A hat which has been popped, or exploded by being sat down upon, is never itself again afterwards.

It is a favorite illusion of sanguine natures to believe the contrary.

Shabby gentility has nothing so characteristic as its hat.  There is always an unnatural calmness about its nap, and an unwholesome gloss, suggestive of a wet brush.

The last effort of decayed fortune is expended in smoothing its dilapidated castor.  The hat is the ultimum moriens of “respectability.”

—­The old gentleman took all these remarks and maxims very pleasantly, saying, however, that he had forgotten most of his French except the word for potatoes,—­pummies de tare.—–­Ultimum moriens, I told him, is old Italian, and signifies last thing to die.  With this explanation he was well contented, and looked quite calm when I saw him afterwards in the entry with a black hat on his head and the white one in his hand.

—­I think myself fortunate in having the Poet and the Professor for my intimates.  We are so much together, that we no doubt think and talk a good deal alike; yet our points of view are in many respects individual and peculiar.  You know me well enough by this time.  I have not talked with you so long for nothing and therefore I don’t think it necessary to draw my own portrait.  But let me say a word or two about my friends.

The Professor considers himself, and I consider him, a very useful and worthy kind of drudge.  I think he has a pride in his small technicalities.  I know that he has a great idea of fidelity; and though I suspect he laughs a little inwardly at times at the grand airs “Science” puts on, as she stands marking time, but not getting on, while the trumpets are blowing and the big drums beating,—­yet I am sure he has a liking for his specially, and a respect for its cultivators.

But I’ll tell you what the Professor said to the Poet the other day.—­My boy, said he, I can work a great deal cheaper than you, because I keep all my goods in the lower story.  You have to hoist yours into the upper chambers of the brain, and let them down again to your customers.  I take mine in at the level of the ground, and send them off from my doorstep almost without lifting.  I tell you, the higher a man has to carry the raw material of thought before he works it up, the more it costs him in blood, nerve, and muscle.  Coleridge knew all this very well when he advised every literary man to have a profession.

—­Sometimes I like to talk with one of them, and sometimes with the other.  After a while I get tired of both.  When a fit of intellectual disgust comes over me, I will tell you what I have found admirable as a diversion, in addition to boating and other amusements which I have spoken of,—­that is, working at my carpenter’s-bench.  Some mechanical employment is the greatest possible relief, after the purely intellectual faculties begin to tire.  When I was quarantined once at Marseilles, I got to work immediately at carving a wooden wonder of loose rings on a stick, and got so interested in it, that when we were set loose, I “regained my freedom with a sigh,” because my toy was unfinished.