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,