After the letters of M. Baudois and Don Pedro had been read aloud to the Pr?tor’s family, the Dosch remarked that the Animalculan Mouthpats furnished confirmatory evidence of the provincialism of the Asiatic Heraclean emigrants, as they were undoubtedly parasitic companions of the involuntary voyage across the ocean. Their Scythio-Celtic jargonic idiom corresponds with the Latins’ incursive invasions into the Klappish and Celtic territories, while in habits and customs they show the marked impression of instinctive traits peculiar to the old Heracleans in their irruptive stages of progression. With the classical tendency of history to transmit evil, the Mouthpats have retained the traditional impressions of their ancestors’ instinctive association with the Gigas, in addition to those derived from direct inheritance in kind.

In compliance with Don Pedro’s request for Manatitlan aid and protection, the Dosch announced his intention of sending two giantescoes to act as auramental governantes for Lovieta and Lavoca, preparatory to their entrance into the Heraclean school, which were to be selected from the reserve maiden fund for the relief of widowers. In answer to Mr. Welson’s inquiry with regard to their age, the Dosch assured him that there was no need of anxiety on that score, for the funded maidens were not of the soured acrimonious kind represented as “old maids” by Giga bruits, whose passionate instincts of affection had been denied marriageable reciprocation, but of matured 278kindly dispositions to whom the controlling influence of animal passion was unknown. “Yet,” he continued, “they possess the common inheritance of womankind, which delights in making the tongue vocalize thoughtful inspirations of affection; but with our Manatitlan matrons and maidens its use for detraction is also unknown.”

Correliana’s usually quiet composure had shown evidences of happy transition to fluttering excitement, after an interview with the padre, which was heightened when the Dosch, after the preliminaries for Manatitlan correspondence with the family of Don Pedro had been arranged, asked her to show the material cause of her gratefully glad perturbation. Upon this hint she produced from her bosom the photographic likeness of Captain Greenwood. This he had presented to her on board of the Tortuga; but while engaged in packing, the day before their departure for Heraclea, it had mysteriously disappeared, and after thorough search it was supposed to be irretrievably lost. The wind was charged with its abstraction, and the waters of the river as its receiver, but Correliana was confident in the belief of their innocence from the absence of the first party, as the day was perfectly calm, and she recollected of placing it beneath a book when the Captain required the aid of her hands. The book, unfortunately, was the “Art of Confession Made Easy,” by Fray Manuel de Jaen; and belonged to Padre Simon, who in one of his “fits” of abstraction recovered it, and used the photograph as a mark, unobserved by Correliana; and as it contained his polemical stock of knowledge for quotation, he was guarded in withholding it from others, and immediately placed it in the transom locker of his stateroom, where it remained lost to his own memory until found by Antonio on the boat’s passage down the river. As the loss of the photograph had been the cause of continued anxiety to all, 279from the inconsolable regrets of the loser, the Captain determined to summons the padre to appear with the couriers at Amelcoy, to bear the treasure back to its owner, in penance for the sorrow he had caused by his heedlessness. Correliana’s conscious blush of happiness, as the semblance of her chosen was passed in review, imparted its impression to the invisible as well as the visible, for the Doschavita with her coterie of companions were anxious to judge of the selection made by their favorite.

The Dosch remarked that the odd fancy of the premeditated surroundings, was in kind characteristic of the jumble of gold, charity, and redeeming grace, as the barter conditions of salvation in the Giga mythology. Professional craftsmen, and mechanical members of societies and orders, parade their badges and insignia as the vain-glorious emblems of exclusive selfishness, while they preach a universal heaven free to all without distinction of persons. Your democratic orators, styled the “heaven born,” assume attitudes for portraiture suited to their special assumptions of vanity for self-inflation; but with the evident fear that the beholder’s perce............