heart of mine. Few, sir, very few, think of me, seeing that there is
nothing about me pleasing to the eye." And as he said this, he
sighed, frisked his left hand across his forehead, and shook his
head. I saw he was troubled with that lack of confidence in himself,
so common to men of his kind; he was also too timid for one thrown
upon a strange land with only genius to aid him in struggling
against adversity. On discovering to him who I was, and that I had
written a Life and Times of Captain Seth Brewster, which my
publisher, and several independent critics he kept in his employ,
had praised into an unprecedented sale, though it was indeed the
veriest rubbish, his pent up enthusiasm gushed forth in a rhapsody
of joy. I told him, too, that two sonnets which I had written, over
the signature of Mary, had been published in the "New Bedford
Mercury," the editor of which very excellent paper said they were
charming, though he never paid me a penny for them. It may interest
all aspiring female poets to know that these little attempts at
verse found their way into the "Home Journal," and were highly
praised by it, as is everything written by Marys of sixteen.

"Men of letters are brothers!" said the little, deformed man,
grasping tightly my hand. "They should bind their sympathies in
eternal friendship. You have no other word for it! The world never
thinks of them until they are dead; ought they not then to be
brothers to one another while they live?" He now placed two chairs,
frisked about like one half crazed, expressed his joy at meeting one
who had aspirations in common with him, said he wished the meek old
lover in the corner had his young bride in paradise, and bid me be
seated and join him in a talk over the past and present of letters.
I replied by saying I was more impatient to know what had brought
him to Barnstable with so strange a subject for his lecture. "That