loO GLAUCUS ; OK, 



the evening fires were lighted one by one ; the 

 soft murmur of the water-fall, and the pleasant 

 laugh of children, and the splash of homeward 

 oars, came clearer and clearer to the eaV at every 

 stroke : and as we rowed on, arose the recollec- 

 tion of many a brave and wise friend, whose lot 

 was cast in no such western paradise, but rather 

 in the infernos of this sinful earth, toiling even 

 then amid the festering alleys of Bcrmondsey and 

 Bethnal Green, to palliate death and misery 

 which they had vainly labored to prevent, 

 watching the strides of that very cholera which 

 they had been striving for years to ward off, 

 now re-admitted in spite of all their warnings, by 

 the carelessness, and laziness, and greed of sinful 

 man. And as I thought over the whole hapless 

 question of sanatory reform, proved long since 

 a moral duty to God and man, possible, easy, 

 even pecuniarily profitable, and yet left undone, 

 there seemed a sublime irony, most humbling to 

 man, in some of Nature's processes, and in the 

 silent and unobtrusive perfection with which she 

 has been taught to anticipate, since the founda- 

 tion of the world, some of the loftiest discoveries 

 of modern science, of which we are too apt to 

 boast as if we had created the method by dis- 



