close to each other in the naked
breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a
crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a
cry mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some
Gloucester fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls
the name of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her
lonely pillow,--a widow.

Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack
sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for
them in the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and
events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that,
if there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar
occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case
for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence
among the Comfortable Classes. There are about as many twins in the
births of thought as of children. For the first time in your lives you
learn some fact or come across some idea. Within an hour, a day, a week,
that same fact or idea strikes you from another quarter. It seems as if
it had passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from
the blank wall that shuts in the world of thought. Yet no possible
connection exists between the two channels by which the thought or the
fact arrived. Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.

One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table boarders,
which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young
fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short, in order to
utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank
interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a
geode.

Aphorism by the Professor.

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food
of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything
at any hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods, and
you might as well attempt to regulate the time of highwater to suit
a fishing-party as to change these periods. The crucial experiment is
this. Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the suspected individual just ten
minutes before dinner. If this is eagerly accepted and d