the heart, lest you should think I have thus humbugged myself; for self-humbug it certainly is; and this is the most intensely human.  Not a fish, or reptile, bird, or beast; not a thing crawling, swimming, flying, or walking, but the human creature, humbugs himself.  ‘Man was made to mourn,’ I would change into, Man was made to be humbugged.  It is better to be greatly gullible, than a ‘cunning dog,’ for gulled we will be.  It is better to be caught at once, than to have our gills torn by wriggling off the hook the twenty times, to be caught at last.  It is better to walk straight into the net than to fatigue ourselves by coming to it in a roundabout way.  A Nova-Scotian once rallied a Down-Easter on the famous wooden hams.  ‘Yaas,’ was the reply, ’and they say that one of you actilly ate one and didn’t know the difference.’  Well, it is better to swallow our humbugs, as the Nova-Scotian did the Connecticut-cured ham, without detecting any thing peculiar in their flavor, than it is to find our mistake at the first cut or saw.  By the way, saltpeter is so needed for other purposes, that probably the Virginia cured will not now have as fine a flavor as formerly.

But, in the way:  You dissent from some of these remarks?  You’ve cut your eye-teeth, have you?  Possibly you forget that trip in the cars, when you ’cutely passed by the swell in flashy waistcoat and galvanized jewelry, and took a seat by a ‘plain blunt man’ in snuff-color; and after he had left the cars at the first station, and the conductor came to you and demanded, ‘Your ticket, sir!’ you probably forgot how in fumbling for it in your pocket, you found it, but not your porte-monnaie.  You perhaps set down in your mental memorandum, under the head of Appearances, not to be deceived by plain bluntness and snuff-color.  There you were wrong; your boasted reason is of no avail in detecting humbugs; there is no such thing as classifying them.  Then, too, we are in greater danger of being humbugged by another class of appearances.

In material things we are compelled to acknowledge that things the most reliable are the most unpretending.  The star, by which the mariner has steered for ages, is not a ‘bright particular star;’ the needle of his compass is shaped from one of the baser metals, (though in a figurative sense gold is highly magnetic.) The inner bears such a relation to the outer, that the inner senses are named from the outer; we are slow to perceive that also all objects of the outer senses, are but types of those of the inner.  You see how I have been obliged to borrow from the outer vocabulary.  I give this idea, in a nebular state, trusting that you will consolidate it.  Were we, in a figurative sense, to choose a guiding-star, it would be a comet, we are so taken with flash and show.  A great truth, though angels heralded its birth, and a star were drawn from its orbit to stand over its cradle, if that cradle were a manger, we