thorny and your pillow uneasy. Interest is a great matter with him, and he has interest in all men in this age of fifty and upwards.

Flesh is heir to ills, and the sexton to flesh. He is well saddled with the cast-off clay of every generation, and he places it where it will at some distant day be reformed into a more glorious image. The sexton has nothing to do with regeneration. Every vessel he launches into the broad ocean sails on its own keel. He wishes well and a safe voyage to a better country, few storms and a quiet haven. He is the Charon of modern mythology, and has, for ought I know, buried himself, fully to understand how he may bury others.

Be civil to him for he may write your epitaph.

CHAPTER VIII.

Hans is introduced to the City Corporation-vulgarly called fathers-his reflections.

Aldermen and turtle soup are under the same head in Crabbe's synonyms, and it would be a very happy thing for our city if they were found no where else. Believing in mnemotechny I never look upon an alderman but that I think of a turtle, nor upon a turtle but I am reminded of an alderman.

As a body, they are as useless individuals as the composition of dust and spirit ever formed. I am sorry truth compels me to say that they are of Dutch origin, though your Dutch alderman was not made of turtle soup. He was a stern man that could see two yards into the earth, an eye like a lynx, a tongue that could talk Dutch as a Dutch King, and he could carry a staff with the reverence of Father Jacob. In the capacity of judge no man better,

he heard many cases and settled them to the satisfaction of both parties. Both shook hands before parting, both pronounced him an upright judge-an original Daniel and a better.

The aldermen of the present day, Heaven knows, never come to any conclusion; they pass laws and forget them. They are as a body termed a Corporation, which means "The belly," according to the Roman fable, and like this fable it is regardless of what the rest of its members do for its salvation. It has a body-no soul. It sustains itself on air; promise-crammed and cramming others with promises. The aldermen are a curse to the 19th century--a body-politic plague-who annoy, fret and worry the city constitution so greatly that you may count its ribs.

By their works a man must judge them, and what do they perform? Pass a book full of ordinances, and print them. Meet once a week as an exclusive tea party, and run the poor taxables over head and ears in debt, and charge their sins to the "Croton," or "Streets."

The aldermanic body, dear reader, is just as much required as a second body is to yourself, or me; and heaven knows I can now barely sustain the wants of my present discontented one.

An alderman now-a-days is nothing but a cracker and cheese eater--a huge hill of flesh-a pile of rubbish- a mountain of misshapen iniquity—a man reared from his youth in the political nursery, toddied in his softer years, with unseasoned turtle. His nod ex-officio is imperial; a shake of his head is as significant (almost) as a burgher's. As a man, he is powerless; he is a mere breath, a bag of wind, a broken bellows. The office forms the golden image; the office creates the dignitary; he is to the community what the bow is to the fiddle: he helps make the noise, he has naught to do with the music.

Do men talk of taxes? Banish this humbugging convention! There was no complaint in the days of yore; why should there be now?

There was never a man who has gone into this berth though thin as a ghost's shadow, but what come out as rotund as a barrel, and many a man has been advised by his physician to take a year's travel through the alder manic country to better his condition. He fattens like a

partridge, and in the same proportion.

Such

A Dutch Alderman never showed any visible signs of improvement. Now he is used as a simile for all that is fat and plump. He makes laws as easily as buttons. laws! Brittle as glass-useless as the paper on which they are printed; like a sneak, they are hid, they doat on darkness; are never known till searched for, and then not worth the search. 'Tis useless to dig for laws, for these brave fellows pass them as easily as if they shovelled them. In old times, one guide book of directions was all that was necessary; a man could trust his neighbors and sleep with open doors. Now, mankind has so multiplied, that laws must increase with the population whether they are carried into effect or not-they are not fit to light a Dutch pipe.

If the philosophy of Pythagoras be true, (and who doubts?) may not the soul of an alderman (if he have any) descend to animate the shell of a turtle, as a compensation for what the turtle has endured for him? and why may not some future father corporate hereafter take snuff from the shell of some present alderman, and eat him too? What a theme for reflection, consideration and wonder !

Who would be an alderman?

CHAPTER IX.

Hans receives information relative to a certain sect of Philosophers-Grahamites-and descants accordingly.

Either all flesh is not grass, or else these philosophers are cannibals; I fear the latter. They will not eat animals, fearing they might devour the encasement of the soul of their grandsires; they will eat grass, which was not only the food of Nebuchadnezzar but is the symbol of human frailty and withering inclination, and yet in it they swallow the whole human race. Within a century, how many thousand species of philosophies have been propagated and died with their originators! And it has long since been discovered as a truth that quackery exists in all branches of science. Prophets, disciples, apostles, philosophers of every imagined creed and kind, have had a separate existence in this country.

How men, with any tolerable show of appetite, can despise veal and mutton for mere chaff or husks, is beyond the imagination to determine, and is such humanity that was never expected even of the prodigal son. When we

find men by choice and not force, feeding on swine fodder, we are led to believe that the doctrine of Pythagoras was true, and that some men by nature are heirs of animal spirit. They at once remind us of centaurs-half horse, half men-so closely linked, that take away either their humanity or animal nature, and they are useless to themselves. However, when we re-consider that such philosophers in times of famine might find bread in barrels, or gruel in staves, dinners in deal boards, and provender in saw-dust, we admit that, after all, there is great interest in believing in the creed.

Why don't these philosophers eat animals? The answer is, because animals eat grass like themselves, and because Pythagoras did not. True, but sheep or beef may not have been plenty in his time: he may not have relished mutton or lamb, (some do not) and it might not have agreed with his constitutional habits. He may have been of plethoric habit and under the advice of his physician, therefore those can hardly be considered reasons.

Placed on the fellow-feeling ground that animals may contain kindred souls, for what reason do these gentlemen take the food from our pasturing relatives, if relations be indeed sheep or goats? Why deprive them of the substance of green fields? If we are to be charitable, be so in all things-aye, say these philosophers, "Thou shalt not kill." True, but if it applies to animals, it applies to vegetation, which has natural life. Why munch that to death? why devour the mangled remains of dead wheat? These Cornites should remember there is reason in all things.

There is no proof that Pythagoras had many followers. If he had, of course they must have been the "rag tag and bob-tail" that hang on every age, till death with a sickly eye and tired of the sight, lops them off.

The inventions that men seek out are so strange that they confound their inventors, to whom they return a plague. They may for a time deceive the foolish; but the wise laugh and pass on. Pandora and quacks are partners. Every newly invented lotion is a disease added to her catalogue. Folly and the wild philosophers are of a birth. The latter are agents for her wholesale whims and opinions. If we go on with inventions, discoveries and wonders, in the same proportion that we have done in the past, the earth won't hold us, and we shall be obliged to link in by annexation the whole solar system.