Over the Teacups

VII

There is no use in burdening my table with those letters of inquiry as to where our meetings are held, and what are the names of the persons designated by numbers, or spoken of under the titles of the Professor, the Tutor, and so forth. It is enough that you are aware who I am, and that I am known at the tea-table as The Dictator. Theatrical “asides” are apt to be whispered in a pretty loud voice, and the persons who ought not to have any idea of what is said are expected to be reasonably hard of bearing. If I named all The Teacups, some of them might be offended. If any of my readers happen to be able to identify any one Teacup by some accidental circumstance,—say, for instance, Number Five, by the incident of her burning the diamond,—I hope they will keep quiet about it. Number Five does n't want to be pointed out in the street as the extravagant person who makes use of such expensive fuel, for the story would soon grow to a statement that she always uses diamonds, instead of cheaper forms of carbon, to heat her coffee with. So with other members of the circle. The “Cracked Teacup,” Number Seven, would not, perhaps, be pleased to recognize himself under that title. I repeat it, therefore, Do not try to identify the individual Teacups. You will not get them right; or, if you do, you may too probably make trouble. How is it possible that I can keep up my freedom of intercourse with you all if you insist on bellowing my “asides” through a speaking-trumpet? Besides, you cannot have failed to see that there are strong symptoms of the springing up of delicate relations between some of our number. I told you how it would be. It did not require a prophet to foresee that the saucy intruder who, as Mr. Willis wrote, and the dear dead girls used to sing, in our young days,

        “Taketh every form of air,
     And every shape of earth,
     And comes unbidden everywhere,
     Like thought's mysterious birth,”
 

would pop his little curly head up between one or more pairs of Teacups. If you will stop these questions, then, I will go on with my reports of what was said and done at our meetings over the teacups.

Of all things beautiful in this fair world, there is nothing so enchanting to look upon, to dream about, as the first opening of the flower of young love. How closely the calyx has hidden the glowing leaves in its quiet green mantle! Side by side, two buds have been tossing jauntily in the breeze, often brought very near to each other, sometimes touching for a moment, with a secret thrill in their close-folded heart-leaves, it may be, but still the cool green sepals shutting tight over the burning secret within. All at once a morning ray touches one of the two buds, and the point of a blushing petal betrays the imprisoned and swelling blossom.

—Oh, no, I did not promise a love-story. There may be a little sentiment now and then, but these papers are devoted chiefly to the opinions, prejudices, fancies, whims, of myself, The Dictator, and others of The Teacups who have talked or written for the general benefit of the company.

Here are some of the remarks I made the other evening on the subject of Intellectual Over-Feeding and its consequence, Mental Dyspepsia. There is something positively appalling in the amount of printed matter yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, secreted by that great gland of the civilized organism, the press. I need not dilate upon this point, for it is brought home to every one of you who ever looks into a bookstore or a public library. So large is the variety of literary products continually coming forward, forced upon the attention of the reader by stimulating and suggestive titles, commended to his notice by famous names, recasting old subjects and developing and illustrating new ones, that the mind is liable to be urged into a kind of unnatural hunger, leading to a repletion which is often followed by disgust and disturbed nervous conditions as its natural consequence.

It has long been a favorite rule with me, a rule which I have never lost sight of, however imperfectly I have carried it out: Try to know enough of a wide range of subjects to profit by the conversation of intelligent persons of different callings and various intellectual gifts and acquisitions. The cynic will paraphrase this into a shorter formula: Get a smattering in every sort of knowledge. I must therefore add a second piece of advice: Learn to hold as of small account the comments of the cynic. He is often amusing, sometimes really witty, occasionally, without meaning it, instructive; but his talk is to profitable conversation what the stone is to the pulp of the peach, what the cob is to the kernels on an ear of Indian corn. Once more: Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant, with all his knowledge and valuable qualities, and will “cavil on the ninth part of a hair,” if it will give him a chance to show off his idle erudition.

