Today's Stichomancy for Stephen Colbert

'Well, he'll be just where we are,' returned the lawyer. 'He's innocent, you see. What hangs people, my dear Pitman, is the unfortunate circumstance of guilt.'

'But indeed, indeed,' pleaded Pitman, 'the whole scheme appears to me so wild. Would it not be safer, after all, just to send for the police?'

'And make a scandal?' enquired Michael. '"The Chelsea Mystery; alleged innocence of Pitman"? How would that do at the Seminary?'

'It would imply my discharge,' admitted the drawing--master. 'I cannot deny that.'

'And besides,' said Michael, 'I am not going to embark in such a

SOCRATES: And yet we have already agreed--have we not?--that there can be no knowledge where there has not previously been ignorance, nor health where there has not been disease, nor virtue where there has not been vice?

CRITIAS: I think that we have.

SOCRATES: But then it would seem that the antecedents without which a thing cannot exist are not necessarily useful to it. Otherwise ignorance would appear useful for knowledge, disease for health, and vice for virtue.

Critias still showed great reluctance to accept any argument which went to prove that all these things were useless. I saw that it was as difficult to persuade him as (according to the proverb) it is to boil a stone, so I said: Let us bid 'good-bye' to the discussion, since we cannot agree

it were, to which the quondam father can be no more than a dry nurse.

This wonderful transformation is the instrument of nature, to balance matters between the sexes. The cruelty of scornful mistresses shall be return'd; the slighted maid shall grow into an imperious gallant, and reward her undoer with a big belly, and a bastard.

It is hardly possible to imagine the revolutions that this wonderful phaenomenon will occasion over the face of the earth. I long impatiently to see the proceedings of the Parliament of Paris, as to the title of succession to the crown, this being a

be quit of the shore. We know he was an orphan from a very early age, without brothers or sisters--no near relations of any kind, I believe, except that aunt who had quarrelled with his father. No affection stood in the way of the quiet satisfaction with which he thought that now all the worries were over, that there was nothing before him but duties, that he knew what he would have to do as soon as the dawn broke and for a long succession of days. A most soothing certitude. He enjoyed it in the dark, stretched out in his bunk with his new blankets pulled over him. Some clock ashore beyond the dock-gates struck two. And then he heard nothing more, because he went off into a light sleep from which he woke up with a

Chance