--Maria, ora pro nobis!]

--But as I was saying, I was riding on the outside of a stage-coach from
London to Windsor, when all at once a picture familiar to me from my New
England village childhood came upon me like a reminiscence rather than a
revelation. It was a mighty bewilderment of slanted masts and spars and
ladders and ropes, from the midst of which a vast tube, looking as if it
might be a piece of ordnance such as the revolted angels battered the
walls of Heaven with, according to Milton, lifted its muzzle defiantly
towards the sky. Why, you blessed old rattletrap, said I to myself, I
know you as well as I know my father's spectacles and snuff-box! And
that same crazy witch of a Memory, so divinely wise and foolish, travels
thirty-five hundred miles or so in a single pulse-beat, makes straight
for an old house and an old library and an old corner of it, and whisks
out a volume of an old cyclopaedia, and there is the picture of which
this is the original. Sir William Herschel's great telescope! It was
just about as big, as it stood there by the roadside, as it was in the
picture, not much different any way. Why should it be? The pupil of
your eye is only a gimlet-hole, not so very much bigger than the eye of a
sail-needle, and a camel has to go through it before you can see him.
You look into a stereoscope and think you see a miniature of a building
or a mountain; you don't, you 're made a fool of by your lying
intelligence, as you call it; you see the building and the mountain just
as large as with your naked eye looking straight at the real objects.
Doubt it, do you? Perhaps you'd like to doubt it to the music of a
couple of gold five-dollar pieces. If you would, say the word, and man
and money, as Messrs. Heenan and Morrissey have it, shall be forthcoming;
for I will make you look at a real landscape with your right eye, and a
stereoscopic view of it with your left eye, both at once, and you can
slide one over the other by a little management and see how exactly the
picture overlies the true landscape. We won't try it now, because I want
to read you something out of my book.

--I have noticed that the Master very rarely fails to come back to his
original proposition, though he, like myself, is fond of zigzagging in
order to reach it. Men's minds are like the pieces on a chess-board in
their way of moving. One mind creeps from the square it is on to the
next, straight forward, like the pawns. Anoth