--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.

--W