift of Fate in all—­he had, not “a strawberry-mark on his left arm,” but a cut from a juvenile brickbat over his right eye, slightly affecting the play of that eyebrow.  Reader, so have I!—­My fate was sealed!

A word with Mr. Holley, one of the inspectors, settled the whole thing.  It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable fellow, of the class known as shiftless, who had scaled his fate by marrying a dumb wife, who was at that moment ironing in the laundry.  Before I left Stafford, I had hired both for five years.  We had applied to Judge Pynchon, then the probate judge at Springfield, to change the name of Dennis Shea to Frederic Ingham.  We had explained to the Judge, what was the precise truth, that an eccentric gentleman wished to adopt Dennis under this new name into his family.  It never occurred to him that Dennis might be more than fourteen years old.  And thus, to shorten this preface, when we returned at night to my parsonage at Naguadavick, there entered Mrs. Ingham, her new dumb laundress, myself, who am Mr. Frederic Ingham, and my double, who was Mr. Frederic Ingham by as good right as I.

Oh, the fun we had the next morning in shaving his beard to my pattern, cutting his hair to match mine, and teaching him how to wear and how to take off gold-bowed spectacles!  Really, they were electro-plate, and the glass was plain (for the poor fellow’s eyes were excellent).  Then in four successive afternoons I taught, him four speeches.  I had found these would be quite enough for the supernumerary-Sepoy line of life, and it was well for me they were.  For though he was good-natured, he was very shiftless, and it was, as our national proverb says, “like pulling teeth” to teach him.  But at the end of the next week he could say, with quite my easy and frisky air,—­