The young wife nodded, and fell to dancing the baby’s cap on the tips of her fingers.

“And what are bubbles,” continued papa, “what are bubbles but a ‘fleeting show?’”

The little cap canted over o’ one side, and there was a sort of a giggle, just the least bit in the world, it was so cunning, as papa added, in unspeakable solemnity—­

“And so, too, everything we covet, everything we love, and everything we revere on earth, are but emptiness and vanity.”

Here a nod from the little cap, mounted on the mother’s fingers, brought papa to a full stop—­a change of look followed—­a downright smile—­and then a much pleasanter sort of speech—­and then, as you live, a kiss!

“And what are bubbles, I should be glad to know, but emptiness and vanity?” continues papa.

“By all this, I am to understand that a wife is a bubble—­hey?”

“To be sure.”

“And the baby?”

“Another.”

“And what are husbands?”

“Bubbles of a large growth.”

“Agreed!—­I have nothing more to say.”

“Look about you.  Watch the busiest man you know—­the wisest, the greatest, among the renowned, the ambitious, and the mighty of earth, and tell me if you can see one who does not spend his life blowing bubbles in the sunshine—­through the stump of a tobacco pipe.  What living creature did you ever know—­”

“Did you speak to me, my dear?”

“No.  Sarah, I was speaking to posterity.”

Another nod from the little cap, and papa grows human.

“Yes!—­what living creature did you ever know who was not more of a bubble-hunter than he was anything else?  We are all schemers—­even the wisest and the best—­all visionaries, my dear.”

By this time, papa had got mamma upon his knee, and the rest of the conversation was at least an octave lower.

“Even so, my love.  And what, after all, is the looming at sea; the Fata Morgana in the Straits of Messina, near Reggio; or the Mirage of the Desert, in Egypt and Persia, but a sample of those glittering phantasmagoria, which are called chateaux en Espagne, or castles in the air, by the wondrous men who spend their lives in piling them up, story upon story, turrets, towers, and steeples—­domes, and roofs, and pinnacles? and therefore do I say again, hurrah for bubbles!”

“What say you to the South Sea bubble, my dear?”

“What say I!—­just what I say of the Tulip bubble, of the Mississippi Scheme, of the Merino Sheep enterprise, of the Down-East Timber lands, of the Morus Multicaulis, of the California fever, and the Cuba hallucination.  They are periodical outbreaks of commercial enterprise, unavoidable in the very nature of things, and never long, nor safely postponed; growing out of a plethora—­never out of a scarcity—­a plethora of wealth and population, and corresponding, in the regularity of their returns, with the plague and the cholera.”