It is a part of our civilization, an offshoot of the very progress of which you speak, a sort of necessity in practical results, at least, that men shall so live as to wage war against nature, and against themselves; that they shall hurry themselves, or be hurried by inevitable circumstances, into the grave at the earliest possible moment.

The Rhodian school was the immediate offshoot from the school of Lysippus at Sicyon; and from this small island of Rhodes the Romans, when they conquered it, carried away three thousand statues.

Louiset, dead in infancy; Jacques Louis, a half imbecile, carried off by a nervous disease; Victor returned to the savage state, wandering about in who knows what dark places; our poor Charles, so beautiful and so frail; these are the latest branches of the tree, the last pale offshoots into which the puissant sap of the larger branches seems to have been unable to mount.

I have seen him in his misery industriously study "What I Know About Farming," squat on a farm in the West, and bring himself, his wife, and four miserable offshoots to the alms-house by endeavoring to apply the rules set down in "What I Know About Farming" to 160 acres of land.