* *

----Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table.--Young
fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare
of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to impale a
slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork holding it
beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons
that guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last,
and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find
one, if it was not in its place.--Now the odd thing was, that, after
waiting so many years to hear of this college trick, I should hear it
mentioned _a second time_ within the same twenty-four hours by a college
youth of the present generation. Strange, but true. And so it has
happened to me and to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid
succession by these twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked
like chain-shot.

I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as
an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of
subsoil in it. The explanation is, of course, that in a great many
thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest
our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the
enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness,
until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts
and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more pieces to
make up a conscious life or a living body than you think for. Why,
some of you were surprised when a friend of mine told you there
were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle. How many "swimming
glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed, rounded disks, taking an
active part in all your vital processes, part and parcel, each one of
them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose are whirled along, like
pebbles in a stream, with the blood which warms your frame and colors
your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop
of blood, under the microscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the
globules, and then made a calculation. The counting by the micrometer
took him _a week_.--You have, my full-grown friend, of these little
couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on your vital errands day
and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions, five hundred and
seventy thousand millions. Errors excepted.--Did I hear some gentl