I saw attributed to me, the other day, the saying, “Know something about everything, and everything about something.” I am afraid it does not belong to me, but I will treat it as I used to treat a stray boat which came through my meadow, floating down the Housatonic,—get hold of it and draw it ashore, and hold on to it until the owner turns up. If this precept is used discreetly, it is very serviceable; but it is as well to recognize the fact that you cannot know something about everything in days like these of intellectual activity, of literary and scientific production. We all feel this. It makes us nervous to see the shelves of new books, many of which we feel as if we ought to read, and some among them to study. We must adopt some principle of selection among the books outside of any particular branch which we may have selected for study. I have often been asked what books I would recommend for a course of reading. I have always answered that I had a great deal rather take advice than give it. Fortunately, a number of scholars have furnished lists of books to which the inquirer may be directed. But the worst of it is that each student is in need of a little library specially adapted to his wants. Here is a young man writing to me from a Western college, and wants me to send him a list of the books which I think would be most useful to him. He does not send me his intellectual measurements, and he might as well have sent to a Boston tailor for a coat, without any hint of his dimensions in length, breadth, and thickness.

But instead of laying down rules for reading, and furnishing lists of the books which should be read in order, I will undertake the much humbler task of giving a little quasi-medical advice to persons, young or old, suffering from book-hunger, book-surfeit, book-nervousness, book-indigestion, book-nausea, and all other maladies which, directly or indirectly, may be traced to books, and to which I could give Greek or Latin names if I thought it worth while.

I have a picture hanging in my library, a lithograph, of which many of my readers may have seen copies. It represents a gray-haired old book-lover at the top of a long flight of steps. He finds himself in clover, so to speak, among rare old editions, books he has longed to look upon and never seen before, rarities, precious old volumes, incunabula, cradle-books, printed while the art was in its infancy,—its glorious infancy, for it was born a giant. The old bookworm is so intoxicated with the sight and handling of the priceless treasures that he cannot bear to put one of the volumes back after he has taken it from the shelf. So there he stands,—one book open in his hands, a volume under each arm, and one or more between his legs,—loaded with as many as he can possibly hold at the same time.

Now, that is just the way in which the extreme form of book-hunger shows itself in the reader whose appetite has become over-developed. He wants to read so many books that he over-crams himself with the crude materials of knowledge, which become knowledge only when the mental digestion has time to assimilate them. I never can go into that famous “Corner Bookstore” and look over the new books in the row before me, as I enter the door, without seeing half a dozen which I want to read, or at least to know something about. I cannot empty my purse of its contents, and crowd my bookshelves with all those volumes. The titles of many of them interest me. I look into one or two, perhaps. I have sometimes picked up a line or a sentence, in these momentary glances between the uncut leaves of a new book, which I have never forgotten. As a trivial but bona fide example, one day I opened a book on duelling. I remember only these words: “Conservons-la, cette noble institution.” I had never before seen duelling called a noble institution, and I wish I had taken the name of the book. Book-tasting is not necessarily profitless, but it is very stimulating, and makes one hungry for more than he needs for the nourishment of his thinking-marrow. To feed this insatiable hunger, the abstracts, the reviews, do their best. But these, again, have grown so numerous and so crowded with matter that it is hard to find time to master their contents. We are accustomed, therefore, to look for analyses of these periodicals, and at last we have placed before us a formidable-looking monthly, “The Review of Reviews.” After the analyses comes the newspaper notice; and there is still room for the epigram, which sometimes makes short work with all that has gone before on the same subject.

It is just as well to recognize the fact that if one should read day and night, confining himself to his own language, he could not pretend to keep up with the press. He might as well try to race with a locomotive. The first discipline, therefore, is that of despair. If you could stick to your reading day and night for fifty years, what a learned idiot you would become long before the half-century was over! Well, then, there is no use in gorging one's self with knowledge, and no need of self-reproach because one is content to remain more or less ignorant of many things which interest his fellow-creatures. We gain a good deal of knowledge through the atmosphere; we learn a great deal by accidental hearsay, provided we have the mordant in our own consciousness which makes the wise remark, the significant fact, the instructive incident, take hold upon it. After the stage of despair comes the period of consolation. We soon find that we are not so much worse off than most of our neighbors as we supposed. The fractional value of the wisest shows a small numerator divided by an infinite denominator of knowledge.

