.ESCULAPIUS. 519 



A stranger, walking the streets of American cities, and 

 elevating his eyes in view of certain august granite and mar- 

 ble masses, might suppose he had gotten into the presence 

 of palaces of proud old monarchs, huge men, kings by con- 

 sent of the earth. 



By what magical incantation, by the music of what Or- 

 pheus have the iron and marble, the sandstone and granite 

 danced to these cities, and arranged themselves in such 

 artistic piles ? The guardian angels of humanity must 

 weep over these monuments of sin, these sublime Choctaw 

 wigwams, made hideous to the spirit's eye by the scalps of 

 murdered gullibles. It is certainly the age of a new order 

 of miracles. Those imperial towers what mountains of con- 

 gealed human sweat 1 what tallyboards of years of human 

 agony ! the sad inheritance of the fall and fearful curse of a 

 wrathful Deity, in an expiatory struggle of twelve dismal 

 hours of work, represented by the dollar ! Touch those mar- 

 ble and granite blocks, they bleed and shriek like the trees in 

 " Dante's Hell," alive with the torments of suffering souls, and 

 this calamity from those cunningly-devised institutions of the 

 devil, quack nostrums, the meanest and most murderous 

 mode of assassination of the fraternal instincts of humanity, 

 abhorrent to men and angels both. Unhappy creators of 

 shams and Yankee vulturizations, gas, puff, sell the waters 

 of the rivers of the earth, diluted with simples, constituting 

 a series of infamous hoaxes, and insult humanity by building 

 from their revenue palaces to the stars. Say to the human 

 race, with the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan : " Yes, ye vile 

 race, for heWs amusement given, too mean for earth, yet 

 claiming kin with heaven ; is it enough, or must we, while 

 a thrill lives in your sapient bosoms, cheat you still ?" 



There is in heathen mythology a goddess, of revenge, 

 whose special function it is to see that retribution, swift 

 and sure, shall seize delinquent sinners. Unhappy fabri- 

 cators of nostrums, she is after you all even now, with 

 her sharpest stick. The granite and marble, the iron and 

 sandstone are but dust; they must crumble and vanish 



