wakes
with a shriek, calls the name of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy
slumbers upon her lonely pillow,--a widow.

Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack
sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for
them in the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and
events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that, if
there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar
occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case
for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence
among the Comfortable Classes.

There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of children.
For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or come across some
idea. Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact or idea strikes
you from another quarter. It seems as if it had passed into space and
bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank wall that shuts in the
world of thought. Yet no possible connection exists between the two
channels by which the thought or the fact arrived. Let me give an
infinitesimal illustration.

One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons table-boarders,
which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young
fellows being always hungry----Allow me to stop dead-short, in order
to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank
interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a
geode.

* * * * *

_Aphorism by the Professor._

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of
different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at
any hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods, and
you might as well attempt to regulate the time of high-water to suit a
fishing-party as to change these periods.

The crucial experiment is this. Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the
suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner. If this is eagerly
accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established. If the subject
of the question changes color and expresses surprise and incredulity, as
if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of maturity is no less
clear.

* * *