INTRODUCTION

This is a busy world, and life is too short, and too busily occupied for one to go a roundabout way to truth, when the end can be more readily reached by a short cut across lots. Most people prefer advice in homoeopathic dose, and religion in a condensed form the latter, especially, they would have divested of long prayers, and everything that squints at cant. These "Fragments' are the mere flashes of thought, and as such, we imagine, will arrest the attention of many minds when the obscurity of a bewildering argument, or tiresome essay, would only inspire indifference. It is with this thought we send this book of "Fragments" adrift, claiming for the many and varied topics treated the rare virtue of brevity, if nothing more, and craving for it the kind indulgence of a discerning, but not always sympathetic public.

THE AUTHOR.