sixteenth or earlier. How much confidence he feels in himself as the
possessor of half-supernatural gifts I cannot say. I think his peculiar
birthright gives him a certain confidence in his whims and fancies which
but for that he would hardly feel. After this explanation, when I speak
of Number Five or Number Seven, you will know to whom I refer.

The company are very frank in their criticisms of each other. "I did not
like that expression of yours, planetary foundlings," said the Mistress.
"It seems to me that it is too like atheism for a good Christian like you
to use."

Ah, my dear madam, I answered, I was thinking of the elements and the
natural forces to which man was born an almost helpless subject in the
rudimentary stages of his existence, and from which he has only partially
got free after ages upon ages of warfare with their tyranny. Think what
hunger forced the caveman to do! Think of the surly indifference of the
storms that swept the forest and the waters, the earthquake chasms that
engulfed him, the inundations that drowned him out of his miserable
hiding-places, the pestilences that lay in wait for him, the unequal
strife with ferocious animals! I need not sum up all the wretchedness
that goes to constitute the "martyrdom of man." When our forefathers
came to this wilderness as it then was, and found everywhere the bones of
the poor natives who had perished in the great plague (which our Doctor
there thinks was probably the small-pox), they considered this
destructive malady as a special mark of providential favor for them. How
about the miserable Indians? Were they anything but planetary
foundlings? No! Civilization is a great foundling hospital, and
fortunate are all those who get safely into the creche before the frost
or the malaria has killed them, the wild beasts or the venomous reptiles
worked out their deadly appetites and instincts upon them. The very idea