ot expect, I assure you,) we fail disastrously. If we
succeed, if we bring up our vital and muscular developments into due
proportion with our nervous energy, we shall have a race of men and
women such as the world never saw. Dolorosus, when in the course of
human events you are next invited to give a Fourth-of-July Oration,
grasp at the opportunity, and take for your subject "Health." Tell your
audience, when you rise to the accustomed flowers of rhetoric as the day
wears on, that Health is the central luminary, of which all the stars
that spangle the proud flag of our common country are but satellites;
and close with a hint to the plumed emblem of our nation, (pointing to
the stuffed one which will probably be exhibited on the platform,) that
she should not henceforward confine her energies to the hatching of
short-lived eaglets, but endeavor rather to educate a few full-grown
birds.

As I take it, Nature said, some years since,--"Thus far the English is
my best race; but we have had Englishmen enough; now for another turning
of the globe, and a step farther. We need something with a little more
buoyancy than the Englishman; let us lighten the ship, even at the risk
of a little peril in the process. Put in one drop more of nervous fluid
and make the American." With that drop, a new range of promise opened on
the human race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organized type of
mankind was born. But the promise must be fulfilled through unequalled
dangers. With the new drop came new intoxication, new ardors, passions,
ambitions, hopes, reactions, and despairs,--more daring, more invention,
more disease, more insanity,--forgetfulness, at first, of the old,
wholesome traditions of living, recklessness of sin and saleratus, loss
of refreshing sleep and of the power of play. To surmount all this, we
have got to fight the good fight, I assure you, Dolorosus. Nature is yet
pledged to produce that finer type, and if we miss it, she will leave us
to decay, like our predecessors,--whirl the globe over once more, and
choose a new place for a new experiment.

MY DOUBLE; AND HOW HE UNDID ME.

It is not often that I trouble the readers of the "Atlantic Monthly." I
should not trouble them now, but for the importunities of my wife, who
"feels to insist" that a duty to society is unfulfilled, till I have
told why I had to have a double, and how he undid me. She is sure, she
says, that intelligent persons cannot understand that