"The trail of the serpent is over them all!"
All lecturers, all professors, all school-masters, have ruts and
grooves in their minds into which their conversation is perpetually
sliding. Did you never, in riding through the woods of a still June
evening, suddenly feel that you had passed into a warm stratum of air,
and in a minute or two strike the chill layer of atmosphere beyond?
Did you never, in cleaving the green waters of the Back Bay,--where
the Provincial blue-noses are in the habit of beating the "Metropolitan"
boat-clubs,--find yourself in a tepid streak, a narrow, local
gulf-stream, a gratuitous warm-bath a little underdone, through
which your glistening shoulders soon flashed, to bring you back
to the cold realities of full-sea temperature? Just so, in talking
with any of the characters above referred to, one not unfrequently
finds a sudden change in the style of the conversation. The
lack-lustre eye, rayless as a Beacon-Street door-plate in August,
all at once fills with light; the face flings itself wide open like
the church-portals when the bride and bridegroom enter; the little
man grows in stature before your eyes, like the small prisoner with
hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of early childhood; you were
talking with a dwarf and an imbecile,--you have a giant and a
trumpet-tongued angel before you!----Nothing but a streak out of a
fifty-dollar lecture.
Pages:
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178