old among furnaces and crucibles and retorts; wearing their
lives away in a search after perpetual youth, and their substance in
that which sooner and more surely than "riotous living" impoverisheth
a man--the transmutation of the baser metals into gold--you fall a
whistling maybe--or beg leave to suggest the word _fudge_. If so, take
my word for it, like a pretty woman with the small-pox, the
probability is, you are very much to be _pitted_.

All stuff and nonsense! you say--downright rigmarole--can't for the
life of you understand what the fellow's driving at.

Indeed.

As sure as you are sitting there.

Well, then, we must try to convince you. One of the pleasantest things
for a man who _does_ believe in night-caps, you will grant me, though,
at the best, he may be nothing more than a bachelor, is to lie out in
the open air, on a smooth sloping hill-side, when the earth is
fragrant, and the wind south, on a long drowsy summer afternoon--with
his great-coat under him if the earth is damp--and with the long rich
grass bending over him, and the blossoming clover swinging between him
and a clear blue sky, starred all over with golden dandelions,
buttercups and white-weed--

Faugh!

One moment if you please--with golden dandelions, buttercups and
white-weed--

Poh!--pish!--Why don't you say with the dent-de-lion, the ranunculus
and the crysanthimum?

Simply because I prefer bumble-bees to humble-bees, and even to
honey-bees, notwithstanding the dictionaries, and never lie down in
the long rich grass, with a great-coat under me; and am not afraid of
catching cold though I may sit upon damp roses, or tread upon the
sweet-scented earth, or tumble about in the newly-mown hay----with my
children about me.

Children!----oh!----ah!--might have known you were not one of us--only
half a man therefore.

How so?

That you had a better-half somewhere, to which you belong when you are
at home.

In other words you might have known that I was no bachelor.

Precisely.

Sir! you are very obliging. And now, perhaps, I may be allowed to
finish the demonstration. I undertook to convince you, if you
remember, that every human being, with his eyes about him, has, under
all circumstances, and at all times, within his reach, and subject to
his order, a heap of amusement, a whole treasury of unappropriated
wisdom. And all I have asked of you thus far is to admit, that if a
man will but go forth into the solitary place and li