"It happened by the merest chance to escape death. Its constitution was too strong for the grim destroyer." "Was nothing else done?" you ask. "No medicines given but homeopathic powders?" "No. They persevered to the last." "The child was well in two or three days I suppose?" you remark. "Yes," he replies, a little coldly. "Children are not apt to recover from an attack of croup without medicine." He forgets himself and answers-- "But I don't believe it was a real case of croup. It couldn't have been!" And so Mr. Wiseacre treats almost every thing that makes its appearance. Not because he understands all about it, but because he knows nothing about it. It is his very ignorance of a matter that makes him dogmatic. He knows nothing of the distinction between truth and the appearances of truth. So fond is he of talking and showing off his superior intelligence and acumen, that he is never a listener in any company, unless by a kind of compulsion, and then he rarely hears any thing in the eagerness he feels to get in his word. Usually he keeps sensible men silent in hopeless astonishment at the very boldness of his ignorance. But Mr. Wiseacre was caught napping once in his life, and that completely. He was entrapped; not taken in open day, with a fair field before him. And it would be easy to entrap him at almost any time, and with almost any humbug, if the game were worth the trouble; for, in the light of his own mind, he cannot see far. His mental vision is not particularly clear; else he would not so often cry "humbug," when wiser men stopped to examine and reflect.