the micrometer took him a _week_. You have, my full-grown friend, of
these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on your
vital errands day and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions
five hundred and seventy thousand millions, errors excepted. Did I
hear some gentleman say "Doubted"? I am the Professor; I sit in my
chair with a petard under it that will blow me through the skylight of
my lecture-room if I do not know what I am talking about and whom I am
quoting.

Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads
and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you
had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is
it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of
all that I have been saying and its bearing on what is now to come?
Listen, then. The number of these living elements in our body
illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of
our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of;
these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we
constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the
presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the
daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the
special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections,
and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl's story,
which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to
learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the
unconscious subject of my brief delineation.

A Short Lecture on Phrenology

_Read to the Boarders at Our Breakfast Table _