ee the photographic record of our thoughts
and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more pieces to make
up a conscious life or a living body than you think for. Why, some of
you were surprised when a friend of mine told you there were fifty-eight
separate pieces in a fiddle. How many "swimming glands"--solid,
organized, regularly formed, rounded disks taking an active part in all
your vital processes, part and parcel, each one of them, of your
corporeal being--do you suppose are whirled along, like pebbles in a
stream, with the blood which warms your frame and colors your cheeks?--A
noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop of blood, under the
microscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a
calculation. The counting by the micrometer took him a week.--You have,
my full-grown friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet
livery, running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live,
sixty-five billions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions. Errors
excepted.--Did I hear some gentleman say, "Doubted? "--I am the
Professor. I sit in my chair with a petard under it that will blow me
through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I do not know what I am
talking about and whom I am quoting.

Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and
saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been
waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible
that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I have
been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? Listen, then. The
number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the
incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts
accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in
the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in the
world of outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now at
our table, and proving to be the daughter of an old acquaintance some of
us may remember, is the special example which led me through this
labyrinth of reflections, and finally lands me at the commencement of
this young girl's story, which, as I said, I have found the time and felt
the interest to learn something of, and which I think I can tell without
wronging the unconscious subject of my brief delineation.
IRIS.

You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile