A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



great swing of the universal tides. The first 

 fretwork of the winter seemed rather winsome. 

 It was like the goo-goo of an Indian baby, as if 

 Boreas were not yet out of his hyperborean cra 

 dle, but, done up in laces, allowed you to take 

 liberties with him before he was able to go upon 

 the war-path. To begin the better acquaintance 

 with the traditional ruffian at this helpless stage, 

 and to see him grow and bluster confidentially, 

 is to rob him of his traditional terror. 



In our colloquia -peripatetica, my Virgil, the 

 Doctor, threw a good deal of his delightful rhap 

 sodical light upon the cold, but it was less his 

 plunging philosophy than my new intimacy with 

 the reputed monster that stirred the vegetable 

 sap of me, and sent it to the roots of things. 



&quot; Cold,&quot; the Doctor said, with a superb air of 

 finality, &quot; is man s chief bugaboo, created by his 

 sensory nerves. He has declared that heat is 

 life and cold is death a preposterous conclusion 

 that modern science is doing its best^to upset.&quot; 



He defied me to furnish one scrap of revela 

 tion or analogy to show that heaven is heated ; 

 and all the traditions, he said, plainly set forth 

 that the other place is. &quot; What nonsense it was 

 to say that cold was death, when cold absolutely 

 interfered with all the processes of death ; and a 

 frozen man puts a stopper on dissolution, while, 

 on the other hand, heat was a destroyer, a con 

 sumer. It was the cold-blooded animals that 

 lived the longest. Some of the pythons,&quot; he 

 declared, &quot; had lived a thousand years.&quot; He 



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