't smoke
till I have done steaming. I'll sit awhile silently for the operation.
Christendom hasn't such a man as your cousin Con for feeling himself
a pig-possessed all the blessed day, acting the part of somebody
else, till it takes me a quarter of an hour of my enfranchisement and
restoration of my natural man to know myself again. For the moment, I'm
froth, scum, horrid boiling hissing dew of the agony of transformation;
I am; I'm that pig disgorging the spirit of wickedness from his poor
stomach.'

The captain drooped to represent the state of the self-relieving victim
of the evil one; but fearful lest either of his cousins should usurp
the chair and thwart his chance of delivering himself, he rattled
away sympathetically with his posture in melancholy: 'Ay, we're
poor creatures; pigs and prophets, princes and people, victors and
vanquished, we 're waves of the sea, rolling over and over, and calling
it life! There's no life save the eternal. Father Boyle's got the truth.
Flesh is less than grass, my sons; 'tis the shadow that crosses the
grass. I love the grass. I could sit and watch grassblades for hours. I
love an old turf mound, where the grey grass nods and seems to know the
wind and have a whisper with it, of ancient times maybe and most like;
about the big chief lying underneath in the last must of his bones that
a breath of air would scatter. They just keep their skeleton shape as
they are; for the turf mound protects them from troubles: 'tis the nurse
to that delicate old infant!--Waves of the sea, did I say? We're wash in
a hog-trough for Father Saturn to devour; big chief and suckling babe,
we all go into it, calling it life! And what hope have we of reading
the mystery? All we can see is the straining of the old fellow's hams to
push his old snout deeper into the gobble, and the ridiculous curl of a
tail totally devoid of expression! You'll observe that gluttons have no
feature; they're jaws and hindquarters; which is the beginning and end
of 'm; and so you may say to Time for his dealing with us: so let it
be a lesson to you not to bother your wits, but leave the puzzle to
the priest. He understands it, and why? because he was told. There 's
harmony in his elocution, and there's none in the modern drivel about
where we're going and what we came out of. No wonder they call it an
age of despair, when you see the big wigs filing up and down the
thoroughfares with a great advertisement board on their should