"What say I!--just what I say of the Tulip bubble, of the Mississippi Scheme, of the Merino Sheep enterprise, of the Down-East Timber lands, of the Morus Multicaulis, of the California fever, and the Cuba hallucination. They are periodical outbreaks of commercial enterprise, unavoidable in the very nature of things, and never long, nor safely postponed; growing out of a plethora--never out of a scarcity--a plethora of wealth and population, and corresponding, in the regularity of their returns, with the plague and the cholera."
"And these are what you have called _bubbles_?"
"And yet, if I understood you aright, when you said, 'I go for bubbles--hurrah for bubbles'--you meant to speak well of them?"
"To be sure I did--certainly--yes--no--so far as a magazine article goes, I did."
"But a magazine article, my love--bear with me, I pray you--ought to be something better than a brilliant paradox, hey?"
"Well, then--however _telling_ it may be to hurrah for bubbles, and to call your wife a bubble, and your child another; because the world is all a 'fleeting show,' and bubbles are a 'fleeting show;' or because the Scriptures tell us that everything here is emptiness and vanity--and bubbles are emptiness and vanity; I have the whole of your argument, I believe?--is hardly worthy of a man, who, in writing, would wish to make his fellow-man better or wiser--"
"Well done the bubble!--I never heard _you_ reason before: keep it up, my dear."
"You never gave me a chance; and, by the way, there is one bubble you have entirely overlooked."
"The buried treasures, and the cross of pure gold, a foot and a half long, you were talking with that worthy man about, last winter, when I came upon you by surprise, and found you both sitting together in the dark--and whispering _so_ mysteriously?"
"Captain Watts, you mean, the lighthouse keeper?"
"Yes. Upon my word, Peter, I began to think you were _up_ for California. I never knew you so absent in all your life as you were, day after day, for a long while after that conversation."
"The very thing, my dear!--and as I happen to know most of the parties, and was in communication for three whole years with the leader of the enterprise, I do think it would be one of the very best illustrations to be found, in our day, of that strange, steadfast, unquenchable faith, which upholds the bubble-hunter through all the sorrows and all the discouragements of life, happen what may: and you shall have the credit of suggesting that story. But then, look you, my dear--if I content myself with telling the simple truth, nobody will believe me."