PROLEGOMENON. 29 



man, and the divine instinct of self-sacrifice, necessarily 

 become curses amidst the treacheries and villanies of men, 

 and that the philanthropist must forever continue to bleed 

 in the future, as he has done in the past, for the good of 

 mankind ? 



The Mountain Sanitarium, with its overtures of healing 

 and salvation, must not subtend this fatal angle, must 

 not succumb to the evil genius of humanity, must not 

 postpone its promises of joy to the reign of baleful en- 

 chantments, or be profaned by vulgarity and sin to gross 

 and common purposes. The faithful have trusted that this 

 could never be; but sometimes, especially in the disastrous 

 approach of the recent oscillations of the earthquake- wave 

 which has shivered the crust of the financial world, some- 

 what cracked and tottering, partially eclipsed, hid slightly 

 in the signless Inane, were its fate and destiny. 



In the mean time, with great suffering, great results have 

 been achieved, jostlings and difficulties have occurred and 

 been transcended, rough and ugly places in the road have been 

 passed, fierce battles have been fought with the sordid and 

 benighted, especially in that howling wilderness of doleful 

 things called " The Law." This, of course, necessitated 

 occasional contact and companionship (followed, as ever, 

 by somewhat disastrous results) with common publicans 

 and sinners, also frequently the more agreeable communion 

 with those inspirers of hope and solid rocks of anchorage 

 for the troubled, the members of the legal profession, to be 

 followed by vast but somewhat questionable spiritual ex- 

 pansions, inseparable from intercourse with this order of 

 beings, including numberless developments of the vulpine 

 instincts and marauding faculties, (omitting, fortunately, 

 to the great joy of the guardian angel of one soul, the 

 horrors of euchre, cigars, and snuff, three of the highest 

 intellectual indulgences and moral disciplines of this guild,) 

 coming as fruit natural and inevitable of the tuition of 

 renowned barristers carrying the culture and light, tlie 

 sharpness and wisdom, of ages in their heads, as well as 



