e surface of the
continent with such rough tools that the storms have not worn the marks
out of it with all the polishing of ever so many thousand years?

Or as you pass a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it any
bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little
worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to
the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish. One of these specks
magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its
centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and
by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,--life
beginning in the microcosm, as in the great worlds of the firmament,
with the revolution that turns the surface in ceaseless round to the
source of life and light.

A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk! Before you have solved their
mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified slag,
or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces. Mysteries are common
enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and Dorchester think
of "brickbats" and the spawn of creatures that live in roadside puddles.

But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly plain,
when we can get at them so as to turn them over. How many ghosts that
"thick men's blood with cold" prove to be shirts hung out to dry!
How many mermaids have been made out of seals! How many times have
horse-mackerels been taken for the sea-serpent!

--Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the matter
with the patient. That is what I say to myself, as I draw a chair to the
bedside. The bed is an old-fashioned, dark mahogany four-poster. It was
never that which made the noise of something moving. It is too heavy to
be pushed about the room.--The Little Gentleman was sitting, bolstered
up by pillows, with his hands clasped and their united palms resting
on the back of the head, one of the three or four positions specially
affected by persons whose breathing is difficult from disease of the
heart or other causes.

Sit down, Sir,--he said,--sit down! I have come to the hill Difficulty,
Sir, and am fighting my way up.--His speech was laborious and
interrupted.

Don't talk,--I said,--except to answer my questions.--And I proceeded
to "prospect" for the marks of some local mischief, which you know is
at the bottom of all these attacks, though we do not always find it.
I suppose I go to