fair;
  They know not, doom’d ones, that the air of heaven,
  For breathing purposes to man was given;
  They know not half the things which life requires,
  But melt their lives away where stoves and fires,
  And furnace issuing from the realms beneath,
  Distils through parlor floors its poisonous breath. 
  Sooner or later must the slighted air
  And exercise take vengeance on the fair. 
  Ah! one by one I see them fade and fall,
  Both old and young, fair, dark or short or tall,
  Till one stupendous ruin wraps them all.’

One can sometimes, in a smiling way, give utterance to truths which seem hard and stern when spoken in grim earnest.  Let us see whether we cannot find some allegory to represent what we mean.

Some time ago, I read a tale which related that a certain gentleman was, once on a time, digging a deep hole in his garden.  He had, as I myself had in my younger days, a perfect passion for digging holes, for the mere pleasure of doing it; but the hole which he was now digging was by far the deepest which he had ever attempted.  At last he became perfectly fascinated, carried away by his pursuit, and actually had his dinner let down to him by a bucket.  Well, he dug on late and early, when just as he was plunging in his spade with great energy for a new dig, he penetrated right through, and fell down, down to the centre of the earth.

To his astonishment he landed upon the top of a coach which was passing at the time, and soon found himself perfectly at home, and began to enter into conversation with the passenger opposite to him, a very gentlemanly looking man enveloped entirely in a black cloak.  He soon found out that the country into which his lot had fallen was a very strange one.  Its peculiarities were thus stated by his gentlemanly fellow-passenger.  “Ours, Sir,” said he, “is called the country of Skitzland.  All the Skitzlanders are born with all their limbs and features perfect; but when they arrive at a certain age, all their limbs and features which have not been used drop off, leaving only the bones behind.  It is rather dark this evening, or you would have seen this more plainly.  Look forward there at our coachman, he consists simply of a stomach and hands, these being the only things he has ever used.  Those two whom you see chatting together are brothers in misfortune; one is a clergyman, the other a lawyer; they have neither of them got any legs at all, though each of them possess a finely developed understanding; and you cannot help remarking what a massive jaw the lawyer has got.  Yonder is Mr.——­, the celebrated millionaire, he is just raising his hat; you see he has lost all the top part of his head, indeed he has little of his head left, except the bump of acquisitiveness and the faculty of arithmetical calculation.  There are two ladies, members of the fashionable world, their case is very pitiable, they consist of nothing whatever but a pair of eyes and a bundle of nerves.