Pumpkins are among the most imposing of all groundling growths. They have fine showy flowers, handsome leaves, roving stems, and they bear solid-looking fruit of a goodly size and gorgeous colour. To see them spreading over their domain with such rapid luxuriance, one would imagine them among the best things growing; but a critical examination proves their flesh to be about three parts water, while as for their stalks, they are of so pithless a nature that they can only creep along the earth, unable to stand upright without support;--which tells something against the pumpkin's claim for extra consideration. Still, their showy largeness attracts the eye, and not a few of us believe in pumpkins, and admire both their mode of growth and the fruit resulting. In like manner the human pumpkins--those beings of imposing presence and loud self-assertion--get themselves believed in by the simple; and, as occasions by which their watery and fibreless nature is revealed do not arise every day, they are for the most part accepted for the substantialities they assume to be, and the world is deceived by appearances as it ever has been. These human pumpkins abound everywhere. In all states and professions, and in both sexes, we find them flourishing magnificently on the face of the earth, taking the lead in their society and setting themselves out as the finest fellows to be found in their respective gardens. Among them are the men of the Bombastes type, so dear to the older playwrights; braggadocios of the kill 'em and eat 'em school, who were such terrible fellows to look at and listen to, though only pumpkins of a singularly innocuous nature when stoutly squeezed and analyzed; fire-eaters of the juggling kind, with special care taken that the fire shall be harmless and that the danger shall lie only in the fear of the spectators. Now that duelling has gone out of fashion, and discharged captains who have signalized themselves in war are rare, our old swashbuckler type of pumpkins has gone out both in fact and fiction, on the stage and off it. To be sure we have a few travellers of slightly apocryphal courage, and more than doubtful accuracy, whose books of perilous adventure and breathless dangers are to us what Bombastes and Bobadil were to our fathers; and we have Major Wellington de Boots with his military swagger and his hare's heart. But he is a very weak imitation of the old fire-eater; and, on the whole, this special family of the pumpkins has dwindled into insignificance, and their place knows them no more.