bling, to the old
mouldering scaffolding of the past, and look bewildered on the broad,
rising arches of the new temple of thought. They stand quivering in the
blast of opinion. And when Mrs. Grundy passes by, they back, like
hermit-crabs, into the first time-worn old shell of precedent they can
find, and hide there, shaking with dread.

My boy, strengthen well your backbone, that it may bear you upright and
onward in your career. Walk erect in this world with the stature and
aspect of a man. Tread forth alone with fearlessness and conscious
power. Bear up your God-given intelligence with unbending pride, that it
may look afar over the broad expanse of nature, and gaze with even eye
upon the mountain-heights of eternal truth. I am using words too big
for you? Well, one of these days you will understand them all, when your
little backbone has gathered more lime.

Bone has done some remarkable things in this world. There was that
little feat of Samson, in which he flourished the grinding apparatus of
a defunct donkey. It has always seemed to me, Madam, that that same
jaw-bone must have been either prodigiously strong and tough, or else
the Philistine crania must have been of very chartaceous texture. There
are the bones of the eleven thousand virgins,--the remains of ancient
virtue, and loveliness, and faith. Though, if all the stories of
travelled anatomists be true, there must have been some virgin heifers
among them; for many of them are certainly of bovine, and not human,
origin.

And then, Madam, do not the poor bones which have been strewn, for ages,
over the rolling earth, play sometimes a nobler part in their decay than
in their prime? The incrusted fragments, carefully treasured up in halls
of science, reveal to the broadening intelligence of man the story of
earth in its young days of mighty struggle, and tell of the sandy
shores, the rolling waters, the waving woods of a primeval time. Turning
back the stony tablets time has firmly bound, he views upon their
wrinkled sides its nature-printed figures,--relics that have there
remained, locked in the rocky sepulchre, built of crumbling mountains,
washed and worn by tides that ebbed and flowed a million years ago. Now,
opened to the eye of human thought, their crumbling forms bring tidings
of a distant, wondrous past, when they were all in all of sentient life
on earth. The thought they could not know, their dead remains have
wakened in the minds of a far nobler