What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all your misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of acts of consciousness which make up your past life?  What should you most dislike to tell your nearest friend?—­Be so good as to pause for a brief space, and shut the volume you hold with your finger between the pages.—­Oh, that is it!

What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants came back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy bills!

At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of those stately upright cabinet desks and cases of drawers which were not rare in prosperous families during the last century.  It had held the clothes and the books and the papers of generation after generation.  The hands that opened its drawers had grown withered, shrivelled, and at last been folded in death.  The children that played with the lower handles had got tall enough to open the desk, to reach the upper shelves behind the folding-doors,—­grown bent after a while,—­and then followed those who had gone before, and left the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new generation.

A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being a quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for by the smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk.  Prying about with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a spring, on pressing which, a secret drawer flew from its hiding-place.  It had never been opened but by the maker.  The mahogany shavings and dust were lying in it as when the artisan closed it,—­and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if that day finished.

Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which no hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you seem to have suspected?  What does it hold?—­A sin?—­I hope not.  What a strange thing an old dead sin laid away in a secret drawer of the soul is!  Must it some time or other be moistened with tears, until it comes to life again and begins to stir in our consciousness,—­as the dry wheel-animalcule, looking like a grain of dust, becomes alive, if it is wet with a drop of water?

Or is it a passion?  There are plenty of withered men and women walking about the streets who have the secret drawer in their hearts, which, if it were opened, would show as fresh as it was when they were in the flush of youth and its first trembling emotions.

What it held will, perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and gone, and same curious eye lights on an old yellow letter with the fossil footprints of the extinct passion trodden thick all over it.

There is not a boarder at our table, I firmly believe, excepting the young girl, who has not a story of the heart to tell, if one could only get the secret drawer open.  Even this arid female, whose armor of black bombazine looks stronger against the shafts of love than any cuirass of triple brass, has had her sentimental history, if I am not mistaken.  I will tell you my reason for suspecting it.