natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his
artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their
cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments.
Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion.
And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as
in a loose outside wrapper.

You shall observe,--the Professor said,--for, like Mr. John Hunter
and other great men, he brings in that SHALL with great effect
sometimes,--you shall observe that a man's clothing or series of
envelopes does after a certain time mould itself upon his
individual nature. We know this of our hats, and are always
reminded of it when we happen to put them on wrong side foremost.
We soon find that the beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with
all its irregular bumps and depressions. Just so all that clothes
a man, even to the blue sky which caps his head,--a little
loosely,--shapes itself to fit each particular being beneath it.
Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets, lovers, condemned criminals,
all find it different, according to the eyes with which they
severally look.

But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer
natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it.
There is a shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells
into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have
crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our
own past. See what these are and you can tell what the occupant
is.

I had no idea,--said the Professor,--until I pulled up my domestic
establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of roots I
had been making during the years I was planted there. Why, there
wasn't a nook or a corner that some fibre had not worked its way
into; and when I gave the last wrench, each of them seemed to
shriek like a mandrake, as it broke its hold and came away.

There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably,
and which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable
aspect and in all dimensions. The infinite galleries of the Past
await but one brief process and all their pictures will be called
out and fixed forever. We had a curious illustration of the great
fact on a very humble scale. When a certain bookcase, long
standing in one place, for which it was built, was removed, there
was the exact image on the wall of the whole, and of many of its
portions. But in t