—­I should like to ask,—­said the divinity-student,—­since we are getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are in contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always now to something?

—­I thought it best not to hear this question.

—­I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or elsewhere.  One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an unfortunate truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,—­as helpless, apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an Egyptian mummy.  He then proceeds, with the air and method of a master, to take off the bandages.  Nothing can be neater than the way in which he does it.  But as he takes off layer after layer, the truth seems to grow smaller and smaller, and some of its outlines begin to look like something we have seen before.  At last, when he has got them all off, and the truth struts out naked, we recognize it as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance whom we have known in the streets all our lives.  The fact is, the philosopher has coaxed the truth into his study and put all those bandages on; or course it is not very hard for him to take them off.  Still, a great many people like to watch the process,—­he does it so neatly!

Dear! dear!  I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see how those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade are abused by my fellow-vertebrates,—­perhaps by myself.  How they spar for wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!

—­The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat fighting attitude.—­Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!—­he said,—­and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the concave palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball.—­You small boy there, hurry up that “Webster’s Unabridged!”

The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked the propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three words, of which the two last were “Webster’s Unabridged,” and the first was an emphatic monosyllable.—­Beg pardon,—­he added,—­forgot myself.  But let us have an English dictionary, if we are to have any.  I don’t believe in clipping the coin of the realm, Sir!  If I put a weathercock on my house, Sir, I want it to tell which way the wind blows up aloft,—­off from the prairies to the ocean, or off from the ocean to the prairies, or any way it wants to blow!  I don’t want a weathercock with a winch in an old gentleman’s study that he can take hold of and turn, so that the vane shall point west when the great wind overhead is blowing east with all its might, Sir!  Wait till we give you a dictionary; Sir!  It takes Boston to do that thing, Sir!

—­Some folks think water can’t run down-hill anywhere out of Boston, —­remarked the Koh-i-noor.