backwoodsman hungering after fattest of pork,--such men as these were no common sinners: they were assassins who struck at the very fountain of life, and throttled a human stomach. Pancreatic meant pancreative. Gastric juice was the long-sought elixir. The liver was the lever of the higher life. Along the biliary duct led the road to glory. All the essence of character, life, power, virtue, success, and their opposites,--all the decrees of Fate even,--were daily concocted by curious chemistry within that dark laboratory lying between the oesophagus and the portal vein. There were brewed the reeking ingredients that fertilize the fungus of Crime; there was made to bloom the bright star-flower of Innocence; there was forged the anchor of Hope; there were twisted the threads of the rotten cable of Despair; there Faith built her cross; there Love vivified the heart, and Hate dyed it; there Remorse sharpened his tooth; there Jealousy tinged his eye with emerald; there was quarried the horse-block from which dark Care leaped into the saddle behind the rider; there were puffed out the smoke-wreaths of Doubt; there were blown the bubbles of Phantasy; there sprouted the seeds of Madness; and there, down in the icy vaults, Death froze his finger for the last, cold touch. IV.--HARMONICS. Ah! but the card? you ask. Yes, here it is. -------------------------------- | | | NAPHTALI RINK, | | 51 Early Avenue. | | (At the Hygienic Institute.) | | | -------------------------------- Of course, this is only in miniature, and represents every way but a very small part of the document, the address being but a drop in the superscriptive surge,--a rivulet of text meandering through a meadow of marginalia. Inasmuch as Duespeptos courted the widest publicity for these stomachic scraps, no scruples of delicacy forbid me to jot down here some few of them. He thought them fitted for the race,--the more readers the better: perhaps it may be, the more the merrier. If called upon to classify them, I should put them all under the genus Gastric Scholia. The different species and varieties it is hardly worth while to enter upon here. There were intuitions, recollections, and glosses, apparently set down in a fragmentary way from time to time, in a most minute and distinct text. Very probably they were hints of thoughts designed to be worked up in a more formal way. Whether the quotations were taken at first or second hand I cannot say; but internal evidence would seem to indicate that many of them might have been clippings from the columns of "The Old Lancaster Day-Book." It is, perhaps, worthy of note that Mr. Rink was, in fact, a man of rather more thought and general information than one might suppose, if judging him merely by his uncouth grammar, and the clipped coin of his jangling speech:--