certain very minute but
entirely satisfactory documents which would have identified and hanged
any rogue in Christendom who had parted with them.--The historical
question, _Who did it_? and the financial question, _Who paid for it_?
were both settled before the new lamp was lighted the next evening.

You see, my friends, what immense conclusions, touching our lives,
our fortunes, and our sacred honor, may be reached by means of very
insignificant premises. This is eminently true of manners and forms of
speech; a movement or a phrase often tells you all you want to know
about a person. Thus, "How's your health?" (commonly pronounced
haaelth)--instead of, How do you do? or, How are you? Or calling your
little dark entry a "hall," and your old rickety one-horse wagon a
"kerridge." Or telling a person who has been trying to please you that
he has given you pretty good "sahtisfahction." Or saying that you
"remember of" such a thing, or that you have been "stoppin'" at Deacon
Somebody's,--and other such expressions. One of my friends had a little
marble statuette of Cupid in the parlor of his country-house,--bow,
arrows, wings, and all complete. A visitor, indigenous to the region,
looking pensively at the figure, asked the lady of the house "if that
was a statoo of her deceased infant?" What a delicious, though somewhat
voluminous biography, social, educational, and aesthetic in that brief
question!

[Please observe with what Machiavellian astuteness I smuggled in
the particular offence which it was my object to hold up to my
fellow-boarders, without too personal an attack on the individual at
whose door it lay.]

That was an exceedingly dull person who made the remark, _Ex pede
Herculem_. He might as well have said, "From a peck of apples you may
judge of the barrel." _Ex_ PEDE, to be sure! Read, instead, _Ex ungue
minimi digiti pedis, Herculem, ejusque patrem, matrem, avos et proavos,
filios, nepotes et pronepotes!_ Talk to me about your [Greek: dos pou
sto]! Tell me about Cuvier's getting up a megatherium from a tooth,
or Agassiz's drawing a portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single
scale! As the "O" revealed Giotto,--as the one word "moi" betrayed the
Stratford-atte-Bowe-taught Anglais,--so all a man's antecedents and
possibilities are summed up in a single utterance which gives at once
the gauge of his education and his mental organization.

Possibilities, Sir?--said the divinity-student; can't a man who says