I made some explanations to The Teacups, the other evening, which they received very intelligently and graciously, as I have no doubt the readers of these reports of mine will receive them. If the reader will turn back to the end of the fourth number of these papers, he will find certain lines entitled, “Cacoethes Scribendi.” They were said to have been taken from the usual receptacle of the verses which are contributed by The Teacups, and, though the fact was not mentioned, were of my own composition. I found them in manuscript in my drawer, and as my subject had naturally suggested the train of thought they carried out into extravagance, I printed them. At the same time they sounded very natural, as we say, and I felt as if I had published them somewhere or other before; but I could find no evidence of it, and so I ventured to have them put in type.

And here I wish to take breath for a short, separate paragraph. I have often felt, after writing a line which pleased me more than common, that it was not new, and perhaps was not my own. I have very rarely, however, found such a coincidence in ideas or expression as would be enough to justify an accusation of unconscious plagiarism,—conscious plagiarism is not my particular failing. I therefore say my say, set down my thought, print my line, and do not heed the suspicion that I may not be as original as I supposed, in the passage I have been writing. My experience may be worth something to a modest young writer, and so I have interrupted what I was about to say by intercalating this paragraph.

In this instance my telltale suspicion had not been at fault. I had printed those same lines, years ago, in “The Contributors' Club,” to which I have rarely sent any of my prose or verse. Nobody but the editor has noticed the fact, so far as I know. This is consoling, or mortifying, I hardly know which. I suppose one has a right to plagiarize from himself, but he does not want to present his work as fresh from the workshop when it has been long standing in his neighbor's shop-window.

But I have just received a letter from a brother of the late Henry Howard Brownell, the poet of the Bay Fight and the River Fight, in which he quotes a passage from an old book, “A Heroine, Adventures of Cherubina,” which might well have suggested my own lines, if I had ever seen it. I have not the slightest recollection of the book or the passage. I think its liveliness and “local color” will make it please the reader, as it pleases me, more than my own more prosaic extravagances:

   LINES TO A PRETTY LITTLE MAID OF MAMMA'S.

   “If Black Sea, Red Sea, White Sea, ran
   One tide of ink to Ispahan,
   If all the geese in Lincoln fens
   Produced spontaneous well-made pens,
   If Holland old and Holland new
   One wondrous sheet of paper grew,
   And could I sing but half the grace
   Of half a freckle in thy face,
   Each syllable I wrote would reach
   From Inverness to Bognor's beach,
   Each hair-stroke be a river Rhine,
   Each verse an equinoctial line!”
 

“The immediate dismissal of the 'little maid' was the consequence.”

I may as well say that our Delilah was not in the room when the last sentence was read.

Readers must be either very good-natured or very careless. I have laid myself open to criticism by more than one piece of negligence, which has been passed over without invidious comment by the readers of my papers. How could I, for instance, have written in my original “copy” for the printer about the fisherman baiting his hook with a giant's tail instead of a dragon's? It is the automatic fellow,—Me—Number-Two of our dual personality,—who does these things, who forgets the message Me—Number—One sends down to him from the cerebral convolutions, and substitutes a wrong word for the right one. I suppose Me—Number—Two will “sass back,” and swear that “giant's” was the message which came down from headquarters. He is always doing the wrong thing and excusing himself. Who blows out the gas instead of shutting it off? Who puts the key in the desk and fastens it tight with the spring lock? Do you mean to say that the upper Me, the Me of the true thinking-marrow, the convolutions of the brain, does not know better? Of course he does, and Me-Number-Two is a careless servant, who remembers some old direction, and follows that instead of the one just given.

Number Seven demurred to this, and I am not sure that he is wrong in so doing. He maintains that the automatic fellow always does just what he is told to do. Number Five is disposed to agree with him. We will talk over the question.

But come, now, why should not a giant have a tail as well as a dragon? Linnaeus admitted the homo caudatus into his anthropological catalogue. The human embryo has a very well marked caudal appendage; that is, the vertebral column appears prolonged, just as it is in a young quadruped. During the late session of the Medical Congress at Washington, my friend Dr. Priestley, a distinguished London physician, of the highest character and standing, showed me the photograph of a small boy, some three or four years old, who had a very respectable little tail, which would have passed muster on a pig, and would have made a frog or a toad ashamed of himself. I have never heard what became of the little boy, nor have I looked in the books or journals to find out if there are similar cases on record, but I have no doubt that there are others. And if boys may have this additional ornament to their vertebral columns, why not men? And if men, why not giants? So I may not have made a very bad blunder, after all, and my reader has learned something about the homo caudatus as spoken of by Linnxus, and as shown me in photograph by Dr. Priestley. This child is a candidate for the vacant place of Missing Link.

