“His personal appearance was not singularly prepossessing.  Inconspicuous in stature and unattractive in features”

—­You misbegotten son of an ourang and grandson of an ascidian (ghosts keep up with science, you observe), what business have you to be holding up my person to the contempt of my posterity?  Haven’t I been sleeping for this many a year in quiet, and don’t the dandelions and buttercups look as yellow over me as over the best-looking neighbor I have in the dormitory?  Why do you want to people the minds of everybody that reads your good-for-nothing libel which you call a “biography” with your impudent caricatures of a man who was a better-looking fellow than yourself, I ’ll bet you ten to one, a man whom his Latin tutor called fommosus puer when he was only a freshman?  If that’s what it means to make a reputation,—­to leave your character and your person, and the good name of your sainted relatives, and all you were, and all you had and thought and felt, so far as can be gathered by digging you out of your most private records, to be manipulated and bandied about and cheapened in the literary market as a chicken or a turkey or a goose is handled and bargained over at a provision stall, is n’t it better to be content with the honest blue slate-stone and its inscription informing posterity that you were a worthy citizen and a respected father of a family?

—­I should like to see any man’s biography with corrections and emendations by his ghost.  We don’t know each other’s secrets quite so well as we flatter ourselves we do.  We don’t always know our own secrets as well as we might.  You have seen a tree with different grafts upon it, an apple or a pear tree we will say.  In the late summer months the fruit on one bough will ripen; I remember just such a tree, and the early ripening fruit was the Jargonelle.  By and by the fruit of another bough will begin to come into condition; the lovely Saint Michael, as I remember, grew on the same stock as the Jargonelle in the tree I am thinking of; and then, when these have all fallen or been gathered, another, we will say the Winter Nelis, has its turn, and so out of the same juices have come in succession fruits of the most varied aspects and flavors.  It is the same thing with ourselves, but it takes us a long while to find it out.  The various inherited instincts ripen in succession.  You may be nine tenths paternal at one period of your life, and nine tenths maternal at another.  All at once the traits of some immediate ancestor may come to maturity unexpectedly on one of the branches of your character, just as your features at different periods of your life betray different resemblances to your nearer or more remote relatives.

But I want you to let me go back to the Bunker Hill Monument and the dynasty of twenty or thirty centuries whose successive representatives are to sit in the gate, like the Jewish monarchs, while the people shall come by hundreds and by thousands to visit the memorial shaft until the story of Bunker’s Hill is as old as that of Marathon.