flood. Men fight and make up; repent and go at it; feast and starve;
laugh and weep; pray and curse; cheat, chaffer, trick, truckle, cozen,
defraud, fib, lie, beg, borrow, steal, hang, drown--as in the laughing
and weeping, tricking and truckling, hanging and drowning times that
have been. Nothing changes, though much be new-fashioned: new fashions
but revivals of things previous. In the books of the past we learn
naught but of the present; in those of the present, the past. All
Mardi's history--beginning middle, and finis--was written out in
capitals in the first page penned. The whole story is told in a title-
page. An exclamation point is entire Mardi's autobiography."

"Who speaks now?" said Media, Bardianna, Azzageddi, or Babbalanja?"

"All three: is it not a pleasant concert?"

"Very fine: very fine.--Go on; and tell us something of the future."

"I have never departed this life yet, my lord."

"But just now you said you were risen from the dead." "From the buried
dead within me; not from myself, my lord."

"If you, then, know nothing of the future--did Bardianna?"

"If he did, naught did he reveal. I have ever observed, my lord, that
even in their deepest lucubrations, the profoundest, frankest,
ponderers always reserve a vast deal of precious thought for their own
private behoof. They think, perhaps, that 'tis too good, or too bad;
too wise, or too foolish, for the multitude. And this unpleasant
vibration is ever consequent upon striking a new vein of ideas in the