In accounting for the blunders, and even gross blunders, which, sooner or later, one who writes much is pretty sure to commit, I must not forget the part played by the blind spot or idiotic area in the brain, which I have already described.

The most knowing persons we meet with are sometimes at fault. Nova onania possumus omnes is not a new nor profound axiom, but it is well to remember it as a counterpoise to that other truly American saying of the late Mr. Samuel Patch, “Some things can be done as well as others.” Yes, some things, but not all things. We all know men and women who hate to admit their ignorance of anything. Like Talkative in “Pilgrim's Progress,” they are ready to converse of “things heavenly or things earthly; things moral or things evangelical; things sacred or things profane; things past or things to come; things foreign or things at home; things more essential or things circumstantial.”

Talkative is apt to be a shallow fellow, and to say foolish things about matters he only half understands, and yet he has his place in society. The specialists would grow to be intolerable, were they not counterpoised to some degree by the people of general intelligence. The man who knows too much about one particular subject is liable to become a terrible social infliction. Some of the worst bores (to use plain language) we ever meet with are recognized as experts of high grade in their respective departments. Beware of making so much as a pinhole in the dam that holds back their knowledge. They ride their hobbies without bit or bridle. A poet on Pegasus, reciting his own verses, is hardly more to be dreaded than a mounted specialist.

One of the best offices which women perform for men is that of tasting books for them. They may or may not be profound students,—some of them are; but we do not expect to meet women like Mrs. Somerville, or Caroline Herschel, or Maria Mitchell at every dinner-table or afternoon tea. But give your elect lady a pile of books to look over for you, and she will tell you what they have for her and for you in less time than you would have wasted in stupefying yourself over a single volume.

One of the encouraging signs of the times is the condensed and abbreviated form in which knowledge is presented to the general reader. The short biographies of historic personages, of which within the past few years many have been published, have been a great relief to the large class of readers who want to know something, but not too much, about them.

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred? Many readers remember what old Rogers, the poet, said:

“When I hear a new book talked about or have it pressed upon me, I read an old one.”

Happy the man who finds his rest in the pages of some favorite classic! I know no reader more to be envied than that friend of mine who for many years has given his days and nights to the loving study of Horace. After a certain period in life, it is always with an effort that we admit a new author into the inner circle of our intimates. The Parisian omnibuses, as I remember them half a century ago,—they may still keep to the same habit, for aught that I know,—used to put up the sign “Complet” as soon as they were full. Our public conveyances are never full until the natural atmospheric pressure of sixteen pounds to the square inch is doubled, in the close packing of the human sardines that fill the all-accommodating vehicles. A new-comer, however well mannered and well dressed, is not very welcome under these circumstances. In the same way, our tables are full of books half-read and books we feel that we must read. And here come in two thick volumes, with uncut leaves, in small type, with many pages, and many lines to a page,—a book that must be read and ought to be read at once. What a relief to hand it over to the lovely keeper of your literary conscience, who will tell you all that you will most care to know about it, and leave you free to plunge into your beloved volume, in which you are ever finding new beauties, and from which you rise refreshed, as if you had just come from the cool waters of Hippocrene! The stream of modern literature represented by the books and periodicals on the crowded counters is a turbulent and clamorous torrent, dashing along among the rocks of criticism, over the pebbles of the world's daily events; trying to make itself seen and heard amidst the hoarse cries of the politicians and the rumbling wheels of traffic. The classic is a still lakelet, a mountain tarn, fed by springs that never fail, its surface never ruffled by storms,—always the same, always smiling a welcome to its visitor. Such is Horace to my friend. To his eye “Lydia, dic per omnes” is as familiar as “Pater noster qui es in caelis” to that of a pious Catholic. “Integer vitae,” which he has put into manly English, his Horace opens to as Watt's hymn-book opens to “From all that dwell below the skies.” The more he reads, the more he studies his author, the richer are the treasures he finds. And what Horace is to him, Homer, or Virgil, or Dante is to many a quiet reader, sick to death of the unending train of bookmakers.

