第60章

--I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as identified with ourselves.In early years, while the child "feels its life in every limb," it lives in the body and for the body to a very great extent.It ought to be so.There have been many very interesting children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the things of earth and an extraordinary development of the spiritual nature.There is a perfect literature of their biographies, all alike in their essentials; the same "disinclination to the usual amusements of childhood "; the same remarkable sensibility; the same docility; the same conscientiousness; in short, an almost uniform character, marked by beautiful traits, which we look at with a painful admiration.It will be found that most of these children are the subjects of some constitutional unfitness for living, the most frequent of which I need not mention.They are like the beautiful, blushing, half-grown fruit that falls before its time because its core is gnawed out.They have their meaning,--they do not-live in vain,--but they are windfalls.I am convinced that many healthy children are injured morally by being forced to read too much about these little meek sufferers and their spiritual exercises.Here is a boy that loves to run, swim, kick football, turn somersets, make faces, whittle, fish, tear his clothes, coast, skate, fire crackers, blow squash "tooters," cut his name on fences, read about Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat the widest-angled slices of pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts with his back teeth and bite out the better part of another boy's apple with his front ones, turn up coppers, "stick" knives, call names, throw stones, knock off hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, "cut behind " anything on wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth, "holler" Fire! on slight evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an engine-company, or, in his own words, "blow for tub No.11," or whatever it may be;--isn't that a pretty nice sort of a boy, though he has not got anything the matter with him that takes the taste of this world out? Now, when you put into such a hot-blooded, hard-fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's hand a sad-looking volume or pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin, white-faced child, whose life is really as much a training for death as the last month of a condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in common between his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents? The time comes when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the beauty of resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the pillow of those who die before their time, in humble hope and trust.

But it is not until he has worked his way through the period of honest hearty animal existence, which every robust child should make the most of,--not until he has learned the use of his various faculties, which is his first duty,--that a boy of courage and animal vigor is in a proper state to read these tearful records of premature decay.I have no doubt that disgust is implanted in the minds of many healthy children by early surfeits of pathological piety.I do verily believe that He who took children in His arms and blessed them loved the healthiest and most playful of them just as well as those who were richest in the tuberculous virtues.Iknow what I am talking about, and there are more parents in this country who will be willing to listen to what I say than there are fools to pick a quarrel with me.In the sensibility and the sanctity which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence.But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust natures out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply what we Professors call "bad practice"; and I know by experience that there are worthy people who not only try it on their own children, but actually force it on those of their neighbors.

--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed, or done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized.A polite note from Messrs.Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at their Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted.We repaired to that scientific Golgotha.

Messrs.Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the woman in the toy called a "weather-house," both on the same wooden arm suspended on a pivot,--so that when one comes to the door, the other retires backwards, and vice versa.The more particular speciality of one is to lubricate your entrance and exit,--that of the other to polish you off phrenologically in the recesses of the establishment.Suppose yourself in a room full of casts and pictures, before a counterful of books with taking titles.I wonder if the picture of the brain is there, "approved" by a noted Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor's, folio plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim.An extra convolution, No.

9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which was not to be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very liberally supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of "organs." Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women,--horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of life,--looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or Joe Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them on his cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen "shiners" on a stripped twig of willow.

The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let the horn-combers wait,--he shall be bumped without inspecting the antechamber.