the forge with unimpaired reverence for the intellectual philosophy of my hammer.

5. Passing along the street one afternoon, I heard a noise in an old building, as of some one puffing a pair of bellows. So without more ado I stepped in, and there, in a corner of a room, I saw the masterpiece of all the machinery that has ever been invented since the birth of Tubal Cain. In its construction it was as simple and unassuming as a cheese-press. It went with a lever-with a lever longer, stronger, than that with which Archimedes promised to lift the world.

6. "It is a printing press," said a boy standing by the ink-trough, with a queueless turban of brown paper on his head. "A printing press ?" I queried musingly to myself. "A printing press? What do you print?" I asked.

7. "Print?" said the boy, staring at me doubtfully, "why, we print thoughts." "Print thoughts!" I slowly repeated after him; and we stood looking for a moment at each other in mutual admiration, -he in the absence of an idea, and I in pursuit of one. But I looked at him the hardest, and he left another ink mark on his forehead from a pathetic motion of his left hand to quicken his apprehension of my meaning.

8. "Why, yes," he reiterated, in a tone of forced confidence, as if passing an idea which, though

having been current a hundred years, might still be counterfeit for all he could show on the spot, "we print thoughts, to be sure." "But, my boy," I asked, in honest soberness, "what are thoughts? and how can you get hold of a man's thoughts to print them ?"

9. "Thoughts are what come out of the people's minds,” he replied. "Get hold of them, indeed! Why, minds aren't anything you can get hold of, nor thoughts either. All the minds that ever thought, and all the thoughts that minds ever made, wouldn't make a ball as big as your fist. Minds, they say, are just like air: you can't see them; they don't make any noise, nor have any color; they don't weigh anything. Bill Deepcut, the sexton, says that a man weighs just as much when his mind has gone out of him as he did before.— No, sir; all the minds that ever lived wouldn't weigh an ounce troy."

10. "Then how do you print thoughts?" I asked. "If minds are thin as air, and thoughts thinner still, and make no noise, and have no substance, shade, or color, and are like the winds, and, more than the winds, are anywhere in a moment— sometimes in heaven, and sometimes on earth and in the waters under the earth-how can you get hold of them? How can you see them when caught, or show them to others?"

1. Transposed, genius, automatons, voluptuous, antipodes, attribute, intellectual, philosophy, hexaped, dwindled, aggregation, Archimedes, queueless, queried, counterfeit, enormous, pathetic.

2. What machinery is meant by "iron intellects"? Is a bale of cotton made into cloth as here stated? What "attribute of divinity" is meant here? A hexaped has how many feet? Can you give any other words in which ped means foot? How great is the velocity of the wind? What is meant by "tuning my anvil"? Who was Tubal Cain?

XXVIII. WHY I LEFT THE ANVIL.

PART II.

1. Ezekiel's eyes grew luminous with a new idea, and, pushing his ink-roller proudly across the metallic page of the newspaper, he replied, "Thoughts work and walk in things that make tracks; and we take these tracks, and stamp them on paper, or on iron, wood, stone, or what not. This is the way we print thoughts. Don't you understand?"

2. The pressman let go the lever and looked interrogatively at Ezekiel, beginning at the patch on his stringless brogans, and following up with his eye to the top of the boy's brown paper buff cap. Ezekiel comprehended the felicity of his illustration, and, wiping his hands on his tow apron, gradually assumed an attitude of earnest exposition. I gave him an encouraging wink, and so he went on.

3. "Thoughts make tracks," he continued impressively, as if evolving a new phase of the idea by repeating it slowly. Seeing we assented to this proposition inquiringly, he stepped to the typecase, with his eye fixed admonishingly upon us. "Thoughts make tracks," he repeated, arranging in his left hand a score or two of metal slips, "and with these letters we can take the exact impression of every thought that ever went out of the heart of a human man; and we can print it, too," giving the inked form a blow of triumph with his fist: "we can print it, too, give us paper and ink enough, till the great round earth is blanketed around with a coverlid of thoughts as much like the pattern as two peas.'

4. Ezekiel seemed to grow an inch at every word, and the brawny pressman looked first at him, and then at the press, with evident astonishment. "Talk about the mind's living for ever!" exclaimed the boy, pointing patronizingly to the ground, as if mind were lying there incapable of immortality until the printer reached it a helping hand; "why, the world is brimful of live, bright, industrious thoughts, which would have been dead, as dead as a stone, if it hadn't been for boys like me who have run the ink-rollers.

5. "Immortality, indeed! why, people's minds wouldn't be immortal if 'twasn't for the printers—

at any rate in this planetary burying-ground. We are the chaps who manufacture immortality for dead men," he subjoined, slapping the pressman graciously on the shoulder.

6. "Give us one good healthy mind," resumed Ezekiel, "to think for us, and we will furnish a dozen worlds as big as this with thoughts to order. Give us such a man, and we will insure his life; we will keep him alive for ever among the living. He can't die, any way you can fix it, when once we have touched him with these bits of inky pewter. He shall not die nor sleep. We will keep his mind at work on all the minds that live on the earth, and all the minds that shall come to live here, as long as the world stands."

7. "Ezekiel," I asked, in a subdued tone of reverence, "will you print my thoughts, too?" "Yes, that I will," he replied, "if you will think some of the right kind." "Yes, that we will," echoed the pressman. And I went home and thought, and Ezekiel has printed my "thoughttracks" ever since.

1. Luminous, interrogatively, felicity, comprehended, exposition, evolving, proposition, inquiringly, admonishingly, patronizingly, planetary, subjoined, subdued.

2. What was Ezekiel's "new idea"? What is meant by "metallic page"? "an attitude of earnest exposition "? "evolv