e cheerful and encouraging remark with which the Poor
Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.

Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part to
continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and particularly
unpleasant world. This is so much a matter of course, that I was
surprised to see the divinity-student change color. He took a look at a
small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting forward over the
chapped sideboard. The image it returned to him had the color of a very
young pea somewhat over-boiled. The scenery of a long tragic drama
flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-train _whishes_ by a
station: the gradual dismantling process of disease; friends looking on,
sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over their own stomachs of iron and
lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive, but calculating their crop, and
thinking how soon it will be ripe, so that they can go to your neighbor,
who is good for a year or so longer; doctors assiduous, but giving
themselves a mental shake, as they go out of your door, that throws
off your particular grief as a duck sheds a rain-drop from his oily
feathers; undertakers solemn, but happy; then the great subsoil
cultivator, who plants, but never looks for fruit in his garden; then
the stone-cutter, who finds the lie that has been waiting for you on a
slab ever since the birds or beasts made their tracks on the new red
sandstone; then the grass and the dandelions and the buttercups,--Earth
saying to the mortal body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred
my bosom, but you are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a
floating consciousness without very definite form or place, but dimly
conceived of as an upright column of vapor or mist several times larger
than life-size, so far as it could be said to have any size at all,
wandering about and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good
old-fashioned solid _matter_ to come down upon with foot and fist,--in
fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the
sitting posture.

And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen
images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian
were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the formless
and position to the placeless. Neither did his thoughts spread
themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them. They came
confusedly into his mind like a heap of brok