'Amlet.) There is also a certain Monsieur, to me at this moment unknown,
and likewise a Herr Von Something, each of whom is essentially my double.
An Arab is at this moment eating dates, a mandarin is just sipping his
tea, and a South-Sea-Islander (with undeveloped possibilities) drinking
the milk of a cocoa-nut, each one of whom, if he had been born in the
gambrel-roofed house, and cultivated my little sand-patch, and grown up
in "the study" from the height of Walton's Polyglot Bible to that of the
shelf which held the Elzevir Tacitus and Casaubon's Polybius, with all
the complex influences about him that surrounded me, would have been so
nearly what I am that I should have loved him like a brother,--always
provided that I did not hate him for his resemblance to me, on the same
principle as that which makes bodies in the same electric condition repel
each other.

For, perhaps after all, my One Reader is quite as likely to be not the
person most resembling myself, but the one to whom my nature is
complementary. Just as a particular soil wants some one element to
fertilize it, just as the body in some conditions has a kind of
famine--for one special food, so the mind has its wants, which do not
always call for what is best, but which know themselves and are as
peremptory as the salt-sick sailor's call for a lemon or a raw potato,
or, if you will, as those capricious "longings," which have a certain
meaning, we may suppose, and which at any rate we think it reasonable to
satisfy if we can.

I was going to say something about our boarders the other day when I got
run away with by my local reminiscences. I wish you to understand that
we have a rather select company at the table of our boarding-house.

Our Landlady is a most respectable person, who has seen better days, of