parlor-name is Angela, contents herself with exclaiming "egh!*******!"

How different distances were in those young days of which I am thinking!
From the old house to the old yellow meeting-house, where the head of the
family preached and the limbs of the family listened, was not much more
than two or three times the width of Commonwealth Avenue. But of a hot
summer's afternoon, after having already heard one sermon, which could
not in the nature of things have the charm of novelty of presentation to
the members of the home circle, and the theology of which was not too
clear to tender apprehensions; with three hymns more or less lugubrious,
rendered by a village-choir, got into voice by many preliminary snuffles
and other expiratory efforts, and accompanied by the snort of a huge
bassviol which wallowed through the tune like a hippopotamus, with other
exercises of the customary character,--after all this in the forenoon,
the afternoon walk to the meeting-house in the hot sun counted for as
much, in my childish dead-reckoning, as from old Israel Porter's in
Cambridge to the Exchange Coffeehouse in Boston did in after years. It
takes a good while to measure the radius of the circle that is about us,
for the moon seems at first as near as the watchface. Who knows but
that, after a certain number of ages, the planet we live on may seem to
us no bigger than our neighbor Venus appeared when she passed before the
sun a few months ago, looking as if we could take her between our thumb
and finger, like a bullet or a marble? And time, too; how long was it
from the serious sunrise to the joyous "sun-down" of an old-fashioned,
puritanical, judaical first day of the week, which a pious fraud
christened "the Sabbath"? Was it a fortnight, as we now reckon duration,
or only a week? Curious entities, or non-entities, space and tithe?
When you see a metaphysician trying to wash his hands of them and get rid
of these accidents, so as to lay his dry, clean palm on the absolute,
does it not remind you of the hopeless task of changing the color of the