Nullity is the primal state of man. The Rev. Dr. Homilectics tries to impress upon me, each Sunday, the importance of going back to the days when Adam and Eve, in the latest cut of fig-leaves, played Romeo and Juliet under the apple-trees in Eden. He never stops to think that their innocence was the immediate result of being Nothing and doing Nothing, and that just as soon as they set out to be Something, they entailed the curse of work upon all mankind. But I go further back than Adam and Eve. In the good old days of chaos, Nothing was in all its glory. It existed everywhere. No sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, No-thing. This was the normal condition. And of what use was it? says Mrs. Increase, who is bringing up a large family of children, to be used hereafter as grindstones for other people's noses. Why, my dear woman of facts and figures and spheres of usefulness, God Almighty took it and made this great world out of it, with all its mountains and rocks and rivers, its sunsets and rainbows and stars, its panorama of beauty by day and night, and you yourself, although you are, probably, but a very small and a very ugly part of this creation. Yes, madame, you and I came from this Nothing. I have retained this Nothing with great success. You, on the other hand, have been striving to change your normal condition by being Something. It is not for me to say whether you have succeeded. A great many people who think they are Something are really Nothing, and a poor kind of Nothing at that. If I have said Nothing in writing on this subject, it was because I had Nothing to say. When one is writing about Nothing, you know, he is not expected to say anything. Which reminds me of a baby. If you ask me how it reminds me, I cannot tell you. I only know that it reminds me of those little but important animals. It is cheerful news for the future census-takers that babies have become fashionable in Paris. The "idea" will, of course, come immediately into fashion here. I do not mean French babies, but babies in the abstract. A baby is a good thing, a blessed thing. I cannot conceive what I should have done if I hadn't, once upon a time, been a baby. A baby is a well-spring, and the quantity of lacteal fluid, lumps of sugar, soothing syrups, paregoric, squills, squalls, walking the floor in your long-tailed night shirts, mother's loves, lovey-doveys, and square spanking that one of those well-springs will absorb is astonishing to one who has not had a baby. I have had several; at least, I own stock in several. Would I sell my experience, past, present or future, in babies? Not much.