'Oh! latest born of time, the wise man said, A mighty destiny surrounds thy head; Great is thy mission, but the puny son Lacks strength to finish what the sires begun; Thy hapless daughters breathe the poison'd air, Fair they may be, but fragile more than fair; They know not, doom'd ones, that the air of heaven, For breathing purposes to man was given; They know not half the things which life requires, But melt their lives away where stoves and fires, And furnace issuing from the realms beneath, Distils through parlor floors its poisonous breath. Sooner or later must the slighted air And exercise take vengeance on the fair. Ah! one by one I see them fade and fall, Both old and young, fair, dark or short or tall, Till one stupendous ruin wraps them all.' One can sometimes, in a smiling way, give utterance to truths which seem hard and stern when spoken in grim earnest. Let us see whether we cannot find some allegory to represent what we mean. Some time ago, I read a tale which related that a certain gentleman was, once on a time, digging a deep hole in his garden. He had, as I myself had in my younger days, a perfect passion for digging holes, for the mere pleasure of doing it; but the hole which he was now digging was by far the deepest which he had ever attempted. At last he became perfectly fascinated, carried away by his pursuit, and actually had his dinner let down to him by a bucket. Well, he dug on late and early, when just as he was plunging in his spade with great energy for a new dig, he penetrated right through, and fell down, down to the centre of the earth.