The hatred of truth at first dawning--that instinct which makes you revolt from the pure beams which search the foul depths and abysses of error--is well illustrated by the action of the atmospheric currents, when blowing through an open window upon smoke. What do you see? Sometimes the impression is strong upon your _ocular_ belief that the window is driving the smoke in. You can hardly be convinced of the contrary--scarcely when five or seven minutes has absolutely rarefied the smoke so much that a book-lettering previously invisible has become even legible. And at last, when the fact, the result, the experience, has corrected the contradictory theory of the eye, you begin to suspect, without any aid from science, that there were two currents, one of which comes round in a curve [Illustration: )] and effects the exit for the other which the window had driven in; just as in the Straits of Gibraltar there is manifestly an upper current setting one way, which you therefore conjecture to argue a lower current setting the other, and thus redressing the equilibrium. Here the smoke corresponds to bits of chip or any loose suspended body in the Gibraltar current. What answers to the current of water is the air, and if the equilibrium _is_ kept up, the re-entrant current balances your retiring current, and the latter carries out the smoke entangled in itself. By the objection, say, of a child, there ought to be a re-entrant column of smoke, which there is not. For the air drives the smoke of the fire up the chimney, and of its own contribution the air has no smoke to give. Or the Augean stable may image it. Doubtless when the first disturbance took place in the abominable mess, those acting would be apt to question for a moment whether it had not been more advisable to leave it alone. Moralists say, 'Nobody will attack you, or hate you, or blame you for your virtues.' What falsehood! Not _as_ virtues, it may be in their eyes, but virtues, nevertheless. Connect with Kant the error of supposing _aetas parentum_, etc., to be the doctrine of sin. Not for what you have done, but for what you are--not because in life you did forsake a wife and children--did endure to eat and drink and lie softly yourself whilst those who should have been as your heart-drops were starving: not because you did that so much is forgiven you, but because you were capable of that, therefore you are incapable of heaven. _Immodesty._--The greatest mistake occurs to me now (Wednesday, April 17th, '44). A girl who should have been unhappily conscious of voluptuous hours, her you would call modest in case of her passing with downcast looks. But why, then, is she not so? That girl is immodest who reconciles to herself such things, and yet assumes the look of innocence. _About Women._--A man brings his own idle preconceptions, and fancies that he has learned them from his experience.