I have some curious books in my library, a few of which I should like to say something about to The Teacups, when they have no more immediately pressing subjects before them. A library of a few thousand volumes ought always to have some books in it which the owner almost never opens, yet with whose backs he is so well acquainted that he feels as if he knew something of their contents. They are like those persons whom we meet in our daily walks, with whose faces and figures, whose summer and winter garments, whose walking-sticks and umbrellas even, we feel acquainted, and yet whose names, whose business, whose residences, we know nothing about. Some of these books are so formidable in their dimensions, so rusty and crabbed in their aspect, that it takes a considerable amount of courage to attack them.

I will ask Delilah to bring down from my library a very thick, stout volume, bound in parchment, and standing on the lower shelf, next the fireplace. The pretty handmaid knows my books almost as if she were my librarian, and I don't doubt she would have found it if I had given only the name on the back.

Delilah returned presently, with the heavy quarto in her arms. It was a pleasing sight,—the old book in the embrace of the fresh young damsel. I felt, on looking at them, as I did when I followed the slip of a girl who conducted us in the Temple, that ancient building in the heart of London. The long-enduring monuments of the dead do so mock the fleeting presence of the living!

Is n't this book enough to scare any of you? I said, as Delilah dumped it down upon the table. The teacups jumped from their saucers as it thumped on the board. Danielis Georgii Morhofii Polyhistor, Literarius, Philosophicus et Poeticus. Lubecae MDCCXXXIII. Perhaps I should not have ventured to ask you to look at this old volume, if it had not been for the fact that Dr. Johnson mentions Morohof as the author to whom he was specially indebted.—more, I think, than to any other. It is a grand old encyclopaedic summary of all the author knew about pretty nearly everything, full of curious interest, but so strangely mediaeval, so utterly antiquated in most departments of knowledge, that it is hard to believe the volume came from the press at a time when persons whom I well remember were living. Is it possible that the books which have been for me what Morhof was for Dr. Johnson can look like that to the student of the year 1990?

Morhof was a believer in magic and the transmutation of metals. There was always something fascinating to me in the old books of alchemy. I have felt that the poetry of science lost its wings when the last powder of projection had been cast into the crucible, and the fire of the last transmutation furnace went out. Perhaps I am wrong in implying that alchemy is an extinct folly. It existed in New England's early days, as we learn from the Winthrop papers, and I see no reason why gold-making should not have its votaries as well as other popular delusions.

Among the essays of Morhof is one on the “Paradoxes of the Senses.” That title brought to mind the recollection of another work I have been meaning to say something about, at some time when you were in the listening mood. The book I refer to is “A Budget of Paradoxes,” by Augustus De Morgan. De Morgan is well remembered as a very distinguished mathematician, whose works have kept his name in high honor to the present time. The book I am speaking of was published by his widow, and is largely made up of letters received by him and his comments upon them. Few persons ever read it through. Few intelligent readers ever took it up and laid it down without taking a long draught of its singular and interesting contents. The letters are mostly from that class of persons whom we call “cranks,” in our familiar language.

At this point Number Seven interrupted me by calling out, “Give us some of those cranks' letters. A crank is a man who does his own thinking. I had a relation who was called a crank. I believe I have been spoken of as one myself. That is what you have to expect if you invent anything that puts an old machine out of fashion, or solve a problem that has puzzled all the world up to your time. There never was a religion founded but its Messiah was called a crank. There never was an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank. Do you want to know why that name is given to the men who do most for the world's progress? I will tell you. It is because cranks make all the wheels in all the machinery of the world go round. What would a steam-engine be without a crank? I suppose the first fool that looked on the first crank that was ever made asked what that crooked, queer-looking thing was good for. When the wheels got moving he found out. Tell us something about that book which has so much to say concerning cranks.”

Hereupon I requested Delilah to carry back Morhof, and replace him in the wide gap he had left in the bookshelf. She was then to find and bring down the volume I had been speaking of.

Delilah took the wisdom of the seventeenth century in her arms, and departed on her errand. The book she brought down was given me some years ago by a gentleman who had sagaciously foreseen that it was just one of those works which I might hesitate about buying, but should be well pleased to own. He guessed well; the book has been a great source of instruction and entertainment to me. I wonder that so much time and cost should have been expended upon a work which might have borne a title like the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus; and yet it is such a wonderful museum of the productions of the squinting brains belonging to the class of persons commonly known as cranks that we could hardly spare one of its five hundred octavo pages.

