Ah, dear me! We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club, subjugating man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of it, and the second by our handling of it,--we rehearse it, I say, by our own hearth-stones, with the _cold_ poker as our club, and the exercise is easy. But when we come to real life, the poker is _in the fire_, and, ten to one, if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to hold;--lucky for us, if it is not white-hot, and we do not have to leave the skin of our hands sticking to it when we fling it down or drop it with a loud or silent cry! --I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human character and feeling I am winding. I meant to tell my thoughts, and to throw in a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured themselves for me from day to day. Chance has thrown together at the table with me a number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean not only to look on them, but, if I can, through them. You can get any man's or woman's secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your own, if you will only look patiently on them long enough. Nature is always applying her reagents to character, if you will take the pains to watch her. Our studies of character, to change the image, are very much like the surveyor's triangulation of a geographical province. We get a base-line in organization, always; then we get an angle by sighting some distant object to which the passions or aspirations of the subject of our observation are tending; then another:--and so we construct our first triangle. Once fix a man's ideals, and for the most part the rest is easy. _A_ wants to die worth half a million. Good. _B_ (female) wants to catch him,--and outlive him. All right. Minor details at our leisure. What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all your misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of acts of consciousness which make up your past life? What should you most dislike to tell your nearest friend?--Be so good as to pause for a brief space, and shut the pamphlet you hold with your fingers between the pages.--Oh, that is it! What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants came back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy hills! At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of those stately upright cabinet-desks and cases of drawers which were not rare in prosperous families during the last century. It had held the clothes and the books and the papers of generation after generation. The hands that opened its drawers had grown withered, shrivelled, and at last been folded in death. The children that played with the lower handles had got tall enough to open the desk,--to reach the upper shelves behind the folding-doors,--grown bent after a while,--and then followed those who had gone before, and left the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new generation.