censor
finally said, solemnly,--

"Dugald! God knows that you said that wicked word."

"Does He?" cried the baby-victim of reral depravity, in a tone of
relief; "then _He_ knows it was a doke" (_Anglice_, joke).

But, mind you, the sin-tempting boot intended no "doke."

The toilet, with its multiform details and complicated machinery, is a
demon whose surname is Legion.

Time would fail me to speak of the elusiveness of soap, the knottiness
of strings, the transitory nature of buttons, the inclination of
suspenders to twist, and of hooks to forsake their lawful eyes, and
cleave only unto the hairs of their hapless owner's head. (It occurs to
me as barely possible, that, in the last case, the hooks may be
innocent, and the sinfulness may lie in _capillary_ attraction.)

And, O my brother or sister in sorrow, has it never befallen you, when
bending all your energies to the mighty task of "doing" your back-hair,
to find yourself gazing inanely at the opaque back of your brush, while
the hand-mirror, which had maliciously insinuated itself into your right
hand for this express purpose, came down upon your devoted head with a
resonant whack?

I have alluded, parenthetically, to the possible guilt of capillary
attraction, but I am prepared to maintain against the attraction of
gravitation the charge of total depravity. Indeed, I should say of it,
as did the worthy exhorter of the Dominie's old parish in regard to
slavery,--"It's the wickedest thing in the world, except sin!"

It was only the other day that I saw depicted upon the young divine's
countenance, from this cause, thoughts "too deep for tears," and,
perchance, too earthy for clerical utterance.

From a mingling of sanitary and economic considerations, he had cleared
his own sidewalk after a heavy snow-storm. As he stood, leaning upon his
shovel, surveying with smiling complacency his accomplished task, the
spite of the arch-fiend Gravitation was raised against him, and, finding
the impish slates (hadn't Luther something to say about "_as many devils
as tiles_"?) ready to cooeperate, an avalanche was the result, making the
last state of that sidewalk worse than the first, and sending the divine
into the house with a battered hat, and an article of faith
supplementary to the orthodox thirty-nine.

Prolonged reflection upon a certain class of grievances has convinced me
that mankind has generally ascribed them to a guiltless source. I refer
to the unspeakab