Sketches New and Old | Page 7

figured
up an estimate, and said that about eight more rods scattered about my
roof would about fix me right, and he guessed five hundred feet of stuff
would do it; and added that the first eight had got a little the start of
him, so to speak, and used up a mere trifle of material more than he had
calculated on--a hundred feet or along there. I said I was in a dreadful
hurry, and I wished we could get this business permanently mapped out,
so that I could go on with my work. He said, "I could have put up those
eight rods, and marched off about my business--some men would have
done it. But no; I said to myself, this man is a stranger to me, and I will
die before I'll wrong him; there ain't lightning-rods enough on that
house, and for one I'll never stir out of my tracks till I've done as I
would be done by, and told him so. Stranger, my duty is accomplished;
if the recalcitrant and dephlogistic messenger of heaven strikes your--"
"There, now, there," I said, "put on the other eight--add five hundred

feet of spiral-twist--do anything and everything you want to do; but
calm your sufferings, and try to keep your feelings where you can reach
them with the dictionary. Meanwhile, if we understand each other now,
I will go to work again."
I think I have been sitting here a full hour this time, trying to get back
to where I was when my train of thought was broken up by the last
interruption; but I believe I have accomplished it at last, and may
venture to proceed again.]
wrestled with this great subject, and the greatest among them have
found it a worthy adversary, and one that always comes up fresh and
smiling after every throw. The great Confucius said that he would
rather be a profound political economist than chief of police. Cicero
frequently said that political economy was the grandest consummation
that the human mind was capable of consuming; and even our own
Greeley had said vaguely but forcibly that "Political--
[Here the lightning-rod man sent up another call for me. I went down in
a state of mind bordering on impatience. He said he would rather have
died than interrupt me, but when he was employed to do a job, and that
job was expected to be done in a clean, workmanlike manner, and when
it was finished and fatigue urged him to seek the rest and recreation he
stood so much in need of, and he was about to do it, but looked up and
saw at a glance that all the calculations had been a little out, and if a
thunder-storm were to come up, and that house, which he felt a
personal interest in, stood there with nothing on earth to protect it but
sixteen lightning-rods--"Let us have peace!" I shrieked. "Put up a
hundred and fifty! Put some on the kitchen! Put a dozen on the barn!
Put a couple on the cow! Put one on the cook!--scatter them all over the
persecuted place till it looks like a zinc-plated, spiral-twisted,
silver-mounted canebrake! Move! Use up all the material you can get
your hands on, and when you run out of lightning-rods put up ramrods,
cam-rods, stair-rods, piston-rods--anything that will pander to your
dismal appetite for artificial scenery, and bring respite to my raging
brain and healing to my lacerated soul!" Wholly unmoved--further than
to smile sweetly--this iron being simply turned back his wrist-bands
daintily, and said he would now proceed to hump himself. Well, all that
was nearly three hours ago. It is questionable whether I am calm
enough yet to write on the noble theme of political economy, but I

cannot resist the desire to try, for it is the one subject that is nearest to
my heart and dearest to my brain of all this world's philosophy.]
economy is heaven's best boon to man." When the loose but gifted
Byron lay in his Venetian exile he observed that, if it could be granted
him to go back and live his misspent life over again, he would give his
lucid and unintoxicated intervals to the composition, not of frivolous
rhymes, but of essays upon political economy. Washington loved this
exquisite science; such names as Baker, Beckwith, Judson, Smith, are
imperishably linked with it; and even imperial Homer, in the ninth
book of the Iliad, has said:
Fiat justitia, ruat coelum, Post mortem unum, ante bellum, Hic facet
hoc, ex-parte res, Politicum e-conomico est.
The grandeur of these conceptions of the old poet, together with the
felicity of the wording which clothes them, and the sublimity of the
imagery whereby they are illustrated, have singled out that stanza, and
made