You speak well, Madam,—­I said;—­yet there is room for a gloss or commentary on what you say.  “He who would bring back the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.”  What you bring away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.—­Benjamin Franklin!  Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring me down the small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will find lying under the “Cruden’s Concordance.” [The boy took a large bite, which left a very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-butter he held, and departed on his errand, with the portable fraction of his breakfast to sustain him on the way.]

—­Here it is.  “Go to the Bible.  A Dissertation, etc., etc.  By J. J. Flournoy.  Athens, Georgia, 1858.”

Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have judiciously delivered.  You may be interested, Madam, to know what are the conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia, has arrived.  You shall hear, Madam.  He has gone to the Bible, and he has come back from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing social evils, which, if it is the real specific, as it professes to be, is of great interest to humanity, and to the female part of humanity in particular.  It is what he calls trigamy, Madam, or the marrying of three wives, so that “good old men” may be solaced at once by the companionship of the wisdom of maturity, and of those less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities which are found at an earlier period of life.  He has followed your precept, Madam; I hope you accept his conclusions.

The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact, “all abroad,” after the delivery of this “counter” of mine, that I left her to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation, which I was beginning to get pretty well in hand.

But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what effect I had produced.  First, she was a little stunned at having her argument knocked over.  Secondly, she was a little shocked at the tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion.  Thirdly.—­I don’t like to say what I thought.  Something seemed to have pleased her fancy.  Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into fashion, there would be three times as many chances to enjoy the luxury of saying, “No!” is more than I, can tell you.  I may as well mention that B. F. came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet for “a lady,”—­one of the boarders, he said,—­looking as if he had a secret he wished to be relieved of.

—­I continued.—­If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in the faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the end of all reason.  If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for truth with its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no presumption in favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of our inheriting it.  Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair chance to become a convert to a better religion.