nything the
matter with him that takes the taste of this world out? Now, when you
put into such a hot-blooded, hard-fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's
hand a sad-looking volume or pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin,
white-faced child, whose life is really as much a training for death as
the last month of a condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in
common between his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the
experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents? The time comes
when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the beauty of
resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the pillow of those
who die before their time, in humble hope and trust. But it is not until
he has worked his way through the period of honest hearty animal
existence, which every robust child should make the most of,--not until
he has learned the use of his various faculties, which is his first
duty,--that a boy of courage and animal vigor is in a proper state to
read these tearful records of premature decay. I have no doubt that
disgust is implanted in the minds of many healthy children by early
surfeits of pathological piety. I do verily believe that He who took
children in His arms and blessed them loved the healthiest and most
playful of them just as well as those who were richest in the tuberculous
virtues. I know what I am talking about, and there are more parents in
this country who will be willing to listen to what I say than there are
fools to pick a quarrel with me. In the sensibility and the sanctity
which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most beautiful
instances of the principle of compensation which marks the Divine
benevolence. But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust natures out of
the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply what we Professors
call "bad practice"; and I know by experience that there are worthy
people who not only try it on their own children, but actually force it
on those of their neighbors.

--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed, or
done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized. A polite note from
Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at their
Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted. We repaired to
that scientific Golgotha.

Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the
woman in the toy called a "weather-house," both on the same wooden arm
su