confine of his first clay cradle, he struggles,
upheaves himself, feels about for light and air, and
tries to expand—to put forth wings. With
long effort he lifts himself above the earth. No
sooner does he feel the air of Heaven, than again,
the winged impulse quickens in his veins; and
first the leaf, and then the petal, then the tender
stamen, and airy pollen, attest in successive
stages the rudimental results of his intense and
repeated efforts to put forth the perfect wing.
In the heart of the flower there is the vision and
the hope of a distant paradise somewhere in the
far-off summer sky, and the flower sighs forth in
sweet odours its aching heart towards that
unattained but promised home. But then come
the ancient foes of the flower-elves, the numberless
tribes of the devouring worms; and these
suck dry the busy veins, and bite off the
rudimental wings, and the poor flower-elf,
arrested in his patient purpose, is compelled to
descend again into the earth, and begin anew,
under novel chances, the endless effort of an
ever-baffled, never-vanquished desire. But the worms
do not injure the flower-elves from mere wanton
malignity, but by a defect of nature, which compels
them to the wrong they do. And when it is
done, they are seized with a vague remorse of
their own deed, and forthwith forego their former
ways, and come in penitent pilgrimage to the
poor flower they have wronged; and there they
build to themselves hermit-cells of repentance,
wherein, after long fast, they fall in trance, and a
wondrous change is wrought upon them. For
the wing-bearing life of the flower, having long
since passed into the body of the worm, ennobles
his nature; and, reconciled thereto by this
process of penitence and purification, completes in
the worm the destiny of the flower; so that the
crawling thing becomes at last a winged thing,
which you call the butterfly. And the butterfly
is born with a heart full of pity and love for the
poor flower whose wings he has stolen away.
So lovingly he lingers about her, so tenderly he
hovers around her, that the grateful blossom
takes him, with forgiving care, to her trembling
bosom, and wraps him in her richest odours, and
feeds him on her sweetest sweets.

"But," continued the Doctor, " the difliculty
of the task you are about to undertake is far
greater than you conceive. The evil and the
wrong of which the lesser and humbler habitants
of this world complain, have their origin less in
any immitigable hostility on the part of Nature,
than in the ignorance or the indifference of man.
Man contains in his own all the inferior natures,
and these cannot be reconciled with each other
except by a previous reconcilement between the
nature of man and the nature of all things whose
welfare is included within his. He, then, that
would reform the least of this world's wrongs
must first reform this world's master—Man.
Men must outlive the arrogance which is only
compatible with ignorance, and learn to look with
a larger loving-kindness upon all the creatures
of the Infinite Love.

"Begin, then, with man. But the grown man
is already out of your reach. His inner being,
like his outer frame, is set and fixed beyond your
power to change it. This is not the case with
the child. In the hearts of children your empire
may yet be established. For you are a child
yourself, and your existence is an immortal
childhood. Do not, then, despise your comrades of
the earth. They are ready to welcome and able
to love you, and it is by love that all sorrow and
wrong must finally be subdued. On the heart
of a child you may hope to found a universal
empire over mankind. For the mother is
influenced by the child, and she in turn influences
the husband, the husband transmits and
communicates that influence to his fellow-men by
various ways, and in the consequence of all his
acts, so that the influence you may secure in a
child's heart, will in this way reach the state,
and, through the state, affect mankind. The
nursery is the parent of the state, and the whole
world is but a nursery of nations."

Obedient to the counsels of Lacerta, and my
own instincts, I have devoted myself to this
endeavour, and have, by this time, succeeded in
introducing myself into every nursery. I am
the welcome guest of every house that is sweetened
by the smile of a mother, or enlivened by
the innocent laughter of childhood, whose friend
and champion I have ever been. The circumstance
which, as I have already informed you,
first attracted me to your house, has afforded me
many opportunities of becoming better acquainted
with your character than you are yet aware of.
Your love of children has secured to you my
affection, and induces me to form the most
promising opinions as to your future capacity to
assist the great purpose of my existence.

It was some time after Nutcracker had finished
this strange biography before I could bring
myself to break by a word the charm of the silence
that ensued, as he leaned back in his seat with a
complacent face, and fixed upon mine a look of
benevolent approbation. At length I stammered
out some incoherent assurance of the pleasure I
experienced in the knowledge that I had so long
been honoured by the friendship of a being for
whom I entertained the profoundest respect.

"This is not altogether so surprising," said
he, with a mysterious smile, " for I have other
grounds of interest in your family. Your cousin
Theodore is one of my most intimate friends."

"Thank Heaven," I exclaimed, "then he is not
dead after all?"

"Dead? who ever supposed that he was
dead?" replied my host, with a tone of
impatient surprise.

"I feared he was drowned," said I. "Where
is he? Is he well? Is he happy?"

"Perfectly happy," said Nutcracker. " Instead
of dragging on from day to day a jaded and
useless existence at the dreary desk of a public
office, or plodding step by step up the professional
pulpit of learned ignorance, he is now free lord