—­Left any goods?—­asked the Salesman.

—­Or dockermunts?—­added the Member of the Haouse.

The Landlady answered with a faded smile, which implied that there was no hope in that direction.  Dr. Benjamin, with a sudden recurrence of youthful feeling, made a fan with the fingers of his right hand, the second phalanx of the thumb resting on the tip of the nose, and the remaining digits diverging from each other, in the plane of the median line of the face,—­I suppose this is the way he would have described the gesture, which is almost a specialty of the Parisian gamin.  That Boy immediately copied it, and added greatly to its effect by extending the fingers of the other hand in a line with those of the first, and vigorously agitating those of the two hands,—­a gesture which acts like a puncture on the distended self-esteem of one to whom it is addressed, and cheapens the memory of the absent to a very low figure.

I wish the reader to observe that I treasure up with interest all the words uttered by the Salesman.  It must have been noticed that he very rarely speaks.  Perhaps he has an inner life, with its own deep emotional, and lofty contemplative elements, but as we see him, he is the boarder reduced to the simplest expression of that term.  Yet, like most human creatures, he has generic and specific characters not unworthy of being studied.  I notice particularly a certain electrical briskness of movement, such as one may see in a squirrel, which clearly belongs to his calling.  The dry-goodsman’s life behind his counter is a succession of sudden, snappy perceptions and brief series of coordinate spasms; as thus: 

“Purple calico, three quarters wide, six yards.”

Up goes the arm; bang! tumbles out the flat roll and turns half a dozen somersets, as if for the fun of the thing; the six yards of calico hurry over the measuring nails, hunching their backs up, like six cankerworms; out jump the scissors; snip, clip, rip; the stuff is wisped up, brown—­papered, tied, labelled, delivered, and the man is himself again, like a child just come out of a convulsion-fit.  Think of a man’s having some hundreds of these semi-epileptic seizures every day, and you need not wonder that he does not say much; these fits take the talk all out of him.

But because he, or any other man, does not say much, it does not follow that he may not have, as I have said, an exalted and intense inner life.  I have known a number of cases where a man who seemed thoroughly commonplace and unemotional has all at once surprised everybody by telling the story of his hidden life far more pointedly and dramatically than any playwright or novelist or poet could have told it for him.  I will not insult your intelligence, Beloved, by saying how he has told it.

—­We had been talking over the subjects touched upon in the Lady’s letter.

—­I suppose one man in a dozen—­said the Master—­ought to be born a skeptic.  That was the proportion among the Apostles, at any rate.