fare sumptuously every day, in comparison
to them. Death,—which visits the houses of
all manner of labourers, artisans, mechanics,
men of all professions and all trades, at
intervals more or less remote,—has fixed a
permanent residence amongst these men, and
revels there, in a rich feast of mortality,
day by day. Living lazy lives, without
continuous occupation, and furnished with no
resources whereby to occupy their hands and
heads, it is but natural to find that drunkenness
and rampant profligacy hold high
carnival amongst them."

"But say, O Haroun!" I interrupted,
unwilling to hear more, "who are these men?"

"These," said the great magician, "are the
plebs for whom you pay so dearly, and who
fight your battles gallantly (nothing, it
appears, can ever prevent that) in all quarters
of the globe."

There is a limit to the credulity of the
most enthusiastic inquirer into the mysteries
of occult science, and here for the present
was the extent of mine.

Finding that it is necessary, however, to
offer some excuse for having mentioned the
last attempt at imposition by the pretended
wizard, I may state that I have done so because
I feel quite confident that, even supposing for
one moment such a state of things to exist,
nobody could by any possibility be
responsible for the fact,—nobody!

A SWEEP THROUGH THE STARS.

ONE of the most curious and pleasing
delusions to which the soul of man is in the habit
of yielding itself during repose, is the frequent
dream in which the sleeping individual fancies
himself gifted with the power of flight. He
is uplifted from the ground, as if in a buoyant
medium, and glides without an effort through
the scenes of an ever-varying panorama. He
skims over the surface of azure seas; he
traverses the glades of tropical forests; he
passes within sight of Alpine chains of rock
and mountain; he leaves ordinary combinations
of landscape behind him, and enters
some valley whose paradisaical loveliness has
no existing type amongst earthly realities.
He even feels a semi-consciousness that
pictures of such surpassing beauty are but visions,
after all; and he makes an effort, in
consequence, to prevent himself from waking to
behold his homely chamber instead of the
brilliant phantasms of his brain. It is a
remarkable psychological fact, that the same
identical scenes (which have no original type
here below, from which they are copied) are
visited, in dreams, by the same person, after
the lapse of days, months, and years.
Landscape dreams cannot be evoked at will; they
return spontaneously, depending probably on
certain similar conditions both of mind and
body, perhaps including the further
circumstances of ventilation and bedding. But
certain it is that their visits are capricious and
irregular; they come like shadows, and so
depart.

It would be a delightful privilege were we
able to command the visions of the night, and
to treat ourselves to a spectacle that should be
interesting, instructive, or magnificent, at will.
The nearest approach to this intellectual
indulgence is the perusal of some able book,
which, by the power of its subject, and the
magic of its style, carries off the mind to
distant realms of space, and to far-removed
epochs of time. One particular flying dream,
with which hundreds of men would be
enraptured, were they able to command it, is, not
a mere passing glance at things of the earth,
or at details or combinations of things of
earthly semblance, but a bird's-eye view of
celestial scenery,—of groups of worlds and
constellations, such as would serve to convey
some imperfect idea, less of planetary life or its
minutiæ, confined in its compass and narrow
in its scale, than of the grand plan and
disposition of this our corner of the universe. Let
us try and soar, then, in waking spirit, since
we cannot so compel our slumbering souls,
and mount far, far above that tiny,
microscopic bit of dust which the human race have
intitled Earth.

Tiny and even microscopic it really is, by
comparison, although it may boast a diameter
of eight thousand miles, or thereabouts, either
from pole to pole, or from the equatorial
surface of one hemisphere to that of its antipodes
on the hemisphere opposite. Jupiter alone
is equal to thirteen hundred Earths; the Sun
to a million four hundred thousand Earths;
Sirius to eleven millions two hundred
thousand of the same. But all that enormous
mass of matter is nothing—still by comparison.
Regard the firmament of Heaven
during any clear, cloudless, moonless night;
the deep-blue vault is scattered with stars, in
number prodigious, wonderful. Who can tell
their multitude? No man living; and it is
probable that no man will ever live who can.
for they are supposed to be infinite; in number
absolutely without limit or end. More
than twenty thousand stars are already
registered in our catalogues. William Herschell,
while observing certain portions of the Milky
Way, saw more than fifty thousand stars pass
over the field of his telescope, during a single
hour, in a strip of sky only two degrees in
breadth. Laplace admits that there may
exist ten thousand million stars; he might
have ventured to guess as far as a million
thousand million and yet have remained
within the truth. Put the sum of the bulk
of all these together, and then say whether
the Earth is not a microscopic atom, in spite
of our spelling her with a capital E. The
wonder is, that the animalcules who creep
over the surface of this insignificant particle
should be endowed with sufficient intellectual
power to speculate on the nature of the Sun
and the arrangement of the Universe.

But human thought and imagination can