p of one
precipice like Niagara, and three steeples, each a hundred
and twenty feet high; and then put the horses down,
in an exposed place, without anybody to watch them,
and go off to indulge in some other idiotic miracle for
vanity's sake.

Science has recently discovered that the ant does not
lay up anything for winter use. This will knock him
out of literature, to some extent. He does not work,
except when people are looking, and only then when the
observer has a green, naturalistic look, and seems to be
taking notes. This amounts to deception, and will injure
him for the Sunday-schools. He has not judgment enough
to know what is good to eat from what isn't. This amounts
to ignorance, and will impair the world's respect for him.
He cannot stroll around a stump and find his way home again.
This amounts to idiocy, and once the damaging fact
is established, thoughtful people will cease to look
up to him, the sentimental will cease to fondle him.
His vaunted industry is but a vanity and of no effect,
since he never gets home with anything he starts with.
This disposes of the last remnant of his reputation
and wholly destroys his main usefulness as a moral agent,
since it will make the sluggard hesitate to go to him
any more. It is strange, beyond comprehension, that so
manifest a humbug as the ant has been able to fool so
many nations and keep it up so many ages without being
found out.

The ant is strong, but we saw another strong thing,
where we had not suspected the presence of much muscular
power before. A toadstool--that vegetable which springs
to full growth in a single night--had torn loose and
lifted a matted mass of pine needles and dirt of twice
its own bulk into the air, and supported it there,
like a column supporting a shed. Ten thousand toadstools,
with the right purchase, could lift a man, I suppose.
But what good would it do?

All our afternoon's progress had been uphill. About five
or half past we reached the summit, and all of a sudden
the dense curtain of the forest parted and we looked
down into a deep and beautiful gorge and out over a
wide panorama of wooded mountains with their summits
shining in the sun and their glade-furrowed sides dimmed
with purple shade. The gorge under our feet--called
Allerheiligen--afforded room in the grassy level at its
head for a cozy and delightful human nest, shut away
from the world and its botherations, and consequently
the monks of the old ti