Those of us who are in the habit of receiving letters from all sorts of would-be-literary people—letters of inquiry, many of them with reference to matters we are supposed to understand—can readily see how it was that Mr. De Morgan, never too busy to be good-natured with the people who pestered—or amused-him with their queer fancies, received such a number of letters from persons who thought they had made great discoveries, from those who felt that they and their inventions and contrivances had been overlooked, and who sought in his large charity of disposition and great receptiveness a balm for their wounded feelings and a ray of hope for their darkened prospects.

The book before us is made up from papers published in “The Athenaeum,” with additions by the author. Soon after opening it we come to names with which we are familiar, the first of these, that of Cornelius Agrippa, being connected with the occult and mystic doctrines dealt with by many of De Morgan's correspondents. But the name most likely to arrest us is that of Giordano Bruno, the same philosopher, heretic, and martyr whose statue has recently been erected in Rome, to the great horror of the Pope and his prelates in the Old World and in the New. De Morgan's pithy account of him will interest the company: “Giordano Bruno was all paradox. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes, an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about 1550, and was roasted alive at Rome, February 17, 1600, for the maintenance and defence of the Holy Church, and the rights and liberties of the same.”

Number Seven could not contain himself when the reading had reached this point. He rose from his chair, and tinkled his spoon against the side of his teacup. It may have been a fancy, but I thought it returned a sound which Mr. Richard Briggs would have recognized as implying an organic defect. But Number Seven did not seem to notice it, or, if he did, to mind it.

“Why did n't we all have a chance to help erect that statue?” he cried. “A murdered heretic at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a hero of knowledge in the nineteenth,—I drink to the memory of the roasted crank, Giordano Bruno!”

Number Seven lifted his teacup to his lips, and most of us followed his example.

After this outburst of emotion and eloquence had subsided, and the teaspoons lay quietly in their saucers, I went on with my extract from the book I had in hand.

I think, I said, that the passage which follows will be new and instructive to most of the company. De Morgan's interpretation of the cabalistic sentence, made up as you will find it, is about as ingenious a piece of fanciful exposition as you will be likely to meet with anywhere in any book, new or old. I am the more willing to mention it as it suggests a puzzle which some of the company may like to work upon. Observe the character and position of the two distinguished philosophers who did not think their time thrown away in laboring at this seemingly puerile task.

“There is a kind of Cabbala Alphabetica which the investigators of the numerals in words would do well to take up; it is the formation of sentences which contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each only once. No one has done it with v and j treated as consonants; but you and I can do it. Dr. Whewell and I amused ourselves some years ago with attempts. He could not make sense, though he joined words he gave me Phiz, styx, wrong, buck, flame, quiz.

“I gave him the following, which he agreed was 'admirable sense,'—I certainly think the words would never have come together except in this way: I quartz pyx who fling muck beds. I long thought that no human being could say this under any circumstances. At last I happened to be reading a religious writer,—as he thought himself,—who threw aspersions on his opponents thick and threefold. Heyday came into my head; this fellow flings muck beds; he must be a quartz pyx. And then I remembered that a pyx is a sacred vessel, and quartz is a hard stone, as hard as the heart of a religious foe-curser. So that the line is the motto of the ferocious sectarian who turns his religious vessels into mud-holders, for the benefit of those who will not see what he sees.”

“There are several other sentences given, in which all the letters (except v and j as consonants) are employed, of which the following is the best: Get nymph; quiz sad brow; fix luck,—which in more sober English would be, Marry; be cheerful; watch your business. There is more edification, more religion, in this than in all the 666 interpretations put together.”

There is something very pleasant in the thought of these two sages playing at jackstraws with the letters of the alphabet. The task which De Morgan and Dr. Whewell, “the omniscient,” set themselves would not be unworthy of our own ingenious scholars, and it might be worth while for some one of our popular periodicals to offer a prize for the best sentence using up the whole alphabet, under the same conditions as those submitted to by our two philosophers.

This whole book of De Morgan's seems to me full of instruction. There is too much of it, no doubt; yet one can put up with the redundancy for the sake of the multiplicity of shades of credulity and self-deception it displays in broad daylight. I suspect many of us are conscious of a second personality in our complex nature, which has many traits resembling those found in the writers of the letters addressed to Mr. De Horgan.

