"And what are husbands?"
"Bubbles of a large growth."
"Agreed!—I have nothing more to say."
"Look about you. Watch the busiest man you know—the wisest, the greatest, among the renowned, the ambitious, and the mighty of earth, and tell me if you can see one who does not spend his life blowing bubbles in the sunshine—through the stump of a tobacco pipe. What living creature did you ever know—"
"Did you speak to me, my dear?"
"No. Sarah, I was speaking to posterity."
Another nod from the little cap, and papa grows human.
"Yes!—what living creature did you ever know who was not more of a bubble-hunter than he was anything else? We are all schemers—even the wisest and the best—all visionaries, my dear."
By this time, papa had got mamma upon his knee, and the rest of the conversation was at least an octave lower.
"Even so, my love. And what, after all, is the looming at sea; the Fata Morgana in the Straits of Messina, near Reggio; or the Mirage of the Desert, in Egypt and Persia, but a sample of those glittering phantasmagoria, which are called chateaux en Espagne, or castles in the air, by the wondrous men who spend their lives in piling them up, story upon story, turrets, towers, and steeples—domes, and roofs, and pinnacles? and therefore do I say again, hurrah for bubbles!"