have nothing more to say."

"Look about you. Watch the busiest man you know--the wisest, the greatest,
among the renowned, the ambitious, and the mighty of earth, and tell me if
you can see one who does not spend his life blowing bubbles in the
sunshine--through the stump of a tobacco pipe. What living creature did you
ever know--"

"Did you speak to me, my dear?"

"No. Sarah, I was speaking to posterity."

Another nod from the little cap, and papa grows human.

"Yes!--what living creature did you ever know who was not more of a
bubble-hunter than he was anything else? We are all schemers--even the
wisest and the best--all visionaries, my dear."

By this time, papa had got mamma upon his knee, and the rest of the
conversation was at least an octave lower.

"Even so, my love. And what, after all, is the looming at sea; the Fata
Morgana in the Straits of Messina, near Reggio; or the Mirage of the
Desert, in Egypt and Persia, but a sample of those glittering
phantasmagoria, which are called _chateaux en Espagne_, or castles in the
air, by the wondrous men who spend their lives in piling them up, story
upon story, turrets, towers, and steeples--domes, and roofs, and pinnacles?
and _therefore_ do I say again, hurrah for bubbles!"

"What say you to the South Sea bubble, my dear?"

"What say I!--just what I say of the Tulip bubble, of the Mississippi
Scheme, of the Merino Sheep enterprise, of the Down-East Timber lands, of
the Morus Multicaulis, of the California fever, and the Cuba hallucination.
They are periodical outbreaks of commercial enterprise, unavoidable in the
very nature of things, and never long, nor safely postponed; growing out of
a plethora--never out of a scarcity--a plethora of wealth and population,
and corresponding, in the regularity of their returns, with the plague and
the cholera."

"And these are what you have called _bubbles_?"

"Precisely."

"And yet, if I understood you aright, when you said, 'I go for
bubbles--hurrah for bubbles'--you meant to speak well of them?"

"To be sure I did--certainly--yes--no--so far as a magazine article goes, I
did."

"But a magazine article, my love--bear with me, I pray you--ought to be
something better than a brilliant paradox, hey?"

"Go on--I like this."

"If you will promise not to be angry."

"I do."

"Well, then--however _telling_ it may be to hurrah for bubbles, and to call
your wife a bubble, and your child another; because the world is