—­Literary life is fun of curious phenomena.  I don’t know that there is anything more noticeable than what we may call conventional reputations.  There is a tacit understanding in every community of men of letters that they will not disturb the popular fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity.  There are various reasons for this forbearance:  one is old; one is rich; one is good-natured; one is such a favorite with the pit that it would not be safe to hiss him from the manager’s box.  The venerable augurs of the literary or scientific temple may smile faintly when one of the tribe is mentioned; but the farce is in general kept up as well as the Chinese comic scene of entreating and imploring a man to stay with you with the implied compact between you that he shall by no means think of doing it.  A poor wretch he must be who would wantonly sit down on one of these bandbox reputations.  A Prince-Rupert’s-drop, which is a tear of unannealed glass, lasts indefinitely, if you keep it from meddling hands; but break its tail off, and it explodes and resolves itself into powder.  These celebrities I speak of are the Prince-Rupert’s drops of the learned and polite world.  See how the papers treat them!  What an array of pleasant kaleidoscopic phrases, which can be arranged in ever so many charming patterns, is at their service!  How kind the “Critical Notices”—­where small authorship comes to pick up chips of praise, fragrant, sugary, and sappy—­always are to them!  Well, life would be nothing without paper-credit and other fictions; so let them pass current.  Don’t steal their chips; don’t puncture their swimming-bladders; don’t come down on their pasteboard boxes; don’t break the ends of their brittle and unstable reputations, you fellows who all feel sure that your names will be household words a thousand years from now.

“A thousand years is a good while,” said the old gentleman who sits opposite, thoughtfully.

—­Where have I been for the last three or four days?  Down at the Island, deer-shooting.—­How many did I bag?  I brought home one buck shot.—­The Island is where?  No matter.  It is the most splendid domain that any man looks upon in these latitudes.  Blue sea around it, and running up into its heart, so that the little boat slumbers like a baby in lap, while the tall ships are stripping naked to fight the hurricane outside, and storm-stay-sails banging and flying in ribbons.  Trees, in stretches of miles; beeches, oaks, most numerous;—­many of them hung with moss, looking like bearded Druids; some coiled in the clasp of huge, dark-stemmed grape-vines.  Open patches where the sun gets in and goes to sleep, and the winds come so finely sifted that they are as soft as swan’s down.  Rocks scattered about,—­Stonehenge-like monoliths.  Fresh-water lakes; one of them, Mary’s lake, crystal-clear, full of flashing pickerel lying under the lily-pads like tigers in the jungle.  Six pounds of ditto killed one morning for breakfast.  Ego fecit.