Or as you pass a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time.  Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the stick:  eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish.  One of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its centre.  And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,—­life beginning in the microcosm, as in the great worlds of the firmament, with the revolution that turns the surface in ceaseless round to the source of life and light.

A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk!  Before you have solved their mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified slag, or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces.  Mysteries are common enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and Dorchester think of “brickbats” and the spawn of creatures that live in roadside puddles.

But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly plain, when we can get at them so as to turn them over.  How many ghosts that “thick men’s blood with cold” prove to be shirts hung out to dry!  How many mermaids have been made out of seals!  How many times have horse-mackerels been taken for the sea-serpent!

—­Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the matter with the patient.  That is what I say to myself, as I draw a chair to the bedside.  The bed is an old-fashioned, dark mahogany four-poster.  It was never that which made the noise of something moving.  It is too heavy to be pushed about the room.—­The Little Gentleman was sitting, bolstered up by pillows, with his hands clasped and their united palms resting on the back of the head, one of the three or four positions specially affected by persons whose breathing is difficult from disease of the heart or other causes.

Sit down, Sir,—­he said,—­sit down!  I have come to the hill Difficulty, Sir, and am fighting my way up.—­His speech was laborious and interrupted.

Don’t talk,—­I said,—­except to answer my questions.—­And I proceeded to “prospect” for the marks of some local mischief, which you know is at the bottom of all these attacks, though we do not always find it.  I suppose I go to work pretty much like other professional folks of my temperament.  Thus: 

Wrist, if you please.—­I was on his right side, but he presented his left wrist, crossing it over the other.—­I begin to count, holding watch in left hand.  One, two, three, four,—­What a handsome hand! wonder if that splendid stone is a carbuncle.—­One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,—­Can’t see much, it is so dark, except one white object.—­One, two, three, four,—­Hang it! eighty or ninety in the minute, I guess.—­Tongue, if you please.—­Tongue is put out.  Forget to look at it, or, rather, to take any particular