"Life," said the scientist, in a voice smothered by the earth he was throwing up into small hills, "is the harmonious action of heterogeneous but related faculties, operating in accordance with certain natural laws."
"Ah!" chattered the lover, "but that thawt of thing is vewy gweat blith in the thothiety of one'th thweetheart." And curling his tail about a branch, he swung himself heavenward and had a spasm.
"It is vita!" grunted the sententious scholar, pausing in his mastication of a Chaldaic root.
"It is a thistle," brayed the warrior: "very nice thing to take!"
"Life, my friends," croaked the philosopher from his hollow tree, dropping the lids over his cattish eyes, "is a disease. We are all symptoms."
"Pooh!" ejaculated the physician, uncoiling and springing his rattle. "How then does it happen that when we remove the symptoms, the disease is gone?"
"I would give something to know that," replied the philosopher, musingly; "but I suspect that in most cases the inflammation remains, and is intensified."
Draw your own moral inference, "in your own jugs."
CXXXIII.
A heedless boy having flung a pebble in the direction of a basking lizard, that reptile's tail disengaged itself, and flew some distance away. One of the properties of a lizard's camp-follower is to leave the main body at the slightest intimation of danger.