 young gentleman's ruin and
disgrace. This singular proposition raised the curiosity of Peregrine, who
promised to yield all manner of attention, and desired him to begin without
further preamble.
    The governor, encouraged by this appearance of candour, expressed his
satisfaction in finding him so open to conviction, and told him he would proceed
upon geometrical principles. Then hemming thrice, observed, that no mathematical
inquiries could be carried on, except upon certain data, or concessions to
truths, that were self-evident; and therefore he must crave his assent to a few
axioms, which he was sure Mr. Pickle would see no reason to dispute. »In the
first place then (said he) you will grant, I hope, that youth and discretion are
with respect to each other as two parallel lines, which though infinitely
produced, remain still equi-distant, and will never coincide: then you must
allow that passion acts upon the human mind, in a ratio compounded of the
acuteness of sense, and constitutional heat: and thirdly, you will not deny that
the angle of remorse is equal to that of precipitation. These postulata being
admitted, (added he, taking paper, pen and ink, and drawing a parallelogram) let
youth be represented by the right line a, b, and discretion by another right
line c, d, parallel to the former. Compleat the parallelogram, a, b, c, d, and
let the point of intersection, b, represent perdition. Let passion, represented
under the letter c, have a motion in the direction c, a. At the same time, let
another motion be communicated to it, in the direction c, d, it will proceed in
the diagonal c, b, and describe it in the same time that it would have described
the side c, a, by the first motion, or the side c, d, by the second. To
understand the demonstration of this corollary, we must premise this obvious
principle, that when a body is acted upon by a motion or power parallel to a
right line given in position, this power, or motion, has no effect to cause the
body to approach towards that line, or recede from it, but to move in a line
parallel to a right line only; as appears from the second law of motion:
therefore c, a, being parallel to d, b,« --
    His pupil having listened to him thus far, could contain himself no longer,
but interrupted the investigation with a loud laugh, and told him that his
postulata put him
