You see, my friends, what immense conclusions, touching our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, may be reached by means of very insignificant premises. This is eminently true of manners and forms of speech; a movement or a phrase often tells you all you want to know about a person. Thus, "How's your health?" (commonly pronounced haälth)--instead of, How do you do? or, How are you? Or calling your little dark entry a "hall," and your old rickety one-horse wagon a "kerridge." Or telling a person who has been trying to please you that he has given you pretty good "sahtisfahction." Or saying that you "remember of" such a thing, or that you have been "stoppin'" at Deacon Somebody's,--and other such expressions. One of my friends had a little marble statuette of Cupid in the parlor of his country-house,--bow, arrows, wings, and all complete. A visitor, indigenous to the region, looking pensively at the figure, asked the lady of the house "if that was a statoo of her deceased infant?" What a delicious, though somewhat voluminous biography, social, educational, and aesthetic in that brief question! [Please observe with what Machiavellian astuteness I smuggled in the particular offence which it was my object to hold up to my fellow-boarders, without too personal an attack on the individual at whose door it lay.] That was an exceedingly dull person who made the remark, _Ex pede Herculem_. He might as well have said, "From a peck of apples you may judge of the barrel." _Ex_ PEDE, to be sure! Read, instead, _Ex ungue minimi digiti pedis, Herculem, ejusque patrem, matrem, avos et proavos, filios, nepotes et pronepotes!_ Talk to me about your [Greek: dos pou sto]! Tell me about Cuvier's getting up a megatherium from a tooth, or Agassiz's drawing a portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single scale! As the "O" revealed Giotto,--as the one word "moi" betrayed the Stratford-atte-Bowe-taught Anglais,--so all a man's antecedents and possibilities are summed up in a single utterance which gives at once the gauge of his education and his mental organization. Possibilities, Sir?--said the divinity-student; can't a man who says _Haöw?_ arrive at distinction?