VISIT OKS. 
165 
among the world’s poor, at any rate; guests who appeal, 
not to your hospitality, but to your hospitalality; who 
earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal 
with the information that they are resolved, for one 
thing, never to help themselves. I require of a visitor 
that he be not actually starving, though he may have 
the very best appetite in the world, however he got it. 
Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not 
know when their visit had terminated, though I went 
about my business again, answering them from greater 
and greater remoteness. Men of almost every degree 
of wit called on me in the migrating season. Some 
who had more wits than they knew what to do with; 
runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened 
from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they 
heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked 
at me beseechingly, as much as to say, —- 
“ 0 Christian, will you send me back ? ” 
One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I 
helped to forward toward the northstar. Men of one 
idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; 
men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those 
hens which are made to take charge of a hundred 
chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them 
lost in every morning’s dew, — and become frizzled 
and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of 
legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you 
crawl all over. One man proposed a book in which 
visitors should write their names, as at the White Moun¬ 
tains; but, alas ! I have too good a memory to make that 
necessary. 
