y, "Day, night, water, sun, and moon, are to be
had gratis; for everything else--down with your dust!"

CHAPTER II.

Nothing has been heard of Uncle Jack. Before we left the brick house the
Captain gave him an invitation to the Tower,--more, I suspect, out
of compliment to my mother than from the unbidden impulse of his own
inclinations. But Mr. Tibbets politely declined it. During his stay
at the brick house he had received and written a vast number of
letters,--some of those he received, indeed, were left at the village
post-office, under the alphabetical addresses of A. B. or X. Y.; for no
misfortune ever paralyzed the energies of Uncle Jack. In the winter of
adversity he vanished, it is true; but even in vanishing, he vegetated
still. He resembled those algae, termed the Prolococcus nivales, which
give a rose-color to the Polar snows that conceal them, and flourish
unsuspected amidst the general dissolution of Nature. Uncle Jack, then,
was as lively and sanguine as ever; though he began to let fall
vague hints of intentions to abandon the general cause of his
fellow-creatures, and to set up business henceforth purely on his own
account,--wherewith my father, to the great shock of my belief in his
philanthropy, expressed himself much pleased. And I strongly suspect
that when Uncle Jack wrapped himself up in his new double Saxony and
went off at last, he carried with him something more than my father's
good wishes in aid of his conversion to egotistical philosophy.

"That man will do yet," said my father, as the last glimpse was caught
of Uncle Jack standing up on the stage-coach box, beside the driver,
partly to wave his hand to us as we stood at the gate, and partly to
array himself more commodiously in a box-coat with six capes, which the
coachman had lent him.

"Do you think so, sir?" said I, doubtfully. "May I ask why?"

Mr. Caxton.--"On the cat principle,--that he tumbles so lightly. You may
throw him down from St. Paul's, and the next time you see him he will be
scrambling atop of the Monument."

Pisistratus.--"But a cat the most vicarious is limited to nine lives;
and Uncle Jack must be now far gone in his eighth."

Ms. Caxton (not heeding that answer, for he has got his hand in his
waistcoat).--"The earth, according to Apuleius, in his 'Treatise on the
Philosophy of Plato,' was produced from right-angled triangles; but fire
and air from the scalene triangle,--the angles of which, I need not say,