time when it was needed.
Sometimes, as in one of those poems recently published,--the reader will
easily guess which,--the youthful spirit has come over me with such a
rush that it made me feel just as I did when I wrote the history of the
"One-hoss Shay" thirty years ago. To repeat one of my comparisons, it
was as if an early fruit had ripened on a graft upon an old, steady-going
tree, to the astonishment of all its later-maturing products. I should
hardly dare to say so much as this if I had not heard a similar opinion
expressed by others.

Once committed to my undertaking, there was no turning back. It is true
that I had said I might stop at any moment, but after one or two numbers
it seemed as if there were an informal pledge to carry the series on, as
in former cases, until I had completed my dozen instalments.

Writers and speakers have their idiosyncrasies, their habits, their
tricks, if you had rather call them so, as to their ways of writing and
speaking. There is a very old and familiar story, accompanied by a
feeble jest, which most of my readers may probably enough have met with
in Joe Miller or elsewhere. It is that of a lawyer who could never make
an argument without having a piece of thread to work upon with his
fingers while he was pleading. Some one stole it from him one day, and
he could not get on at all with his speech,--he had lost the thread of
his discourse, as the story had it. Now this is what I myself once saw.
It was at a meeting where certain grave matters were debated in an
assembly of professional men. A speaker, whom I never heard before or
since, got up and made a long and forcible argument. I do not think he
was a lawyer, but he spoke as if he had been trained to talk to juries.
He held a long string in one hand, which he drew through the other band
incessantly, as he spoke, just as a shoe maker performs the motion of
waxing his thread. He appeared to be dependent on this motion. The
physiological significance of the fact I suppose to be that the flow of
what we call the nervous current from the thinking centre to the organs
of speech was rendered freer and easier by the establishment of a
simultaneous collateral nervous current to the set of muscles concerned
in the action I have described.

I do not use a string to help me write or speak, but I must have its
equivalent. I must have my paper and pen or pencil before me to set my
thoughts flowing in such form that they can be written c