--Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table.--Young fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to impale a slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork holding it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-time.The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find one, if it was not in its place.--Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting so many years to hear of this college trick, I should hear it mentioned a second time within the same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the present generation.
Strange, but true.And so it has happened to me and to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.
I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as an unexplained marvel.I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of subsoil in it.--The explanation is, of course, that in a great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our attention.Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.
There go more pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body than you think for.Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of mine told you there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle.
How many "swimming glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed, rounded disks taking an active part in all your vital processes, part and parcel, each one of them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose are whirled along, like pebbles in a stream, with the blood which warms your frame and colors your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop of blood, under the microscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a calculation.The counting by the micrometer took him a week.--You have, my full-grown friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions.
Errors excepted.--Did I hear some gentleman say, "Doubted? "--I am the Professor.I sit in my chair with a petard under it that will blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I do not know what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.
Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come?
Listen, then.The number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of;these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections, and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl's story, which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the unconscious subject of my brief delineation.
IRIS.
You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd poem written by an old Latin tutor? He brought up at the verb amo, Ilove, as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living dictionary for him at the word , filia, a daughter.The poor man was greatly perplexed in choosing a name for her.Lucretia and Virginia were the first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured stories of Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying, though he had read them a hundred times.
--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber.To them her wrongs briefly.Let them see to the wretch,--she will take care of herself.Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart.
She slides from her seat, and falls dying."Her husband and her father cry aloud."--No, not Lucretia.
-Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl.She engaged to a very promising young man.Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy to her,--must have her at any rate.Hires a lawyer to present the arguments in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter.
There used to be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.--All right.There are two sides to everything.Audi alteram partem.
The legal gentleman has no opinion,--he only states the evidence.
--A doubtful case.Let the young lady be under the protection of the Honorable Decemvir until it can be looked up thoroughly.--Father thinks it best, on the whole, to give in.Will explain the matter, if the young lady and her maid will step this way.That is the explanation,--a stab with a butcher's knife, snatched from a stall, meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding VirginiaThe old man thought over the story.Then he must have one look at the original.So he took down the first volume and read it over.