bull or the brown heifer die, look out for hail, or thunderstorm,
at least, as a forerunner of the event. Nothing less can possibly
console or satisfy us for such a most unaccountable, not to
say unnatural and unwarrantable, a dispensation. The poets have
ministered largely to this vanity on the part of mankind. Shakspere
is constantly at it, and Ben Jonson, and all the dramatists. Not
a butcher, in the whole long line of the butchering Caesars, from
Augustus down, but, according to them, died in a sort of gloom
glory, resulting from the explosion of innumerable stars and rockets,
and the apparitions of as many comets! "Gorgons, and hydras, and
chimeras dire," invariably announce the coming stroke of fate; and
five or seven moons of a night have suddenly arisen to warn some
miserable sublunarian that orders had been issued that there should
be no moon for him that quarter, or, in military and more precise
phrase, that he should have no "quarters" during that moon. Even our
venerable and stern old puritan saint, Milton--he who was blessed
with the blindness of his earthly eye, that he should be more
perfectly enabled to contemplate the Deity within--has given way to
this superstition when he subjects universal nature to an earthquake
because Adam's wife followed the counsels of the snake.

A pretty condition of things it would be, if stars, suns, and
systems, were to shoot madly from their spheres on such occasions!
Well might the devil laugh if such were the case! How he would chuckle
to behold globes and seas, and empires, fall into such irreverend
antics because some poor earthling, be he kingling or common sodling,
goes into desuetude, either by the operation of natural laws, or
the sharp application of steel or shot! Verily, it makes precious
little difference to the Great Reaper, by what process we finally
become harvested. He is sure of us, though no graves gape, no stars