friend in the street, and, kissing the tip of your
finger, to lisp, with bending head and smiling eye,--

"May I never disagree with you!"

THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

WHAT HE SAID, WHAT HE HEARD, AND WHAT HE SAW.

[_The Professor talks with the Reader. He tells a Young Girl's Story_.]

When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of
mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the
balance of creation was disturbed. The materials that go to the making
of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate nature of
one man's-worth of masculine constituents. These combined to make our
first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the previous creation
of our common father. All this, mythically, illustratively, and by no
means doctrinally or polemically.

The man implies the woman, you will understand. The excellent gentleman
whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling matter a few
weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of miracles at the present
day. So do I. I believe, if you could find an uninhabited coral-reef
island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with plenty of cocoa-palms
and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome young fellow, like our
Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched there a year afterwards, you
would find him walking under the palm trees arm in arm with a pretty
woman.

Where would she come from?

Oh, that's the miracle!

----I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at
the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear some
fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a clairvoyant,
seeing it all beforehand.

----I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to
the sun to ripen well.--How some of us fellows remember Joe and Harry,
Baltimoreans, both! Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples, and his eyes
like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the whiteness of the flesh
of cocoa-nuts, and his laugh that set the chandelier-drops rattling
overhead, as we sat at our sparkling banquets in those gay times! Harry,
champion, by acclamation, of the College heavyweights, broad-shouldered,
bull-necked, square-jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science,
lots of pluck, good-natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a
red-eyed bison in the crack of hand-to-hand battle! Who forgets the
great muster-day, and the collision of the classic wit