rns and hoofs and stings, all the
misfortunes of life seemed to come upon him at once. Bankruptcy,
bereavement, scandalization, and eruptive disease so irritating that
he had to re-enforce his ten finger-nails with pieces of earthenware
to scratch himself withal. His wife took the diagnosis of his
complaints and prescribed profanity. She thought he would feel better
if between the paroxysms of grief and pain he would swear a little.
For each boil a plaster of objurgation.

Probably no man was ever more tempted to take the bad advice than
when, at last, Job's three exasperating friends came in, Eliphaz,
Zophar, and Bildad, practically saying to him, "You old sinner, serves
you right; you are a hypocrite; what a sight you are! God has sent
these chastisements for your wickedness."

The disfigured invalid, putting down the pieces of broken saucer with
which he had been rubbing his arms, with swollen eyelids looks up and
says to his garrulous friends in substance, "The most wicked people
sometimes have the best health and are the most prospered," and then
in that connection hurls the question which every man and woman has
asked in some juncture of affairs, "Wherefore do the wicked live?"

They build up fortunes that overshadow the earth. They confound all
the life-insurance tables on the subject of longevity, dying
octogenarians, perhaps nonagenarians, possibly centenarians. Ahab in
the palace, Naboth in the cabinet. Unclean Herod on the throne,
consecrated Paul twisting ropes for tent-making. Manasseh, the worst
of all the kings of Juda, living longer than any of them. While the
general rule is the wicked do not live out half their days, there are
exceptions where they live on to great age and in a Paradise of beauty
and luxuriance, and die with a whole college of physicians expending
its skill in trying further prolongation of life, and have a funeral
with casket under mountain of calla-lilies, the finest equipages of
the city jingling and flashing into line, the poor, angle-worm of the
dust carried out to its hole in the ground with the pomp that might
make a spirit from some other world suppose that the Archangel Michael
was dead.

Go up among the finest residences of the city, and on some of the
door-plates you will find the names of those mightiest for commercial
and social iniquity. They are the vampires of society--they are the
gorgons of the century. Some of these men have each wheel of their
carriage a jugger