-bower or palace-window, moonlit
kiosk or silent mountain-peak, as whim suggested or affairs urged.
This was magic indeed, and worthy the genii of any age.

The sense of reality with which I accepted this wonder of wonders has
furnished forth many a dream, sleeping and waking, since those days;
and it is no uncommon thing for me, even now, to be sailing through
the air, feeling its soft waves against my face, and the delicious
refreshment of the upper ether in my breast, only to wake as if I had
dropped into bed with a celerity that made the arrival upon earth
anything but pleasant. I am not sure but there is some reality in
these flights, after all. These aerial journeys may be foretastes of
those we shall make after we are freed from the incumbrance of
avoirdupois. I hope so, at least.

Yet there are good things of the kind here below, too. After all, what
were a magic carpet that could carry a single lucky wight,--at best,
but a species of heavenly sulky,--compared with a railroad train that
speeds along hundreds of men, women, and children, over land and
water, with any amount of heavy baggage, as well as a boundless extent
of crinoline? And if this equipage, gift of genii of our age, seem to
lack some of the celerity and secrecy which attended the voyagers of
the flying carpet, suppose we add the power of whispering to a friend
a thousand miles off the inmost thoughts of the heart, the most
desperate plans, the most dangerous secrets! Do not the two powers
united leave the carpet immeasurably behind?

Shakspeare is said, in those noted lines,--

"Dear as the ruddy drops
That visit this sad heart,"

to have anticipated the discovery of the circulation of the blood: did
not the writers of the Oriental stories foresee rail and telegraph,
and describe them in their own tropical style?

It is often said, that, although medical science leaves us pretty much
as it found us with regard to the days of the years of our pilgrimage,
and has as yet, with all its discoveries, done little towards
prolonging "this pleasing, anxious being," yet the material
improvements of our day do in effect lengthen mortal life for us. And
truly, what must Indian life have been worth, when it took a month to
cut down a tree with a stone hatchet, and when the shaping of a canoe
was the work of a year? When two hundred miles of travel consumed a
week's time, every two hundred miles' journey was worth a week's life;
and if we accept the