II

When the fire on the hearth has blazed up and then settled into

steady radiance, talk begins. There is no place like the chimney-

corner for confidences; for picking up the clews of an old

friendship; for taking note where one's self has drifted, by

comparing ideas and prejudices with the intimate friend of years ago,

whose course in life has lain apart from yours. No stranger puzzles

you so much as the once close friend, with whose thinking and

associates you have for years been unfamiliar. Life has come to mean

this and that to you; you have fallen into certain habits of thought;

for you the world has progressed in this or that direction; of

certain results you feel very sure; you have fallen into harmony with

your surroundings; you meet day after day people interested in the

things that interest you; you are not in the least opinionated, it is

simply your good fortune to look upon the affairs of the world from

the right point of view. When you last saw your friend,--less than a

year after you left college,--he was the most sensible and agreeable

of men; he had no heterodox notions; he agreed with you; you could

even tell what sort of a wife he would select, and if you could do

that, you held the key to his life.

Well, Herbert came to visit me the other day from the antipodes. And

here he sits by the fireplace. I cannot think of any one I would

rather see there, except perhaps Thackery; or, for entertainment,

Boswell; or old, Pepys; or one of the people who was left out of the

Ark. They were talking one foggy London night at Hazlitt's about

whom they would most like to have seen, when Charles Lamb startled

the company by declaring that he would rather have seen Judas

Iscariot than any other person who had lived on the earth. For

myself, I would rather have seen Lamb himself once, than to have

lived with Judas. Herbert, to my great delight, has not changed; I

should know him anywhere,--the same serious, contemplative face, with

lurking humor at the corners of the mouth,--the same cheery laugh and

clear, distinct enunciation as of old. There is nothing so winning

as a good voice. To see Herbert again, unchanged in all outward

essentials, is not only gratifying, but valuable as a testimony to

nature's success in holding on to a personal identity, through the

entire change of matter that has been constantly taking place for so

many years. I know very well there is here no part of the Herbert

whose hand I had shaken at the Commencement parting; but it is an

astonishing reproduction of him,--a material likeness; and now for

the spiritual.

Such a wide chance for divergence in the spiritual. It has been such

a busy world for twenty years. So many things have been torn up by

the roots again that were settled when we left college. There were

to be no more wars; democracy was democracy, and progress, the

differentiation of the individual, was a mere question of clothes; if

you want to be different, go to your tailor; nobody had demonstrated

that there is a man-soul and a woman-soul, and that each is in

reality only a half-soul,--putting the race, so to speak, upon the

half-shell. The social oyster being opened, there appears to be two

shells and only one oyster; who shall have it? So many new canons of

taste, of criticism, of morality have been set up; there has been

such a resurrection of historical reputations for new judgment, and

there have been so many discoveries, geographical, archaeological,

geological, biological, that the earth is not at all what it was

supposed to be; and our philosophers are much more anxious to

ascertain where we came from than whither we are going. In this

whirl and turmoil of new ideas, nature, which has only the single end

of maintaining the physical identity in the body, works on

undisturbed, replacing particle for particle, and preserving the

likeness more skillfully than a mosaic artist in the Vatican; she has

not even her materials sorted and labeled, as the Roman artist has

his thousands of bits of color; and man is all the while doing his

best to confuse the process, by changing his climate, his diet, all

his surroundings, without the least care to remain himself. But the

mind?

It is more difficult to get acquainted with Herbert than with an

entire stranger, for I have my prepossessions about him, and do not

find him in so many places where I expect to find him. He is full of

criticism of the authors I admire; he thinks stupid or improper the

books I most read; he is skeptical about the "movements" I am

interested in; he has formed very different opinions from mine

concerning a hundred men and women of the present day; we used to eat

from one dish; we could n't now find anything in common in a dozen;

his prejudices (as we call our opinions) are most extraordinary, and

not half so reasonable as my prejudices; there are a great many

persons and things that I am accustomed to denounce, uncontradicted

by anybody, which he defends; his public opinion is not at all my

public opinion. I am sorry for him. He appears to have fallen into

influences and among a set of people foreign to me. I find that his

church has a different steeple on it from my church (which, to say

the truth, hasn't any). It is a pity that such a dear friend and a

man of so much promise should have drifted off into such general

contrariness. I see Herbert sitting here by the fire, with the old

look in his face coming out more and more, but I do not recognize any

features of his mind,--except perhaps his contrariness; yes, he was

always a little contrary, I think. And finally he surprises me with,

"Well, my friend, you seem to have drifted away from your old notions

and opinions. We used to agree when we were together, but I

sometimes wondered where you would land; for, pardon me, you showed

signs of looking at things a little contrary."

I am silent for a good while. I am trying to think who I am. There

was a person whom I thought I knew, very fond of Herbert, and

agreeing with him in most things. Where has he gone? and, if he is

here, where is the Herbert that I knew?

If his intellectual and moral sympathies have all changed, I wonder

if his physical tastes remain, like his appearance, the same. There

has come over this country within the last generation, as everybody

knows, a great wave of condemnation of pie. It has taken the

character of a "movement!" though we have had no conventions about

it, nor is any one, of any of the several sexes among us, running for

president against it. It is safe almost anywhere to denounce pie,

yet nearly everybody eats it on occasion. A great many people think

it savors of a life abroad to speak with horror of pie, although they

were very likely the foremost of the Americans in Paris who used to

speak with more enthusiasm of the American pie at Madame Busque's

than of the Venus of Milo. To talk against pie and still eat it is

snobbish, of course; but snobbery, being an aspiring failing, is

sometimes the prophecy of better things. To affect dislike of pie is

something. We have no statistics on the subject, and cannot tell

whether it is gaining or losing in the country at large. Its

disappearance in select circles is no test. The amount of writing

against it is no more test of its desuetude, than the number of

religious tracts distributed in a given district is a criterion of

its piety. We are apt to assume that certain regions are

substantially free of it. Herbert and I, traveling north one summer,

fancied that we could draw in New England a sort of diet line, like

the sweeping curves on the isothermal charts, which should show at

least the leading pie sections. Journeying towards the White

Mountains, we concluded that a line passing through Bellows Falls,

and bending a little south on either side, would mark northward the

region of perpetual pie. In this region pie is to be found at all

hours and seasons, and at every meal. I am not sure, however, that

pie is not a matter of altitude rather than latitude, as I find that

all the hill and country towns of New England are full of those

excellent women, the very salt of the housekeeping earth, who would

feel ready to sink in mortification through their scoured kitchen

floors, if visitors should catch them without a pie in the house.

The absence of pie would be more noticed than a scarcity of Bible

even. Without it the housekeepers are as distracted as the

boarding-house keeper, who declared that if it were not for canned

tomato, she should have nothing to fly to. Well, in all this great

agitation I find Herbert unmoved, a conservative, even to the

under-crust. I dare not ask him if he eats pie at breakfast. There

are some tests that the dearest friendship may not apply.

"Will you smoke?" I ask.

"No, I have reformed."

"Yes, of course."

"The fact is, that when we consider the correlation of forces, the

apparent sympathy of spirit manifestations with electric conditions,

the almost revealed mysteries of what may be called the odic force,

and the relation of all these phenomena to the nervous system in man,

it is not safe to do anything to the nervous system that will--"

"Hang the nervous system! Herbert, we can agree in one thing: old

memories, reveries, friendships, center about that:--is n't an open

wood-fire good?"

"Yes," says Herbert, combatively, "if you don't sit before it too

long."