toy with a dozen bits of colored glass for contents? And, most important
of all, can you present it in a narrative or romance which will enable
me to pass an idle hour not disagreeably? How, for instance, does it
compare in this respect with other prophetic books on the shelf?_ 

_I am not referring to living authors; least of all to that flamingo of
letters who for the last decade or so has been a wonder to our island
birds.  For what could I say of him that is not known to every one--that
he is the tallest of fowls, land or water, of a most singular shape, and
has black-tipped crimson wings folded under his delicate rose-colored
plumage? These other books referred to, written, let us say, from thirty
or forty years to a century or two ago, amuse us in a way their poor
dead authors never intended.  Most amusing are the dead ones who take
themselves seriously, whose books are pulpits quaintly carved and
decorated with precious stones and silken canopies in which they stand
and preach to or at their contemporaries._ 

_In like manner, in going through this book of mine after so many years I
am amused at the way it is colored by the little cults and crazes, and
modes of thought of the 'eighties of the last century.  They were so