he is to return, when he is to gladden their hearts with his
presence--" But I can write no more. Sobs interrupted the speaker, and
he took his seat in an ecstasy of godliness and benevolence.

I hurried across the house, to beg the brigadier would introduce me to
this just monikin without a moment's delay. I felt as if I could take
him to my heart at once, and swear an eternal friendship with a spirit
so benevolent. The brigadier was too much agitated, at first, to attend
to me; but, after wiping his eyes at least a hundred times, he finally
succeeded in arresting the torrents, and looked upwards with a bland
smile.

"Is he not a wonderful monikin?"

"Wonderful indeed! How completely he puts us all to shame!--Such a
monikin can only be influenced by the purest love for the species."

"Yes, he is of a class that we call the third monikinity. Nothing
excites our zeal like the principles of the class of which he is a
member!"

"How! Have you more than one class of the humane?"

"Certainly--the Original, the Representative, and the Speculative."

"I am devoured by the desire to understand the distinctions, my dear
brigadier."

"The Original is an every-day class, that feels under the natural
impulses. The Representative is a more intellectual division, that
feels chiefly by proxy. The Speculatives are those whose sympathies are
excited by positive interests, like the last speaker. This person has
lately bought a farm by the acre, which he is about to sell, in village
lots, by the foot, and war will knock the whole thing in the head. It is
this which stimulates his benevolence in so lively a manner."

"Why, this is no more than a development of the social-stake system--"

I was interrupted by the speaker, who called the house to order. The
vote on the resolution of the last orator was to be taken. It read as
follows:--

"Resolved, that it is altogether unbecoming the dignity and character
of Leapthrough, for Leaplow to legislate on the subject of so petty a
consideration as a certain pitiful treaty between the two countries."

"Unanimity--unanimity!" was shouted by fifty voices. Unanimity there
was; and then the whole house set to work shaking hands and hugging each
other, in pure joy at the success of the honorable and ingenious manner
in which it had got rid of this embarrassing and impertinent question.

CHAPTER XXVII. AN EFFECT OF LOGARITHMS ON MORALS--AN OBSCURATION, A
DISSERTATION, AND A CALCULATI