"You are in the right, my dame cousin!" cried Beresynth already drunk to his drunken hostess. "What can Nature be about when she turns off the things they christen beauties from her pottery-wheel? Why, they are hardly worth the trouble of setting to work at them. But such cabinet pieces as you and I! there the creative power, or the principle of nature, or the soul of the world, or the mundane animal, or whatever title one chooses to give the thing, can look at its product with a certain degree of complacency and satisfaction. For it has your curved lines: it starts off into noticeable angles; it is jagged like corals; it darts forward like crystals; it agglomerates like basalt; nay, there is no conceivable line that does not hop, skip, and jump about our bodies. We, coz, are the spoilt, the cockered children of the formation: and this is why the common rabble of nature are so malicious and envious toward us. Their slim wretched fashion is next door to the slimy eel: there is nothing edifying in such an edifice. From that piece of monotony to the prawn is already a good step; and how far above that is the seal! how do we surpass them both, as well as the seastar, the crab, and the lobster, my trustiest cousin, in our excursive irregularities, which defy all the mathematicians in the world to find an expression for their law. But coz, pray where did you get those two gorgeous teeth? the incomparable couple cut a grand and gloomy figure there across the chasm ... of your unfathomable mouth, and form a capital bridge over the gulf that gapes between the dark cliffs of your gums." "O you rogue! O you flatterer!" laught the old woman: "but your darling chin that comes forward so complaisantly, and is so ready to wait upon you and spread itself out like a table. Don't you think you could put a good-sized platter upon it comfortably, where your mouth might then quietly nibble away, while your hands were seeking work elsewhere. This I call an economical arrangement." "We won't spoil ourselves by too much praise;" said the dwarf: "we are already, it seems, vain enough of our advantages; and after all we did not give them to ourselves." "You are right," said she. "But what profession are you of, cousin? where do you live?"