to indicate a desire or
an intention to choose a successor to her. My readers, therefore, will
not be surprised to learn, by a plain averment of the simple truth,
that not one of all the score of ladies, whose names had been coupled
with his own, would Doctor Bugbee have married, if he could, and that
to none of them had he ever given any good reason for believing that
she stood especially high in his esteem.

[To be continued in the next Number.]

WHERE WILL IT END?

Wise men of every name and nation, whether poets, philosophers,
statesmen, or divines, have been trying to explain the puzzles of
human condition, since the world began. For three thousand years, at
least, they have been at this problem, and it is far enough from being
solved yet. Its anomalies seem to have been expressly contrived by
Nature to elude our curiosity and defy our cunning. And no part of it
has she arranged so craftily as that web of institutions, habits,
manners, and customs, in which we find ourselves enmeshed as soon as
we begin to have any perception at all, and which, slight and almost
invisible as it may seem, it is so hard to struggle with and so
impossible to break through. It may be true, according to the poetical
Platonism of Wordsworth, that "heaven lies about us in our infancy";
but we very soon leave it far behind us, and, as we approach manhood,
sadly discover that we have grown up into a jurisdiction of a very
different kind.

In almost every region of the earth, indeed, it is literally true that
"shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy." As
his faculties develope, he becomes more and more conscious of the
deepening shadows, as well as of the grim walls that cast them on his
soul, and his opening intelligence is earliest exercised in divining
who built them first, and why they exist at all. The infant Chinese,
the baby Calmuck, the suckling Hottentot, we must suppose, rest
unconsciously in the calm of the heaven from which they, too, have
emigrated, as well as the sturdy new-born Briton, or the freest and
most independent little Yankee that is native and to the manner born
of this great country of our own. But all alike grow gradually into a
consciousness of walls, which, though invisible, are none the less
impassable, and of chains, though light as air, yet stronger than
brass or iron. And everywhere is the machinery ready, though different
in its frame and operation in differe