when it asserts that money does not grow on every bush, imply a fortiori that there were certain bushes which did produce it?  Again, there is another ancient saw to the effect that money is the root of all evil.  From which two adages it may be safe to infer that the aforesaid species of tree first degenerated into a shrub, then absconded underground, and finally, in our iron age, vanished altogether.  In favorable exposures it may be conjectured that a specimen or two survived to a great age, as in the garden of the Hesperides; and, indeed, what else could that tree in the Sixth AEneid have been with a branch whereof the Trojan hero procured admission to a territory, for the entering of which money is a surer passport than to a certain other more profitable and too foreign kingdom?  Whether these speculations of mine have any force in them, or whether they will not rather, by most readers, be deemed impertinent to the matter in hand, is a question which I leave to the determination of an indulgent posterity.  That there were, in more primitive and happier times, shops where money was sold,—­and that, too, on credit and at a bargain,—­I take to be matter of demonstration.  For what but a dealer in this article was that AEolus who supplied Ulysses with motive-power for his fleet in bags? what that Ericus, King of Sweden, who is said to have kept the winds in his cap? what, in more recent times, those Lapland Nornas who traded in favorable breezes?  All which will appear the more clearly when we consider, that, even to this day, raising the wind is proverbial for raising money, and that brokers and banks were invented by the Venetians at a later period.

And now for the improvement of this digression.  I find a parallel to Mr. Sawin’s fortune in an adventure of my own.  For, shortly after I had first broached to myself the before-stated natural-historical and archaeological theories, as I was passing, haec negotia penitus mecum revolvens, through one of the obscure suburbs of our New England metropolis, my eye was attracted by these words upon a signboard,—­CHEAP CASH-STORE.  Here was at once the confirmation of my speculations, and the substance of my hopes.  Here lingered the fragment of a happier past, or stretched out the first tremulous organic filament of a more fortunate future.  Thus glowed the distant Mexico to the eyes of Sawin, as he looked through the dirty pane of the recruiting-office window, or speculated from the summit of that mirage-Pisgah which the imps of the bottle are so cunning to raise up.  Already had my Alnaschar-fancy (even during that first half-believing glance) expended in various useful directions the funds to be obtained by pledging the manuscript of a proposed volume of discourses.  Already did a clock ornament the tower of the Jaalam meeting-house, a gift appropriately, but modestly, commemorated in the parish and town records, both, for now many years, kept by myself.  Already had my son Seneca completed