—­These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual green fruit of all the places in the world.  I think so, at any rate.  The demand for intellectual labor is so enormous and the market so far from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like unripe gooseberries,—­get plucked to make a fool of.  Think of a country which buys eighty thousand copies of the “Proverbial Philosophy,” while the author’s admiring countrymen have been buying twelve thousand!  How can one let his fruit hang in the sun until it gets fully ripe, while there are eighty thousand such hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises?  Consequently, there never was such a collection of crude pippins and half-grown windfalls as our native literature displays among its fruits.  There are literary green-groceries at every corner, which will buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple.  It takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and writing.  The temptation of money and fame is too great for young people.  Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr.——­ we won’t say who,—­editor of the—­we won’t say what, offered me the sum of fifty cents per double-columned quarto page for shaking my young boughs over his foolscap apron?  Was it not an intoxicating vision of gold and glory?  I should doubtless have revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning that the fifty cents was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal expression of past fact or present intention.

—­Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.  It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful or hurtful.  But making a business of it leads to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.

—­I don’t believe one word of what you are saying,—­spoke up the angular female in black bombazine.

I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam,—­I said, and added softly to my next neighbor,—­but you prove it.

The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student said, in an undertone,—­Optime dictum.

Your talking Latin,—­said I,—­reminds me of an odd trick of one of my old tutors.  He read so much of that language, that his English half turned into it.  He got caught in town, one hot summer, in pretty close quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a series of city pastorals.  Eclogues he called them, and meant to have published them by subscription.  I remember some of his verses, if you want to hear them.—­You, Sir, (addressing myself to the divinity-student,) and all such as have been through college, or, what is the same thing, received an honorary degree, will understand them without a dictionary.  The old man had a great deal to say about “aestivation,” as he called it, in opposition, as one might say, to hibernation.  Intramural aestivation, or town-life in summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence, or semi-asphyxia.  One wakes up from it about the beginning of the last week in September.  This is what I remember of his poem:-