Now, in so advanced a stage of the world's existence (and of this narrative) is it needful, judicious, or even becoming to describe, spoonful by spoonful, however grateful, delicious, and absorbing, the process of administering and receiving soup? To "give and take" is said, by people of large experience in life, to be about the latest and most consummate lesson of humanity; coming even after that extreme of wisdom which teaches us to "grin and bear it." But in the present trifling instance, two young people very soon began to be comparatively at home with the subject. The opening of the eyes, in all countries and creatures, is done a good deal later than the opening of the mouth; the latter being the essential, the former quite a fortuitous proceeding. After six spoonfuls, as counted by Esther, Hardenow opened both his eyes; after two or three more, he knew where he was; and when he had swallowed a dozen and a bonus, scarcely any of his wits were wanting. Still Esther, for fear of a relapse, went on; though her hand trembled dreadfully when he sat up, with his poor bones creaking sadly, and tried to be steady upon her arm, but was overbalanced by his weight of brain. Instead of shrieking, or screaming, she took advantage of this opportunity, and his bony chin dropping afforded the finest opening towards his interior. To put it briefly, he quite came round, and after twenty spoonfuls vowed--with the conscience rushing for the moment into the arms of common sense--that never would he fast again. And after thirty were absorbed and beginning to assimilate, he gazed at Esther's smiling eyes, and saw the clearest and truest solution of his "postulates on celibacy." Esther dropped her eyes in terror, and made him drink the dregs and bottom, with a convert's zealous gulp. And as it happened, this was wise. If any malignant persons charge him with having sold, for a mess of pottage, man's noblest birthright, celibacy, let every such person be corded up, at the longest possible date after breakfast, and the shortest before dinner--or rather, alas! before dinner-time--let him stay corded, and rolling about in a hog-house (as long as roll he can, which never would approach Mr. Hardenow's cycle); let him, throughout this whole period, instead of eating, expect to be eaten; then with a wolf in his stomach (if he has one) let him lose his wits (if he has any), and then let a lovely girl come and free him, and feed him, and cry over him, and regard him--with his clothes at their very worst, and cakes of dirt in his eyes and mouth--as the imperial Jove in some Dictæan cavern dormant; and then, as the light and the life flow back, and the power of his heart awakes, let there manifestly accrue thereto a better, gentler, and sweeter heart, timid even of its own pulse, and ashamed of its own veracity--and then if he takes all this unmoved, why, let him be corded up again, and nobody come to deliver him.