Corners.  Miss Hepzibah Tarbell, daughter of that archenemy of his kind, Deacon Joash T., attended only one of my lectures.  In a day or two the symptoms of eruption were most encouraging.  She has already quarrelled with all her family,—­accusing her father of bigamy, her uncle Benoni of polytheism, her brother Zeno C. of aneurism, and her sister Eudoxy Trithemia of the variation of the magnetic needle.  If ever hopes of seeing a perfect case of Primitive Christian were well-founded, I think we may entertain them now.”

What I chiefly object to in the general-denunciation sort of reformers is that they make no allowance for character and temperament.  They wish to repeal universal laws, and to patch our natural skins for us, as if they always wanted mending.  That while they talk so much of the godlike nature of man, they should so forget the human natures of men!  The Flathead Indian squeezes the child’s skull between two boards till it shapes itself into a kind of gambrel roof against the rain,—­the readiest way, perhaps, of uniforming a tribe that wear no clothes.  But does he alter the inside of the head?  Not a hair’s-breadth.  You remember the striking old gnomic poem that tells how Aaron, in a moment of fanatical zeal against that member by which mankind are so readily led into mischief, proposes a rhinotomic sacrifice to Moses?  What is the answer of the experienced law-giver?

  Says Moses to Aaron,
  “’T is the fashion to wear ’em!’”

Shall we advise the Tadpole to get his tail cut off, as a badge of the reptile nature in him, and to achieve the higher sphere of the Croakers at a single hop?  Why, it is all he steers by; without it, he would be as helpless as a compass under the flare of Northern Lights; and he no doubt regards it as a mark of blood, the proof of his kinship with the preadamite family of the Saurians.  Shall we send missionaries to the Bear to warn him against raw chestnuts, because they are sometimes so discomforting to our human intestines, which are so like his own?  One sermon from the colic were worth the whole American Board.

Moreover, as an author, I protest in the name of universal Grub Street against a unanimity in goodness.  Not to mention that a Quaker world, all faded out to an autumnal drab, would be a little tedious,—­what should we do for the villain of our tragedy or novel?  No rascals, no literature.  You have your choice.  Were we weak enough to consent to a sudden homogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would be thrown out of employment.  The wife and mother, for example, with as indeterminate a number of children as the Martyr Rogers, who visits me monthly,—­what claim would she have upon me, were not her husband forever taking to drink, or the penitentiary, or Spiritualism?  The pusillanimous lapse of her lord into morality would not only take the very ground of her invention from under her feet, but would rob her and him of an income that sustains them both in blissful independence