I confess to a
tender feeling for my little brood of thoughts. When they have been
welcomed and praised it has pleased me, and if at any time they have been
rudely handled and despitefully entreated it has cost me a little worry.
I don't despise reputation, and I should like to be remembered as having
said something worth lasting well enough to last.

But all that is nothing to the main comfort I feel as a writer. I have
got rid of something my mind could not keep to itself and rise as it was
meant to into higher regions. I saw the aeronauts the other day emptying
from the bags some of the sand that served as ballast. It glistened a
moment in the sunlight as a slender shower, and then was lost and seen no
more as it scattered itself unnoticed. But the airship rose higher as the
sand was poured out, and so it seems to me I have felt myself getting
above the mists and clouds whenever I have lightened myself of some
portion of the mental ballast I have carried with me. Why should I hope
or fear when I send out my book? I have had my reward, for I have
wrought out my thought, I have said my say, I have freed my soul. I can
afford to be forgotten.

Look here!--he said. I keep oblivion always before me.---He pointed to a
singularly perfect and beautiful trilobite which was lying on a pile of
manuscripts.---Each time I fill a sheet of paper with what I am writing,
I lay it beneath this relic of a dead world, and project my thought
forward into eternity as far as this extinct crustacean carries it
backward. When my heart beats too lustily with vain hopes of being
remembered, I press the cold fossil against it and it grows calm. I
touch my forehead with it, and its anxious furrows grow smooth. Our
world, too, with all its breathing life, is but a leaf to be folded with
the other strata, and if I am only patient, by and by I shall be just as
famous as imperious Caesar himself, embedded with me in a conglomerate.

He began reading:--"There is no new thing under the sun," said the
Preacher. He would not say so now, if he should come to life for a
little while, and have his photograph taken, and go up in a balloon, and
take a trip by railroad and a voyage by steamship, and get a message from
General Grant by the cable, and see a man's leg cut off without its
hurting him. If it did not take his breath away and lay him out as flat
as the Queen of Sheba was knocked over by the splendors of his court, he
must have rivall