Great Mysteries and Little Plagues

about the steps of your doors, in every street of every village, in every green field, and every crowded thoroughfare. They flourish bravely in snow-storms, in the dust of the trampled highway, where drums are beating and colors flying--in the roar of cities. They love the sounding sea-breeze and the open air, and may always be found about the wharves, and rejoicing before the windows of toy-shops. They love the blaze of fireworks and the smell of gunpowder; and where that is, they are, to a dead certainty.

You have but to go abroad for half an hour in pleasant weather, or to throw open your doors or windows on a Saturday afternoon, if you live anywhere in the neighborhood of a school-house, or a vacant lot, with here and there a patch of green, or a dry place in it, and steal behind the curtains, or draw the blinds, and let the fresh wind blow through and through the chambers of your heart for a few minutes, winnowing the dust and scattering the cobwebs that have gathered there while you were asleep,