the "poor fellow" Astoragus sitting on your breast all night with his octopus fang at the back of your neck—eh?'
'I am very well, Doctor, thank you,' I answered. 'I have had a most refreshing sleep. Of course the personages you have named do disturb me more or less, but there is no remedy; we must try to endure all things, and resist their evil influence. I wish to take the world as I find it, and fight my way through like a brave soldier.'
He did not reply immediately, and I finished my breakfast in silence. I had been frequently warned never to say too much, and being somewhat garrulous by nature, required warning; and I was determined not to say 'poor fellow' again in that mighty presence, in reference to Astoragus, or any other person. My companion, or patron, or hero, or director—I might appropriately call him the good genius of those subterranean realms—remained wrapt in meditation for some time, and at length lifting up his head, like a lion which scents blood from afar, spoke thus as if in soliloquy:
'Wearisome platitudes, wild speculations incapable of proof; indiscriminate nonsense; universal folly; scandalous desires; wealth, pleasure, fashion; stifling of conscience; contempt of virtue and honour; dangerous political changes; neglect of experience; disregard of frightful examples of decay, disease and death; baseness in the soul, the blood, and the heart—this is the world into which we were born! . . . To what kind of country are we, children of men, now drifting? Who can devise an infallible cure for diseases? Why are we expected to be as hard and unfeeling as the rocks of the wilderness, and as insensible as the trees of the forest? Our spirit—is it immortal? tender, delicate, sensitive! Our flesh, different from the dust of which it is made, and tortured by heat, by cold, by famine, by excruciating pain. Our limbs may be smashed like rotten sticks, our shivering bodies pierced by the pitiless
