use; that the world was very clear-sighted, and soon estimated a man at his just value. This cured me, and I determined to be natural, and let the world find me out." "The world," says Thackeray, "can pry out everything about us which it has a mind to know. But there is this consolation, which men will never accept in their own cases, that the world doesn't care. Consider the amount of scandal it has been forced to hear in its time, and how weary it must be of that kind of intelligence. You are taken to prison and fancy yourself indelibly disgraced? You are bankrupt under odd circumstances? You drive a queer bargain with your friend and are found out, and imagine the world will punish you? Pshaw! Your shame is only vanity. Go and talk to the world as if nothing had happened, and nothing has happened. Tumble down; brush the mud off your clothes; appear with a smiling countenance, and nobody cares. Do you suppose society is going to take out its pocket-handkerchief and be inconsolable when you die? Why should it care, very much, then, whether your worship graces yourself or disgraces yourself? Whatever happens, it talks, meets, jokes, yawns, has its dinner, pretty much as before." Depend upon it, the world will not hunt you, nor concern itself much about you. If you want its favors you must keep yourself in its eye. Cicero left Sicily extremely pleased with the success of his administration, and flattered himself that all Rome was celebrating his praises, and that the people would readily grant him everything that he desired; in which imagination he landed at Puteoli, a considerable port adjoining to Baiæ, the chief seat of pleasure in Italy, where there was a perpetual resort of all the rich and the great, as well for the delights of its situation as for the use of its baths and hot waters. But here, as he himself pleasantly tells the story, he was not a little mortified by the first friend whom he met, who asked him how long he had left Rome, and what news there, when he answered that he came from the provinces. "From Africk, I suppose," says another; and upon his replying, with some indignation, "No; I come from Sicily," a third, who stood by, and had a mind to be thought wiser, said presently, "How? did you not know that Cicero was quæstor of Syracuse?" Upon which, perceiving it in vain to be angry, he fell into the humor of the place, and made himself one of the company who came to the waters. This mortification gave some little check to his ambition, or taught him rather how to apply it more successfully; and did him more good, he says, than if he had received all the compliments that he expected; for it made him reflect that the people of Rome had dull ears, but quick eyes; and that it was his business to keep himself always in their sight; nor to be so solicitous how to make them hear of him, as to make them see him: so that, from this moment, he resolved to stick close to the forum, and to live perpetually in the view of the city; nor to suffer either his porter or his sleep to hinder any man's access to him.

As capital in trade must be constantly turning to accumulate, so intelligence must be constantly in use to be useful. Its value and utility and accuracy can only be known by constantly testing it. A false light leads straight into the bog, and misinformation is worse than no information at all. Curiosity has need to be on tip-toe,—but cautious, nevertheless. Southey tells a story in his Doctor which the Jesuit Manuel de Vergara used to tell of himself. When he was a little boy he asked a Dominican friar what was the meaning of the seventh commandment, for he said he could not tell what committing adultery was. The friar, not knowing how to answer, cast a perplexed look around the room, and thinking he had found a safe reply, pointed to a kettle on the fire, and said the commandment meant that he must never put his hand in the pot while it was boiling. The very next day, a loud scream alarmed the family, and behold there was little Manuel running about the room, holding up his scalded finger, and exclaiming, "Oh dear! oh dear! I've committed adultery! I've committed adultery! I've committed adultery!"

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand. What they are most ready to talk upon, if they knew just a little more about, they would be dumb; or would at least betray in some degree what John Buncle calls "the decencies of ignorance." We are told that shortly after the shock of the famous earthquake at Talcahuano, a great wave was seen from the distance of three or four miles, approaching in the middle of the bay with a smooth outline; but along the shore it tore up cottages and trees, as it swept onward with irresistible force. At the head of the bay it broke in a fearful line of white breakers, which rushed up to a height of twenty-three vertical feet above the highest spring-tides. The lower orders in Talcahuano thought that the earthquake was caused by some old Indian women, witches, who, two years before, being offended, stopped the volcano of Antuco!

Bishop Latimer says that "Master More was once sent in commission into Kent, to help to try out, if it might be, what was the cause of Goodwin Sands, and the shelf that stopped up Sandwich Haven. Among others, came in before him an old man with a white head, and one that was thought to be little less than one hundred years old. Quoth Master More, How say you in this matter? What think you to be the cause of these shelves and flats that stop up Sandwich Haven? Forsooth, quoth he, I am an old man. I think that Tenterden-steeple is the cause of Goodwin Sands; for I am an old man, sir, quoth he, and I may remember the building of Tenterden-steeple, and I may remember when there was no steeple at all there. And before that Tenterden-steeple was in building, there was no manner of speaking of any flats or sands that stopped the haven, and therefore I think that Tenterden-steeple is the cause of the destroying and decay of Sandwich Haven!" (The centenarian's reply crystallized at once into a proverb and synonym for popular ignorance; but what if the old man had in his mind the half of the story omitted by Latimer—that the obnoxious steeple had been built by a bishop with fifty thousand pounds appropriated to build a breakwater!)

The fox that Darwin tells us about in his Voyage was literally lost in the presence of wonders. "In the evening," says the naturalist, "we reached the island of San Pedro. In doubling the point, two of the officers landed, to take a round of angles with the theodolite. A fox of a kind said to be peculiar on the island, and very rare in it, was sitting on the rocks. He was so intently absorbed in watching the work of the officers, that I was able, by quietly walking up behind, to knock him on the head with my geological hammer!"

"We on this globe," said Voltaire, speaking of the slender acquaintance of Europe with the Chinese Empire, "we on this globe are like insects in a garden—those who live on an oak seldom meet those who pass their short lives on an ash." "We are poor, silly animals," says Horace Walpole; "we live for an instant upon a particle of a boundless universe, and are much like a butterfly that should argue about the nature of the seasons, and what creates their vicissitudes, and does not exist itself to see an annual revolution of them." When Dr. Livingstone returned from Africa, after a stay of sixteen years as a missionary, he was induced to bring with him an intelligent and affectionate native, Sekwebu, who had been of great service to him. When they parted from their friends at Kilemane, the sea on the bar was frightful, even to the seamen. This was the first time Sekwebu had seen the sea. As the terrible breakers broke over them, he asked, wonderingly, "Is this the way you go? Is this the way you go?" exclaiming, "What a strange country is