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