I have not ventured very often nor very deeply into the field of metaphysics, but if I were disposed to make any claim in that direction, it would be the recognition of the squinting brain, the introduction of the term “cerebricity” corresponding to electricity, the idiotic area in the brain or thinking-marrow, and my studies of the second member in the partnership of I-My-Self & Co. I add the Co. with especial reference to a very interesting article in a late Scribner, by my friend Mr. William James. In this article the reader will find a full exposition of the doctrine of plural personality illustrated by striking cases. I have long ago noticed and referred to the fact of the stratification of the currents of thought in three layers, one over the other. I have recognized that where there are two individuals talking together there are really six personalities engaged in the conversation. But the distinct, separable, independent individualities, taking up conscious life one after the other, are brought out by Mr. James and the authorities to which he refers as I have not elsewhere seen them developed.

Whether we shall ever find the exact position of the idiotic centre or area in the brain (if such a spot exists) is uncertain. We know exactly where the blind spot of the eye is situated, and can demonstrate it anatomically and physiologically. But we have only analogy to lead us to infer the possible or even probable existence of an insensible spot in the thinking-centre. If there is a focal point where consciousness is at its highest development, it would not be strange if near by there should prove to be an anaesthetic district or limited space where no report from the senses was intelligently interpreted. But all this is mere hypothesis.

Notwithstanding the fact that I am nominally the head personage of the circle of Teacups, I do not pretend or wish to deny that we all look to Number Five as our chief adviser in all the literary questions that come before us. She reads more and better than any of us. She is always ready to welcome the first sign of genius, or of talent which approaches genius. She makes short work with all the pretenders whose only excuse for appealing to the public is that they “want to be famous.” She is one of the very few persons to whom I am willing to read any one of my own productions while it is yet in manuscript, unpublished. I know she is disposed to make more of it than it deserves; but, on the other hand, there are degrees in her scale of judgment, and I can distinguish very easily what delights her from what pleases only, or is, except for her kindly feeling to the writer, indifferent, or open to severe comment. What is curious is that she seems to have no literary aspirations, no desire to be known as a writer. Yet Number Five has more esprit, more sparkle, more sense in her talk, than many a famous authoress from whom we should expect brilliant conversation.

There are mysteries about Number Five. I am not going to describe her personally. Whether she belongs naturally among the bright young people, or in the company of the maturer persons, who have had a good deal of experience of the world, and have reached the wisdom of the riper decades without losing the graces of the earlier ones, it would be hard to say. The men and women, young and old, who throng about her forget their own ages. “There is no such thing as time in her presence,” said the Professor, the other day, in speaking of her. Whether the Professor is in love with her or not is more than I can say, but I am sure that he goes to her for literary sympathy and counsel, just as I do. The reader may remember what Number Five said about the possibility of her getting a sprained ankle, and her asking the young Doctor whether he felt equal to taking charge of her if she did. I would not for the world insinuate that he wishes she would slip and twist her foot a little,—just a little, you know, but so that it would have to be laid on a pillow in a chair, and inspected, and bandaged, and delicately manipulated. There was a banana-skin which she might naturally have trodden on, in her way to the tea-table. Nobody can suppose that it was there except by the most innocent of accidents. There are people who will suspect everybody. The idea of the Doctor's putting that banana-skin there! People love to talk in that silly way about doctors.

Number Five had promised to read us a narrative which she thought would interest some of the company. Who wrote it she did not tell us, but I inferred from various circumstances that she had known the writer. She read the story most effectively in her rich, musical voice. I noticed that when it came to the sounds of the striking clock, the ringing of the notes was so like that which reaches us from some far-off cathedral tower that we wanted to bow our heads, as if we had just heard a summons to the Angelus. This was the short story that Number Five read to The Teacups:—

I have somewhere read this anecdote. Louis the Fourteenth was looking out, one day, from, a window of his palace of Saint-Germain. It was a beautiful landscape which spread out before him, and the monarch, exulting in health, strength, and the splendors of his exalted position, felt his bosom swell with emotions of pride and happiness: Presently he noticed the towers of a church in the distance, above the treetops. “What building is that?” he asked. “May it please your Majesty, that is the Church of St. Denis, where your royal ancestors have been buried for many generations.” The answer did not “please his Royal Majesty.” There, then, was the place where he too was to lie and moulder in the dust. He turned, sick at heart, from the window, and was uneasy until he had built him another palace, from which he could never be appalled by that fatal prospect.

