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 alms-house, and is put on the Poor Board, every other denomination must have a minister there, lest the poor-house 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 textbooks 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, over-tasked 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 Delta rang applause.  But he did not find himself a rich man; and the football has never come in his way again.  From that moment to this moment he has been of no use, that one can see, at all.  Still, for that great act we speak of Isaacs gratefully and remember him kindly; and he forges on, hoping to meet the football somewhere again.  In that vague hope, he had arranged a “movement” for a general organization of the human family into Debating-Clubs, County Societies, State Unions, etc., etc., with a view of inducing all children to take hold of the handles of their knives and forks, instead of the metal.  Children have bad habits in that way.  The movement, of course, was absurd; but we all did our best to forward, not it, but him.  It came