often accompany premature decay I see one of the most beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence.  But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust natures out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply what we Professors call “bad practice”; and I know by experience that there are worthy people who not only try it on their own children, but actually force it on those of their neighbors.

—­Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed, or done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized.  A polite note from Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at their Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted.  We repaired to that scientific Golgotha.

Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the woman in the toy called a “weather-house,” both on the same wooden arm suspended on a pivot,—­so that when one comes to the door, the other retires backwards, and vice versa.  The more particular speciality of one is to lubricate your entrance and exit,—­that of the other to polish you off phrenologically in the recesses of the establishment.  Suppose yourself in a room full of casts and pictures, before a counterful of books with taking titles.  I wonder if the picture of the brain is there, “approved” by a noted Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor’s, folio plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim.  An extra convolution, No. 9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which was not to be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very liberally supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of “organs.”  Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women, —­horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of life,—­looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or Joe Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them on his cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen “shiners” on a stripped twig of willow.

The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let the horn-combers wait,—­he shall be bumped without inspecting the antechamber.

Tape round the head,—­22 inches. (Come on, old 23 inches, if you think you are the better man!)

Feels thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles as those horrid old women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the provision-stalls at the Quincy Market.  Vitality, No. 5 or 6, or something or other.  Victuality, (organ at epigastrium,) some other number equally significant.

Mild champooing of head now commences.  ’Extraordinary revelations!  Cupidiphilous, 6!  Hymeniphilous, 6 +!  Paediphilous, 5!  Deipniphilous, 6!  Gelasmiphilous, 6!  Musikiphilous, 5!  Uraniphilous, 5!  Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on.  Meant for a linguist.—­Invaluable information.  Will invest in grammars and dictionaries immediately.—­I have nothing against the grand total of my phrenological endowments.