The Poet at the Breakfast Table | Page 5

out
to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of personal property
he had forgotten in his inventory.
--You don't know what your thoughts are going to be beforehand? said
the "Member of the Haouse," as he calls himself.
--Why, of course I don't. Bless your honest legislative soul, I suppose I
have as many bound volumes of notions of one kind and another in my
head as you have in your Representatives' library up there at the State
House. I have to tumble them over and over, and open them in a
hundred places, and sometimes cut the leaves here and there, to find

what I think about this and that. And a good many people who flatter
themselves they are talking wisdom to me, are only helping me to get at
the shelf and the book and the page where I shall find my own opinion
about the matter in question.
--The Member's eyes began to look heavy.
--It 's a very queer place, that receptacle a man fetches his talk out of.
The library comparison does n't exactly hit it. You stow away some
idea and don't want it, say for ten years. When it turns up at last it has
got so jammed and crushed out of shape by the other ideas packed with
it, that it is no more like what it was than a raisin is like a grape on the
vine, or a fig from a drum like one hanging on the tree. Then, again,
some kinds of thoughts breed in the dark of one's mind like the blind
fishes in the Mammoth Cave. We can't see them and they can't see us;
but sooner or later the daylight gets in and we find that some cold, fishy
little negative has been spawning all over our beliefs, and the brood of
blind questions it has given birth to are burrowing round and under and
butting their blunt noses against the pillars of faith we thought the
whole world might lean on. And then, again, some of our old beliefs
are dying out every year, and others feed on them and grow fat, or get
poisoned as the case may be. And so, you see, you can't tell what the
thoughts are that you have got salted down, as one may say, till you run
a streak of talk through them, as the market people run a butterscoop
through a firkin.
Don't talk, thinking you are going to find out your neighbor, for you
won't do it, but talk to find out yourself. There is more of you-- and less
of you, in spots, very likely--than you know.
--The Member gave a slight but unequivocal start just here. It does
seem as if perpetual somnolence was the price of listening to other
people's wisdom. This was one of those transient nightmares that one
may have in a doze of twenty seconds. He thought a certain imaginary
Committee of Safety of a certain imaginary Legislature was proceeding
to burn down his haystack, in accordance with an Act, entitled an Act
to make the Poor Richer by making the Rich Poorer. And the chairman
of the committee was instituting a forcible exchange of hats with him,

to his manifest disadvantage, for he had just bought him a new beaver.
He told this dream afterwards to one of the boarders.
There was nothing very surprising, therefore, in his asking a question
not very closely related to what had gone before.
--Do you think they mean business?
--I beg your pardon, but it would be of material assistance to me in
answering your question if I knew who "they" might happen to be.
--Why, those chaps that are setting folks on to burn us all up in our
beds. Political firebugs we call 'em up our way. Want to substitoot the
match-box for the ballot-box. Scare all our old women half to death.
--Oh--ah--yes--to be sure. I don't believe they say what the papers put
in their mouths any more than that a friend of mine wrote the letter
about Worcester's and Webster's Dictionaries, that he had to disown the
other day. These newspaper fellows are half asleep when they make up
their reports at two or three o'clock in the morning, and fill out the
speeches to suit themselves. I do remember some things that sounded
pretty bad,--about as bad as nitroglycerine, for that matter. But I don't
believe they ever said 'em,
when they spoke their pieces, or if they
said 'em I know they did n't mean 'em. Something like this, wasn't it? If
the majority didn't do something the minority wanted 'em to, then the
people were to burn up our cities, and knock us down and jump on our
stomachs. That was