Today's Stichomancy for Dan Brown

situation, but is dazed and cannot arrive at any conclusion. His one NECESSITY is Reconciliation, Atonement. He finds he cannot LIVE outside of and alienated from his tribe. He makes a Sacrifice, an offering to his fellows, as a seal of sincerity--an offering of his own bodily suffering or precious blood, or the blood of some food-animal, or some valuable gift or other--if only he may be allowed to return. The offering is accepted. The ritual is performed; and he is received back. I have already spoken of this perfectly natural evolution of the twin-ideas of Sin and Sacrifice, so I need not enlarge upon the subject. But two things

Pagan and Christian Creeds

uglier spectacle than these sisters rivalling in unsisterliness. Here is a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture - he had a Puritanic vein, which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic horror; he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses and at their hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair of great Bibles, or praying aloud for each other's penitence with marrowy emphasis; now each, with kilted petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some tempestuous evening; now sitting each at her window, looking out upon the summer landscape sloping far below

then added with feeling: "But I've got that SOLID!"

And if I have not also shown that German is a harassing and infuriating study, my execution has been at fault, and not my intent. I heard lately of a worn and sorely tried American student who used to fly to a certain German word for relief when he could bear up under his aggravations no longer--the only word whose sound was sweet and precious to his ear and healing to his lacerated spirit. This was the word DAMIT. It was only the SOUND that helped him, not the meaning; [3] and so, at last, when he learned that the emphasis was not on the first syllable,