—­“Oh, oh, oh!” cried the young fellow whom they call John,—­“that is from one of your lectures!”

I know it, I replied,—­I concede it, I confess it, I proclaim it.

“The trail of the serpent is over them all!”

All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, have ruts and grooves in their minds into which their conversation is perpetually sliding.  Did you never, in riding through the woods of a still June evening, suddenly feel that you had passed into a warm stratum of air, and in a minute or two strike the chill layer of atmosphere beyond?  Did you never, in cleaving the green waters of the Back Bay,—­where the Provincial blue-noses are in the habit of beating the “Metropolitan” boat-clubs,—­find yourself in a tepid streak, a narrow, local gulf-stream, a gratuitous warm-bath a little underdone, through which your glistening shoulders soon flashed, to bring you back to the cold realities of full-sea temperature?  Just so, in talking with any of the characters above referred to, one not unfrequently finds a sudden change in the style of the conversation.  The lack-lustre eye rayless as a Beacon-Street door-plate in August, all at once fills with light; the face flings itself wide open like the church-portals when the bride and bridegroom enter; the little man grows in stature before your eyes, like the small prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of early childhood; you were talking with a dwarf and an imbecile, —­you have a giant and a trumpet-tongued angel before you!—­Nothing but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lecture.—­As when, at some unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain-column springs into the air before the astonished passer-by,—­silver-footed, diamond-crowned, rainbow-scarfed,—­from the bosom of that fair sheet, sacred to the hymns of quiet batrachians at home, and the epigrams of a less amiable and less elevated order of reptilia in other latitudes.

—­Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with the higher?  No matter who he was.  Now look at what is going on in India,—­a white, superior “Caucasian” race, against a dark-skinned, inferior, but still “Caucasian” race,—­and where are English and American sympathies?  We can’t stop to settle all the doubtful questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does the same nature in the inferior animals,—­tame it or crush it.  The India mail brings stories of women and children outraged and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers.  England takes down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with empire, and makes a correction thus:  [Delphi] Dele.  The civilized world says, Amen.