is known, to some other old Easy Chair, sitting in the parquette and
spying round the house. "All the world's a stage, and men and women
merely players."

Is it quite so? Are these players? The young pale general there, the
placid woman, the man in the orchestra stall, have they been playing
only? There are scars upon that young soldier's body; in the most
secret drawer of that woman's chamber there is a dry, scentless
flower; the man in the orchestra stall could show you a tress of
golden hair. If they are players, who is in earnest?




EMERSON LECTURING.


Many years ago the Easy Chair used to hear Ralph Waldo Emerson
lecture. Perhaps it was in the small Sunday-school room under a
country meeting-house, on sparkling winter nights, when all the
neighborhood came stamping and chattering to the door in hood and
muffler, or ringing in from a few miles away, buried under
buffalo-skins. The little, low room was dimly lighted with oil-lamps,
and the boys clumped about the stoves in their cowhide boots, and
laughed and buzzed and ate apples and peanuts and giggled, and grew
suddenly solemn when the grave men and women looked at them. At the
desk stood the lecturer and read his manuscript, and all but the boys
sat silent and inthralled by the musical spell.

Some of the hearers remembered the speaker as a boy, as a young man.