Now we were coming to the tableaux! He wanted us to step outside in order that the business could be done for us, with more haste and certainty, and we really felt as good as assassinated and hid in the bushes! It was quite astonishing how our visual organs intensified! We could see every wrinkle and line in the fellow's face, could almost count the stitches in his coat, and the more we looked, and the keener and more searching became our observation, the more atrocious and subtle became the fellow and his purpose. With a firmness that astonished ourself, we said—
"No, Sir; if you have business there or elsewhere, you had better go!" and with this determined speech, we walked up to the desk, and with the air of a "man of business" or the nonchalance of a hero, says we—
"What are you after—have you any business with us?"
"You're kind of crusty, Mister," says he. "I'm canvassing this State,—wouldn't you like to subscribe for a first-rate map of Missouri, or a new Edition of Josephus?"
We felt too mean all over to "subscribe," but we found a light, and soon found in the stranger one of the best sort of fellows, a man of information and morality, and, though he had looked dangerous, he turned out harmless as a lamb, and we got intimate as brothers before Captain V—— returned that night.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Of all the public lecturers of our time and place, none have attracted more attention from the press, and consequently the people, than Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Lecturing has become quite a fashionable science—and now, instead of using the old style phrases for illustrating facts, we call travelling preachers perambulating showmen, and floating politicians, lecturers.
As a lecturer, Ralph Waldo Emerson is extensively known around these parts; but whether his lectures come under the head of law, logic, politics, Scripture, or the show business, is a matter of much speculation; for our own part, the more we read or hear of Ralph, the more we don't know what it's all about.