all things, whether in heaven,
or upon the earth, or in the waters under the earth, whether small or
great, visible or invisible, animate or inanimate; whether the eye can
see, or the ear can hear, or the nose can smell, or the fingers touch;
finally, whatever exists or is imaginable in the nature of things, past,
present, or to come, all may be abstractions."

"Indeed!" said Uncle Tim, "pray, what do you make of the abstraction of
a red cow?"

"A red cow," said the Doctor, "considered metaphysically or as an
abstraction, is an animal possessing neither hide nor horns, bones nor
flesh, but is the mere type, eidolon, and fantastical semblance of these
parts of a quadruped. It has a shape without any substance, and no color
at all, for its redness is the mere counterfeit or imagination of such.
As it lacks the positive, so is it also deficient in the accidental
properties of all the animals in its tribe, for it has no locomotion,
stability, or endurance, neither goes to pasture, gives milk, chews the
cud, nor performs any other function of the horned beast, but is a mere
creation of the brain, begotten by a freak of the fancy and nourished by
a conceit of the imagination."

"Pshaw!" exclaimed Aunt Judy. "All the metaphysics under the sun
wouldn't make a pound of butter!"

"That's a fact," said Uncle Tim.

* * * * *

_There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are:--
And it cometh everywhere._

EMERSON.

XLIX. INDIAN SUMMER.[J]

SAMUEL LOVER.--1797-1868.

When summer's verdant beauty flies,
And autumn glows with richer dyes,
A softer charm beyond them lies--
It is the Indian summer.
Ere winter's snows and winter's breeze
Bereave of beauty all the trees,
The balmy spring renewal sees
In the sweet Indian summer.

And thus, dear love, if early years
Have drown'd the germ of joy in tears,
A later gleam of hope appears--
Just like the Indian summer:
And ere the snows of age descend,
O trust me, dear one, changeless friend,
Our falling years may brightly end--
Just like the Indian summer.

FOOTNOTES:

[J] The brief period which succeeds the autumnal close, called the
"Indian Summer,"--a reflex, as it were, of the early portion of the
year--strikes a stranger in America as peculiarly beautiful, and
quite charmed m