Lines to A pretty little maid of mamma’s.

   “If Black Sea, Red Sea, White Sea, ran
   One tide of ink to Ispahan,
   If all the geese in Lincoln fens
   Produced spontaneous well-made pens,
   If Holland old and Holland new
   One wondrous sheet of paper grew,
   And could I sing but half the grace
   Of half a freckle in thy face,
   Each syllable I wrote would reach
   From Inverness to Bognor’s beach,
   Each hair-stroke be a river Rhine,
   Each verse an equinoctial line!”

“The immediate dismissal of the ‘little maid’ was the consequence.”

I may as well say that our Delilah was not in the room when the last sentence was read.

Readers must be either very good-natured or very careless.  I have laid myself open to criticism by more than one piece of negligence, which has been passed over without invidious comment by the readers of my papers.  How could I, for instance, have written in my original “copy” for the printer about the fisherman baiting his hook with a giant’s tail instead of a dragon’s?  It is the automatic fellow,—­Me—­Number-Two of our dual personality,—­who does these things, who forgets the message Me—­Number—­One sends down to him from the cerebral convolutions, and substitutes a wrong word for the right one.  I suppose Me—­Number—­Two will “sass back,” and swear that “giant’s” was the message which came down from headquarters.  He is always doing the wrong thing and excusing himself.  Who blows out the gas instead of shutting it off?  Who puts the key in the desk and fastens it tight with the spring lock?  Do you mean to say that the upper Me, the Me of the true thinking-marrow, the convolutions of the brain, does not know better?  Of course he does, and Me-Number-Two is a careless servant, who remembers some old direction, and follows that instead of the one just given.

Number Seven demurred to this, and I am not sure that he is wrong in so doing.  He maintains that the automatic fellow always does just what he is told to do.  Number Five is disposed to agree with him.  We will talk over the question.

But come, now, why should not a giant have a tail as well as a dragon?  Linnaeus admitted the homo caudatus into his anthropological catalogue.  The human embryo has a very well marked caudal appendage; that is, the vertebral column appears prolonged, just as it is in a young quadruped.  During the late session of the Medical Congress at Washington, my friend Dr. Priestley, a distinguished London physician, of the highest character and standing, showed me the photograph of a small boy, some three or four years old, who had a very respectable little tail, which would have passed muster on a pig, and would have made a frog or a toad ashamed of himself.  I have never heard what became of the little boy, nor have I looked in the books or journals to find out if there