doubt, again would give a courteous answer; but he would reply--if
he was a really educated man--that to comply with your request
would involve his giving up public work, under the probable
penalty of being dead within the twelve-month.

And how much work of every kind, intellectual as well as physical,
is spoiled or hindered; how many deaths occur from consumption and
other complaints which are the result of this habit of tight
lacing, is known partly to the medical men, who lift up their
voices in vain, and known fully to Him who will not interfere with
the least of His own physical laws to save human beings from the
consequences of their own wilful folly.

And now--to end this lecture with more pleasing thoughts--What
becomes of this breath which passes from your lips? Is it merely
harmful; merely waste? God forbid! God has forbidden that
anything should be merely harmful or merely waste in this so wise
and well-made world. The carbonic acid which passes from your
lips at every breath--ay, even that which oozes from the volcano
crater when the eruption is past--is a precious boon to thousands
of things of which you have daily need. Indeed there is a sort of
hint at physical truth in the old fairy tale of the girl, from
whose lips, as she spoke, fell pearls and diamonds; for the
carbonic acid of your breath may help hereafter to make the pure
carbonate of lime of a pearl, or the still purer carbon of a
diamond. Nay, it may go--in such a world of transformations do we
live--to make atoms of coal strata, which after being buried for
ages beneath deep seas, shall be upheaved in continents which are
yet unborn, and there be burnt for the use of a future race of
men, and resolved into their original elements. Coal, wise men