We left him with professions of esteem and respect which were real.  We had gone, not to scoff, but very probably to smile, and I will not say we did not.  But the Master was more thoughtful than usual.

—­If I had not solemnly dedicated myself to the study of the Order of Things,—­he said,—­I do verily believe I would give what remains to me of life to the investigation of some single point I could utterly eviscerate and leave finally settled for the instruction and, it may be, the admiration of all coming time.  The keel ploughs ten thousand leagues of ocean and leaves no trace of its deep-graven furrows.  The chisel scars only a few inches on the face of a rock, but the story it has traced is read by a hundred generations.  The eagle leaves no track of his path, no memory of the place where he built his nest; but a patient mollusk has bored a little hole in a marble column of the temple of Serapis, and the monument of his labor outlasts the altar and the statue of the divinity.

—­Whew!—­said I to myself,—­that sounds a little like what we college boys used to call a “squirt.”—­The Master guessed my thought and said, smiling,

—­That is from one of my old lectures.  A man’s tongue wags along quietly enough, but his pen begins prancing as soon as it touches paper.  I know what you are thinking—­you’re thinking this is a squirt.  That word has taken the nonsense out of a good many high-stepping fellows.  But it did a good deal of harm too, and it was a vulgar lot that applied it oftenest.

I am at last perfectly satisfied that our Landlady has no designs on the Capitalist, and as well convinced that any fancy of mine that he was like to make love to her was a mistake.  The good woman is too much absorbed in her children, and more especially in “the Doctor,” as she delights to call her son, to be the prey of any foolish desire of changing her condition.  She is doing very well as it is, and if the young man succeeds, as I have little question that he will, I think it probable enough that she will retire from her position as the head of a boarding-house.  We have all liked the good woman who have lived with her,—­I mean we three friends who have put ourselves on record.  Her talk, I must confess, is a little diffuse and not always absolutely correct, according to the standard of the great Worcester; she is subject to lachrymose cataclysms and semiconvulsive upheavals when she reverts in memory to her past trials, and especially when she recalls the virtues of her deceased spouse, who was, I suspect, an adjunct such as one finds not rarely annexed to a capable matron in charge of an establishment like hers; that is to say, an easy-going, harmless, fetch-and-carry, carve-and-help, get-out-of-the-way kind of neuter, who comes up three times (as they say drowning people do) every day, namely, at breakfast, dinner, and tea, and disappears, submerged beneath the waves of life, during the intervals of these events.