ut writing one's name among the
stars, like that frisky cow who, in jumping over the moon, upon a
time, made the milky way. I've always had some doubts about that
exploit; but then there is the mark she left. Your friend Roberts
is uneasy about this new star business; he is afraid that it will
unsettle the cheese market, and he don't know about it, nor do I.

"There! I got home only last night, and haven't heard any news to
write you. Some time I will tell of two or three things I saw and
heard, and about some of our cousins, who regard us as belonging to
the outer and lower skirts of the race. If I am to be one end of a
family, let it be the beginning.

"Mother sends love. Edward and George speak of you constantly. I've
not seen our Major since my return.

"Write me a good, sharp, cutting, criticising, deuced brotherly letter
soon. As ever,

"BART.

"P.S. Have you read Pickwick?

"B."

It was full of badinage, with only a dip or two into an absorbing
purpose that he had fully formed, and which he evidenced to himself by
the summary expulsion of the muses.

In the world of nature and humanity, is there such an embodiment of
contradictions and absurdities as a youth in his transit from the
dreamland of boyhood to the battle-field of manhood, through a region
partaking of both, and abounding with strange products of its own? I
am not speaking of the average boy, such boys as make up the male mass
of the world--the undreaming, unthinking, plodding, drudging, sweating
herd, whose few old commonplace, well-worn ideas don't possess the
power of reproduction, and whose thoughts are thirteenth or thirteen
hundredth-handed, and transmitted unimpregnated to other dullards, and
whose life and spirit is that of the young animal merely--but a real
young man, one of possibilities, intended for a man, and not merely
for a male, one in whom the primitive forces of nature are planted,
and who may develop into a new driving or forming power. What a mad,
impulsive, freaky thing it is! You may see him bruising his still
soft head a score of times against the impossible, and he will still
contend that he can do it. He will spring frantically up the face of
an unclimbable precipice, as the young salmon leaps up a cataract, and
die in the faith that he can go up it.

Oh, sublime faith! Oh, sublime folly! What strides he is constantly
taking to the ridiculous, and not always from the sublime! How strong!
how weak! How wise! how fo