"Well, if you insist, I am delighted of course.--But what a city! I must break out with my amazement. Who could have believed that prosperous, gay, bragging New Orleans would come to such grief and poverty! I seem to have walked through Tyre and witnessed the fulfillment of the predictions of the prophets. I have been haunted all day by Ezekiel. Business gone, money gone, population gone. It is the hand of the Almighty, bringing to shame the counsels of wicked rulers and the predictions of lying seers. I ask no better proof than I have seen to-day that there is a Divine Ruler. I hope that the whole land will not have to pay as heavy a price as New Orleans to be quit of its compact with the devil. We are all guilty to some extent. The North thought that it could make money out of slavery and yet evade the natural punishments of its naughty connivance. It thought that it could use the South as a catspaw to pull its chestnuts out of the fires of hell. It hoped to cheat the devil by doing its dirty business over the planter's shoulders. But he is a sharp dealer. He will have his bond or his pound of flesh. None of us ought to get off easily, and therefore I conclude that we shall not." Now who would suppose that the Doctor had in his mind all the while a moral lecture to Colburne? Yet so it was: for this purpose had he gone back to Tyre and Babylon; with this object in view had he descanted on divine providence and the father of evil. It was his manner to reprove and warn persons whom he liked, but not bluntly nor directly. He touched them up gently, around the legs of other people, and over the shoulders of events which lost their personal interest to most human beings thousands of years ago. Please to notice how gradually, delicately, yet surely he descended upon Colburne through epochal spaces of time, and questions which involved the guilt and punishment of continents.