The Autobiography of Methuselah | Page 9

if you have
a pain it is evident that you have a thought. To be rid of the pain stop
thinking.
Then she would fix her eye on mine, and gaze at me sternly in an effort
to remove my sufferings by the hot poultice of her own mushy
reflections instead of getting the peppermint and the hot-water bag.
When night came on and I was restless instead of wooing slumber on
my behalf with soft and soothing lullabies, or telling me fairy-stories
such as children love, she would say: The child's mind is immature. His
conclusions, therefore, are immature. Whence his decisions as to what
he likes lack maturity, and consequently to give him that for which he
professes to like is equivalent to feeding him on unripe fruit. So we
conclude that what he says he likes he really does not like, and to
please him therefore, it becomes necessary to give him what he
professes to dislike. Ergo, I will read him to sleep with the seventeenth
chapter, part forty-nine of the works of Niet-Zhe on the co-ordination
of our æsthetic powers in respect to the relative delights of pleasure
and pain.
I will do my Aunt Jerusha the credit of saying at this point that her

method of putting me to sleep was efficacious. I do not ever remember
having retained consciousness past the third paragraph of her remedy
for insomnia.
[Illustration: Aunt Jerusha as a disciplinarian.]
I tremble to think of what I should have become had this fauntleroy
process of rearing been allowed to continue unchecked. There were
prigs enough in our family already without afflicting the world with
another, and it rejoices me to this day to recall that just as we were
reaching the point when it was either an early and beautiful demise in
the odor of sanctity as a perfect child, or my present eminence as the
most continuous human performance on record for me, my father
stepped in, reasserted his authority and rescued me from the clutches of
my Aunt Jerusha. Returning one day from business, he discovered Aunt
Jerusha sitting in a rocking-chair in the nursery before me reading
aloud from her tablets, whilst I, as usual, hung strapped and suspended
from a hook on the picture moulding. It was my supper-time, and she
was feeding me according to the New Thought method of catering. The
substance of her discourse was that hunger was an idea, nothing more.
She was proving to her own satisfaction at least that I was hungry only
because I thought I was hungry, and as father came in she was trying to
persuade me that if I would be a good boy and make up my mind that
my appetite had been appeased by a series of courses of thought
biscuits, spirituelle waffles, and mental hors d'oeuvres generally I
would no longer be hungry.
"Fill your spirit stomach with the food of thought, Methy, dear," she
was saying as my father appeared in the door-way. "Make up your
mind that it is stuffed with the crackers and milk of the spirit; that your
spiritual bread is buttered with the oleomargerine of lofty ideals, and
sugared with the saccharin of your granulated meditations, and you will
grow strong. You will become an intellectual athlete, like the great
King Ptush of Egypt; a winner in the spiritual Marathon--"
"What are you trying to do with this kid, anyhow?" demanded my
father at this point. "Turn him into a strap-hanger, or is this just a little
lynching party?"

"Hush, Enoch," protested Aunt Jerusha. "Do not project an
unsympathetic thought wave across our wires. I am just getting little
Methy into a receptive mood. He is having his supper."
"Supper?" roared my father. "You call that stuff supper? Why, the child
is getting thinner than a circus lemonade--"
"In the grosser sense, yes," replied Aunt Jerusha, calmly, after the
manner of maiden ladies who are sure of their position. "But look at
those eyes. Do they not betoken a great and budding soul within that is
hourly waxing in strength and beauty?"
"My dear Jerusha," said my father, unhooking me from the wall and
handing me a ripe red banana to eat, "all that you say is very lovely,
and I have no doubt that under your administration of affairs the boy
will sooner or later become a bully idea, but I hate a man whose
convexity of soul has been attained through a concavity of stomach.
What this boy needs at this stage of the game is development in what
you properly term the grosser sense, I might even go so far as to say the
butcher sense as well as the grocer sense. Ham and eggs is what he
needs."
And with that he sent out and