I don’t doubt that the different personalities at our table will get mixed up in the reader’s mind if he is not particularly clear-headed.  That happens very often, much oftener than all would be willing to confess, in reading novels and plays.  I am afraid we should get a good deal confused even in reading our Shakespeare if we did not look back now and then at the dramatis personae.  I am sure that I am very apt to confound the characters in a moderately interesting novel; indeed, I suspect that the writer is often no better off than the reader in the dreary middle of the story, when his characters have all made their appearance, and before they have reached near enough to the denoument to have fixed their individuality by the position they have arrived at in the chain of the narrative.

My reader might be a little puzzled when he read that Number Five did or said such or such a thing, and ask, “Whom do you mean by that title?  I am not quite sure that I remember.”  Just associate her with that line of Emerson,

   “Why nature loves the number five,”

and that will remind you that she is the favorite of our table.

You cannot forget who Number Seven is if I inform you that he specially prides himself on being a seventh son of a seventh son.  The fact of such a descent is supposed to carry wonderful endowments with it.  Number Seven passes for a natural healer.  He is looked upon as a kind of wizard, and is lucky in living in the nineteenth century instead of the sixteenth or earlier.  How much confidence he feels in himself as the possessor of half-supernatural gifts I cannot say.  I think his peculiar birthright gives him a certain confidence in his whims and fancies which but for that he would hardly feel.  After this explanation, when I speak of Number Five or Number Seven, you will know to whom I refer.

The company are very frank in their criticisms of each other.  “I did not like that expression of yours, planetary foundlings,” said the Mistress.  “It seems to me that it is too like atheism for a good Christian like you to use.”

Ah, my dear madam, I answered, I was thinking of the elements and the natural forces to which man was born an almost helpless subject in the rudimentary stages of his existence, and from which he has only partially got free after ages upon ages of warfare with their tyranny.  Think what hunger forced the caveman to do!  Think of the surly indifference of the storms that swept the forest and the waters, the earthquake chasms that engulfed him, the inundations that drowned him out of his miserable hiding-places, the pestilences that lay in wait for him, the unequal strife with ferocious animals!  I need not sum up all the wretchedness that goes to constitute the “martyrdom of man.”  When our forefathers came to this wilderness as it then was, and found everywhere the bones of the poor natives who had perished in the great plague (which our Doctor there thinks was probably the small-pox),