llowing epistle, we behold Mr. Sawin returning, a _miles
emeritus_, to the bosom of his family. _Quantum mutatus!_ The good
Father of us all had doubtless intrusted to the keeping of this child of
his certain faculties of a constructive kind. He had put in him a share
of that vital force, the nicest economy of every minute atom of which is
necessary to the perfect development of Humanity. He had given him a
brain and heart, and so had equipped his soul with the two strong wings
of knowledge and love, whereby it can mount to hang its nest under the
eaves of heaven. And this child, so dowered, he had intrusted to the
keeping of his vicar, the State. How stands the account of that
stewardship? The State, or Society (call her by what name you will), had
taken no manner of thought of him till she saw him swept out into the
street, the pitiful leavings of last night's debauch, with cigar-ends,
lemon-parings, tobacco-quids, slops, vile stenches, and the whole
loathsome next-morning of the bar-room,--an own child of the Almighty
God! I remember him as he was brought to be christened, a ruddy, rugged
babe; and now there he wallows, reeking, seething,--the dead corpse, not
of a man, but of a soul,--a putrefying lump, horrible for the life that
is in it. Comes the wind of heaven, that good Samaritan, and parts the
hair upon his forehead, nor is too nice to kiss those parched, cracked
lips; the morning opens upon him her eyes full of pitying sunshine, the
sky yearns down to him,--and there he lies fermenting. O sleep! let me
not profane thy holy name by calling that stertorous unconsciousness a
slumber! By and by comes along the State, God's vicar. Does she say, 'My
poor, forlorn foster-child! Behold here a force which I will make dig
and plant and build for me'? Not so, but, 'Here is a recruit ready-made
to my hand, a piece of destroying energy lying unprofitably idle.' So
she claps an ugly gray suit on him, puts a musket in his grasp, and
sends him off, with Gubernatorial and other godspeeds, to do duty as a
destroyer.

I made one of the crowd at the last Mechanics' Fair, and, with the rest,
stood gazing in wonder at a perfect machine, with its soul of fire, its
boiler-heart that sent the hot blood pulsing along the iron arteries,
and its thews of steel. And while I was admiring the adaptation of means
to end, the harmonious involutions of contrivance, and the
never-bewildered complexity, I saw a grimed and greasy fellow, the
imp