Like many other old women, she shows a great nervousness and restlessness whenever I venture to express any opinion upon a class of subjects which can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of men as their strictly private property,—­not even to the clergy, or the newspapers commonly called “religious.”  Now, although it would be a great luxury to me to obtain my opinions by contract, ready-made, from a professional man, and although I have a constitutional kindly feeling to all sorts of good people which would make me happy to agree with all their beliefs, if that were possible, still I must have an idea, now and then, as to the meaning of life; and though the only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least, not to express them, with reference to such subjects, I can’t afford to pay quite so much as that even for peace.

I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on the shores of Sir Isaac Newton’s Ocean of Truth, that salt, fish, which have been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and dried, are the only proper and allowable food for reasonable people.  I maintain, on the other hand, that there are a number of live fish still swimming in it, and that every one of us has a right to see if he cannot catch some of them.  Sometimes I please myself with the idea that I have landed an actual living fish, small, perhaps, but with rosy gills and silvery scales.  Then I find the consumers of nothing but the salted and dried article insist that it is poisonous, simply because it is alive, and cry out to people not to touch it.  I have not found, however, that people mind them much.

The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer.  I try every questionable proposition on her.  If she winces, I must be prepared for an outcry from the other old women.  I frightened her, the other day, by saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first.  So she sent me a book to read which was to cure me of that error.  It was an old book, and looked as if it had not been opened for a long time.  What should drop out of it, one day, but a small heart-shaped paper, containing a lock of that straight, coarse, brown hair which sets off the sharp faces of so many thin-flanked, large-handed bumpkins!  I read upon the paper the name “Hiram.”—­Love! love! love!—­everywhere! everywhere!—­under diamonds and housemaids’ “jewelry,”—­lifting the marrowy camel’s-hair, and rustling even the black bombazine!—­No, no,—­I think she never was pretty, but she was young once, and wore bright ginghams, and, perhaps, gay merinos.  We shall find that the poor little crooked man has been in love, or is in love, or will be in love before we have done with him, for aught that I know!