your life a-quivering. True, it may be best that you should
do this. If it was but a cumberer of the ground, tear it up,
root and branch, and plant in its stead the seeds of that tree
whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. But such
things are done with circumspection,--not as unto man. If you
are gay and jovial about it, if you feel no darts of torture
flashing through be fastnesses of your life, do not flatter
yourself that you are making radical changes. You are only
pulling up pig-weed to set out smart-weed, and the less you
say about it the better.

Now Halicarnassus is really just as Orthodox as I. He would
not lie or steal any quicker than I. He would not willingly
sacrifice one jot or tittle of his faith, and yet he is always
startling you with small heresies. He is like a calf tied to
a tree in the orchard by a long rope. In the exuberance of his
glee Bossy starts from the post, tail up, in a hand gallop.
You would think, from the way he sets out, that he was going
to race around the whole orchard, and probably he thinks he is
himself. But by the time he is fairly under full headway, his
rope tightens up with a jerk, and away he goes heels over head.
The only difference is, that Halicarnassus knows the length of
his tether, and always fetches up in time to escape an
overturn; but other people do not know it, and they imagine he
is going pell-mell into infidelity. Now I was determined to
have none of this trash in a steamboat. One has no desire to
encounter superfluous risks in a country where life and limb
are held on so uncertain a tenure as in this. There are quite
chances enough of shipwreck without having any Jonahs aboard.
Besides, in point of the fine arts, heterodoxy is worse than