subdued his spirits that he could no longer conceive the possibility
of happiness, nor had the heart to try for it. Nevertheless,
happening to, overhear some conversation in the Intelligence Office
respecting wealth to be rapidly accumulated by a certain mode of
speculation, he resolved to live out this one other experiment of
better fortune. Many persons desired to exchange their youthful
vices for others better suited to the gravity of advancing age; a
few, we are glad to say, made earnest, efforts to exchange vice for
virtue, and, hard as the bargain was, succeeded in effecting it.
But it was remarkable that what all were the least willing to give
up, even on the most advantageous terms, were the habits, the
oddities, the characteristic traits, the little ridiculous
indulgences, somewhere between faults and follies, of which nobody
but themselves could understand the fascination.

The great folio, in which the Man of Intelligence recorded all these
freaks of idle hearts, and aspirations of deep hearts, and desperate
longings of miserable hearts, and evil prayers of perverted hearts,
would be curious reading were it possible to obtain it for
publication. Human character in its individual developments-human
nature in the mass--may best be studied in its wishes; and this was
the record of them all. There was an endless diversity of mode and
circumstance, yet withal such a similarity in the real groundwork,
that any one page of the volume-whether written in the days before
the Flood, or the yesterday that is just gone by, or to be written
on the morrow that is close at hand, or a thousand ages hence--might
serve as a specimen of the whole. Not but that there were wild
sallies of fantasy that could scarcely occur to more than one man's
brain, whether reasonable or lunatic. The strangest wishes--yet
most incident to men who had gone deep into scientific pursuits, and