in action without furnishing the food they required to work upon.
If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an
image of a dull speaker and a lively listener. The bird in sable
plumage flaps heavily along his straight-forward course, while the
other sails round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back
again, tweaks out a black feather, shoots away once more, never
losing sight of him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the
same time the crow does, having cut a perfect labyrinth of loops
and knots and spirals while the slow fowl was painfully working
from one end of his straight line to the other.

[I think these remarks were received rather coolly. A temporary
boarder from the country, consisting of a somewhat more than
middle-aged female, with a parchment forehead and a dry little
"frisette" shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold
beads, a black dress too rusty for recent grief and contours in
basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely, and was reported to have
been very virulent about what I said. So I went to my good old
minister, and repeated the remarks, as nearly as I could remember
them, to him. He laughed good-naturedly, and said there was
considerable truth in them. He thought he could tell when people's
minds were wandering, by their looks. In the earlier years of his
ministry he had sometimes noticed this, when he was preaching;--
very little of late years. Sometimes, when his colleague was
preaching, he observed this kind of inattention; but after all, it
was not so very unnatural. I will say, by the way, that it is a
rule I have long followed, to tell my worst thoughts to my
minister, and my best thoughts to the young people I talk with.]

- I want to make a literary confession now, which I believe nobody