banks. A whistle from their keeper brings them back in the evening; and as, according to Tradescent Lay, the last to return receives a flogging for his tardiness, their hurry to get back to the boats, when they hear the accustomed call, is in no small degree amusing. I cannot but think that there must be something like a sense of duty in these poor creatures, that they thus of themselves, and of good-will return to the certainty of being salted and dried. This may sound very ridiculous, Eusebius, but there is matter in it to muse upon; and if we want to know man, we must speculate a little beyond him, and learn him by similities and differences. He has best knowledge of his own home and country who has wandered into a _terra incognita_, and studied the differences of soil and climate. And besides that every man is a world to himself, and may find a _terra incognita_ in his own breast, it is not amiss to look abroad into other wildernesses, where he will find instincts that are not so much any creature's but that they have something divine in them, and so, in their origin at least, akin to his own. He will find conscience of some sort growing in the soil of every heart. It is not amiss to discover where it grows most healthily, and by what deadly nightshade its virtue may be suffocated, and its nicer sense not thrive. Surprising is the diversity;--were not nature corrupted, there would be no diversity. Now, truth and right is one; and yet we judge not one thing, we think not aright. Yet is the original impulse true to its purpose, but, in its passage through the many channels of the mind, is strangely perverted. It is eloquently said by a modern writer, a deep thinker, "Thus does the conscience of man project itself athwart whatsoever of knowledge, or surmise, or imagination, understanding, faculty, acquirement, or natural disposition he has in him; and, like light through coloured glass, paint strange pictures on the rim of the horizon and elsewhere. Truly this same sense of the infinite nature of duty, is the central part of all within us; a ray as of eternity and immortality immured in dusky many-coloured Time, and its deaths and births. Your coloured glass varies so much from century to century--and in certain money-making, game-preserving centuries, it gets terribly opaque. Not a heaven with cherubim surrounds you then, but a kind of vacant, leaden, cold hell. One day it will again cease to be opaque, this coloured glass; now, may it not become at once translucent and uncoloured? Painting no pictures more for us, but only the everlasting azure itself. That will be a right glorious consummation." If it were only the painting pictures! but we act the painted scenes. And strange they are, and of diversity enough. It was the confession of an apostle, that he "thought with himself that he ought to do many things contrary" to his master. There are national consciences how unlike each other;