It appeared to me that many of the owners of these bottled spirits had become unhappy on very slight provocation. Some of the reasons assigned, I thought hardly sufficient to justify a frown of a day's duration; part of these afflictions ought rather, in my opinion, to have been received as advantages; others seemed altogether fanciful, and it was manifest that the sufferer had become unfortunate merely by the force of a lively imagination. Amongst these bottles I observed some that were empty, and inquiring the reason, I was told that they had contained the mirth of persons who, after a certain period of melancholy, had regained their happiness by fortitude, philosophy, religion, a change of wind, or some other consolation; for whenever a person, whose mirth has been under this confinement, is ready to be cheerful again, and wants his spirits back, they make so great an effort to escape from the bottle as to force out the cork, and immediately they return into the possession of their owner, performing the journey in a few minutes. When this liberation is effected, the attendants who manage the bottles inscribe on the label the length of time that the spirits had remained in prison; and the empty bottle is still left to receive them again, should they be banished from their owner a second time. This often occurs by the vicissitudes incident to many tempers, in which the being happy to-day affords no security for happiness to-morrow. By these inscriptions, I found that the spirits of some people are engaged in perpetual journeys between the earth and the moon.