cling about this old globe of ours, rising, swarming, disappearing like the maggots on a dead horse, but of no light importance to the bearer when you remember its weight of sorrows, anxieties, disappointments, and responsibilities, not to mention the Black Care sitting heavily at the top to keep the whole burden in its place. Life is a bubble, they say. Very well—but is it blown from a soap-dish by a schoolboy, rising heavenward, tinted with rainbow hues, to burst only when at its most beautiful and its best? or is it not rather a bubble gurgling to the surface from the agonized lungs of some struggling wretch drowning far below in the dark, pitiless water,
'Unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown?'
—Wasted, too, unless the fish eat him, and then who knows? none of us perhaps may ever eat the fish.
"Listen to me. I won't make your flesh
