a tub of water it
would turn into a snake in the course of a few days. That did not seem
to me so very much stranger than it was that an egg should turn into a
chicken. What can I say to that? Only that it is the Lord's doings, and
marvellous in my eyes; and if our philosophical friend should find some
little live creatures, or what seem to be live creatures, in any of his
messes, I should say as much, and no more. You do not think I would shut
up my Bible and Prayer-Book because there is one more thing I do not
understand in a world where I understand so very little of all the
wonders that surround me?

It may be very wrong to pay any attention to those speculations about
the origin of mankind which seem to conflict with the Sacred Record. But
perhaps there is some way of reconciling them, as there is of making the
seven days of creation harmonize with modern geology. At least, these
speculations are curious enough in themselves; and I have seen so
many good and handsome children come of parents who were anything
but virtuous and comely, that I can believe in almost any amount of
improvement taking place in a tribe of living beings, if time and
opportunity favor it. I have read in books of natural history that dogs
came originally from wolves. When I remember my little Flora, who, as I
used to think, could do everything but talk, it does not seem to me
that she was much nearer her savage ancestors than some of the horrid
cannibal wretches are to their neighbors the great apes.

You see that I am tolerably liberal in my habit of looking at all
these questions. We women drift along with the current of the times,
listening, in our quiet way, to the discussions going on round us in
books and in conversation, and shift the phrases in which we think and
talk with something of the same ease as that with which we change our
style of dress from year to year. I doubt if you of the other sex
know what an effect this habit of accommodating our tastes to changing
standards has upon us. Nothing is fixed in them, as you know; the very
law of fashion is change. I suspect we learn from our dressmakers to
shift the costume of our minds, and slip on the new fashions of thinking
all the more easily because we have been accustomed to new styles of
dressing every season.

It frightens me to see how much I have written without having yet said a
word of what I began this letter on purpose to say. I have taken so much
space in "defining my