Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born!  On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period there were sharp little milk-teeth always ready to anticipate; there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels.  The odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim recesses.

—­Do I remember Byron’s line about “striking the electric chain”?  —­To be sure I do.  I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs the automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves us.  What can be more trivial than that old story of opening the folio Shakspeare that used to lie in some ancient English hall and finding the flakes of Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up in them perhaps a hundred years ago?  And, lo! as one looks on these poor relics of a bygone generation, the universe changes in the twinkling of an eye; old George the Second is back again, and the elder Pitt is coming into power, and General Wolfe is a fine, promising young man, and over the Channel they are pulling the Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the Atlantic the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust so long—­even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry—­are alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils, and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of heaven!  And all this for a bit of pie-crust!

—­I will thank you for that pie,—­said the provoking young fellow whom I have named repeatedly.  He looked at it for a moment, and put his hands to his eyes as if moved.—­I was thinking,—­he said indistinctly—­

—­How?  What is’t?—­said our landlady.

—­I was thinking—­said he—­who was king of England when this old pie was baked,—­and it made me feel bad to think how long he must have been dead.

[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; cela va sans dire.  She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of corn that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize itself by a special narrative.  There was the wooing and the wedding,—­the start in life,—­the disappointments,—­the children she had buried,—­the struggle against fate,—­the dismantling of life, first of its small luxuries, and then of its comforts,—­the broken spirits,—­the altered character of the one on whom she leaned,—­and at last the death that came and drew the black curtain between her and all her earthly hopes.

I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but I often cried,—­not those pattering tears that run off the eaves upon our neighbors’ grounds, the stillicidium of self-conscious sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features;—­such I did shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-house Inferno tugged at her soul with their red-hot pincers.]