tch the showman himself,
and guess, not without a shudder, that they are lying in wait for
spectator also.

"Think of it: for three dollars a year I buy a season-ticket to this
great Globe Theatre, for which God would write the dramas (only that we
like farces, spectacles, and the tragedies of Apollyon better), whose
scene-shifter is Time, and whose curtain is rung down by Death.

"Such thoughts will occur to me sometimes as I am tearing off the
wrapper of my newspaper. Then suddenly that otherwise too often vacant
sheet becomes invested for me with a strange kind of awe. Look! deaths
and marriages, notices of inventions, discoveries, and books, lists of
promotions, of killed, wounded, and missing, news of fires, accidents,
of sudden wealth and as sudden poverty;--I hold in my hand the ends of
myriad invisible electric conductors, along which tremble the joys,
sorrows, wrongs, triumphs, hopes, and despairs of as many men and women
everywhere. So that upon that mood of mind which seems to isolate me
from mankind as a spectator of their puppet-pranks, another supervenes,
in which I feel that I, too, unknown and unheard of, am yet of some
import to my fellows. For, through my newspaper here, do not families
take pains to send me, an entire stranger, news of a death among them?
Are not here two who would have me know of their marriage? And strangest
of all, is not this singular person anxious to have me informed that he
has received a fresh supply of Dimitry Bruisgins? But to none of us does
the Present (even if for a moment discerned as such) continue
miraculous. We glance carelessly at the sunrise, and get used to Orion
and the Pleiades. The wonder wears off, and to-morrow this sheet, in
which a vision was let down to me from Heaven, shall be the wrappage to
a bar of soap or the platter for a beggar's broken victuals."--H. W.]

No. VII.

A LETTER

FROM A CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY IN ANSWER TO SUTTIN
QUESTIONS PROPOSED BY MR. HOSEA BIGLOW, INCLOSED IN
A NOTE FROM MR. BIGLOW TO S. H. GAY, ESQ., EDITOR OF
THE NATIONAL ANTISLAVERY STANDARD.

[Curiosity may be said to be the quality which pre-eminently
distinguishes and segregates man from the lower animals. As we trace the
scale of animated nature downward, we find this faculty of the mind (as
it may truly be called) diminished in the savage, and quite extinct in
the brute. The first object which civilized man proposes to himself I
take to be the