From Noah's Ark shall float the commodore's broad pendant. The ocean shall be covered, so far as eye can range, with countless craft of every build and rig. And all shall glide about in quiet, inasmuch as oars shall be muffled, and steamers, having learned to consume their own smoke, shall be taught equally to swallow their hideous noises. The marshalling of the competitors and the order of the racing are left to your discretion; but there need be no lack of interest. Caiques from Stamboul and gondolas from Venice shall be frequent; and pirogues from the Malayan peninsula shall over-haul the three trim yacht-schooners that raced across the Atlantic from New-York. Here Cleopatra's barge shall be matched against an Esquimaux kayak; there a catamaran from Coringa shall bump the Yale College eight. If you cannot make something out of all this picturesque confusion, and if you cannot contrive to lose therein both yourself and the reader of your paragraph, the fault will be yours, not mine.--There remain the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne. What are you to do with them? Simply this. Endow each one of them with personal attributes; let each have form and features, distinct from the others of her sisterhood. Is the task difficult? So much the better. After a cool thousand or so of these individual portraitures, you may begin to fumble in vain for separate identities. In fact, who knows whether you may not be compelled to take refuge hopelessly in sleep, the very mark at which both of us are aiming? And now, the foregoing long and subdivided paragraph being brought at last to an end, it were disingenuous to shirk an admission, that the "who's who" is not so plainly discernible therein as it might be. You and I, and the reader and the writer, and the giver and recipient of advice, will be accused by the critic of being somewhat queerly mixed up. What, then? Are not vagueness and uncertainty of style specially appropriate to the circumstances? Who would thank us for precision? No, no; carry clearness, if you like, into your mathematical definitions; but leave us our mistiness when we treat of the mysterious. Nor, on the whole, am I otherwise than content with my suggested assumption of temporary and imaginary authorship, as one of the methods for quieting a fevered brain. How pleasant to dream that rival Publishers are contending for your manuscript poems; that rival Managers are waylaying you for a sight of your unwritten comedy! Besides, by adding authorship to the list that closed with the damsels of Cologne, the number is brought up to eleven, so that, when I wind up with my trump card, the promised dozen of dreams will be complete, and I shall be enabled to dispense with the "waves of shadow" on the wheat-field, which I acknowledged were not my original conception.