We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from the main street.—­Look down there,—­I said,—­My friend the Professor lived in that house at the left hand, next the further corner, for years and years.  He died out of it, the other day.  —­Died?—­said the schoolmistress.—­Certainly,—­said I.—­We die out of houses, just as we die out of our bodies.  A commercial smash kills a hundred men’s houses for them, as a railroad crash kills their mortal frames and drives out the immortal tenants.  Men sicken of houses until at last they quit them, as the soul leaves its body when it is tired of its infirmities.  The body has been called “the house we live in”; the house is quite as much the body we live in.  Shall I tell you some things the Professor said the other day?  —­Do!—­said the schoolmistress.

A man’s body,—­said the Professor,—­is whatever is occupied by his will and his sensibility.  The small room down there, where I wrote those papers you remember reading, was much more a portion of my body than a paralytic’s senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his.

The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes.  First, he has his natural garment of flesh and blood.  Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments.  Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion.  And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper.

You shall observe,—­the Professor said,—­for, like Mr. John Hunter and other great men, he brings in that shall with great effect sometimes,—­you shall observe that a man’s clothing or series of envelopes does after a certain time mould itself upon his individual nature.  We know this of our hats, and are always reminded of it when we happen to put them on wrong side foremost.  We soon find that the beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with all its irregular bumps and depressions.  Just so all that clothes a man, even to the blue sky which caps his head,—­a little loosely,—­shapes itself to fit each particular being beneath it.  Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets, lovers, condemned criminals, all find it different, according to the eyes with which they severally look.

But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer natures.  See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it.  There is a shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells into the walls of its own.  A house is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past.  See what these are and you can tell what the occupant is.

I had no idea,—­said the Professor,—­until I pulled up my domestic establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of roots I had been making during the years I was planted there.  Why, there wasn’t a nook or a corner that some fibre had not worked its way into; and when I gave the last wrench, each of them seemed to shriek like a mandrake, as it broke its hold and came away.