—­Oh, yes!  A thousand kindly and courteous acts,—­a thousand faces that melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow melts, but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose roots are memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams.  I am not ungrateful, nor unconscious of all the good feeling and intelligence everywhere to be met with through the vast parish to which the lecturer ministers.  But when I set forth, leading a string of my mind’s daughters to market, as the country-folk fetch in their strings of horses—­Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow who sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy lecturer, as if, because he was decently paid for his services, he had therefore sold his sensibilities.—­Family men get dreadfully homesick.  In the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of the logs in one’s fireplace at home.

“There are his young barbarians all at play,”—­

if he owns any youthful savages.—­No, the world has a million roosts for a man, but only one nest.

—­It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always made in all discussions.  The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the consciousness of carrying a “settler” in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the individual thus armed.  When a person is really full of information, and does not abuse it to crush conversation, his part is to that of the real talkers what the instrumental accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of vocalists.

—­What do I mean by the real talkers?—­Why, the people with fresh ideas, of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them in.  Facts always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts about facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the finger on the key and the man of facts asserts his true dignity.  I have known three of these men of facts, at least, who were always formidable,—­and one of them was tyrannical.

—­Yes, a man sometimes makes a grand appearance on a particular occasion; but these men knew something about almost everything, and never made mistakes.—­He?  Veneers in first-rate style.  The mahogany scales off now and then in spots, and then you see the cheap light stuff—­I found—­very fine in conversational information, the other day when we were in company.  The talk ran upon mountains.  He was wonderfully well acquainted with the leading facts about the Andes, the Apennines, and the Appalachians; he had nothing in particular to say about Ararat, Ben Nevis, and various other mountains that were mentioned.  By and by some Revolutionary anecdote came up, and he showed singular familiarity with the lives of the Adamses, and gave many details relating to Major Andre.  A point of Natural History being suggested, he gave an excellent account of the air-bladder of fishes.  He was very full upon the subject of agriculture, but retired from the conversation when horticulture