Something like the experience of Louis the Fourteenth was that of the owner of

        THE TERRIBLE CLOCK.

I give the story as transcribed from the original manuscript:—

The clock was bequeathed to me by an old friend who had recently died. His mind had been a good deal disordered in the later period of his life. This clock, I am told; seemed to have a strange fascination for him. His eyes were fastened on it during the last hours of his life. He died just at midnight. The clock struck twelve, the nurse told me, as he drew his last breath, and then, without any known cause, stopped, with both hands upon the hour.

It is a complex and costly piece of mechanism. The escapement is in front, so that every tooth is seen as it frees itself. It shows the phases of the moon, the month of the year, the day of the month, and the day of the week, as well as the hour and minute of the day.

I had not owned it a week before I began to perceive the same kind of fascination as that which its former owner had experienced. This gradually grew upon me, and presently led to trains of thought which became at first unwelcome, then worrying, and at last unendurable. I began by taking offence at the moon. I did not like to see that “something large and smooth and round,” so like the skull which little Peterkin picked up on the field of Blenheim. “How many times,” I kept saying to myself, “is that wicked old moon coming up to stare at me?” I could not stand it. I stopped a part of the machinery, and the moon went into permanent eclipse. By and by the sounds of the infernal machine began to trouble and pursue me. They talked to me; more and more their language became that of articulately speaking men. They twitted me with the rapid flight of time. They hurried me, as if I had not a moment to lose. Quick! Quick! Quick! as each tooth released itself from the escapement. And as I looked and listened there could not be any mistake about it. I heard Quick! Quick! Quick! as plainly, at least, as I ever heard a word from the phonograph. I stood watching the dial one day,—it was near one o'clock,—and a strange attraction held me fastened to the spot. Presently something appeared to trip or stumble inside of the infernal mechanism. I waited for the sound I knew was to follow. How nervous I got! It seemed to me that it would never strike. At last the minute-hand reached the highest point of the dial. Then there was a little stir among the works, as there is in a congregation as it rises to receive the benediction. It was no form of blessing which rung out those deep, almost sepulchral tones. But the word they uttered could not be mistaken. I can hear its prolonged, solemn vibrations as if I were standing before the clock at this moment.

Gone! Yes, I said to myself, gone,—its record made up to be opened in eternity.

I stood still, staring vaguely at the dial as in a trance. And as the next hour creeps stealthily up, it starts all at once, and cries aloud, Gone!—Gone! The sun sinks lower, the hour-hand creeps downward with it, until I hear the thrice-repeated monosyllable, Gone!—Gone!—Gone! Soon through the darkening hours, until at the dead of night the long roll is called, and with the last Gone! the latest of the long procession that filled the day follows its ghostly companions into the stillness and darkness of the past.

I silenced the striking part of the works. Still, the escapement kept repeating, Quick! Quick! Quick! Still the long minute-hand, like the dart in the grasp of Death, as we see it in Roubiliac's monument to Mrs. Nightingale, among the tombs of Westminster Abbey, stretched itself out, ready to transfix each hour as it passed, and make it my last. I sat by the clock to watch the leap from one day of the week to the next. Then would come, in natural order, the long stride from one month to the following one.

I could endure it no longer. “Take that clock away!” I said. They took it away. They took me away, too,—they thought I needed country air. The sounds and motions still pursued me in imagination. I was very nervous when I came here. The walks are pleasant, but the walls seem to me unnecessarily high. The boarders are numerous; a little miscellaneous, I think. But we have the Queen, and the President of the United States, and several other distinguished persons, if we may trust what they tell about themselves.

After we had listened to Number Five's story, I was requested to read a couple of verses written by me when the guest of my friends, whose name is hinted by the title prefixed to my lines.

        LA MAISON D'OR.

        BAR HARBOR.

   From this fair home behold on either side
   The restful mountains or the restless sea:
   So the warm sheltering walls of life divide
   Time and its tides from still eternity.

   Look on the waves: their stormy voices teach
   That not on earth may toil and struggle cease.
   Look on the mountains: better far than speech
   Their silent promise of eternal peace.