atter is settled, and
metaphysicians may as well make a record of the decision; for Watts
McHurdie, Jacob Dolan, Philemon Ward, Martin Culpepper, and sometimes
Oscar Fernald, know just exactly as much about it as the ablest
logician in the world. It is, however, regrettable that after deciding
that the external world is but a divine reaction upon the individual
consciousness, the parliament was unable to reach any sort of a
decision as to whose consciousness received the picture. Mr. Dolan
maintained vigorously that his consciousness was the one actually
affected, and that the colonel and the general and Watts were mere
hallucinations of his. The general held that Jake and the others were
accessory phantasms of his own dream, and Watts and the colonel, being
of more poetical temperament, held that the whole outfit was a chimera
in some larger consciousness, whose entity it is not given us to know.
As for Oscar, he claimed the parliament was crazy, and started to
prove it, when it was thought best to shift and modify the discussion;
and, therefore, early in September, when the upper currents of the
national atmosphere were vocal with discordant allegations, denials,
accusations, and maledictions, in Watts McHurdie's shop the question
before the house was, "How many people are there in the world?" For
ten days, in the desultory debate that had droned through the summer,
the general, true to his former contention, insisted that there was
only one person in the world. Mr. Dolan, with the Celtic elasticity of
reason, was willing to admit two.

"You and me and no more--all the rest is background for us," he
proclaimed. "If the you of the moment is the colonel--well and good;
then the colonel and I for it; but if it is the general and I--to the
trees with your colonel and Watts, and the three billion
others--you're merely stage setting, and become third persons."

"But," asked McHurdie, "if I exist this minute with you, and then you
focus your attention on Mart there, the next minute, and he exists,
what becomes of me when you turn your head from me?"

Dolan did not answer. He dipped into the _Times_ and read awhile; and
the colonel and the general got out the checkerboard and plunged into
a silent game. At length Dolan, after the fashion of debaters in the
parliament, came out of his newspaper and said:--

"That, Mr. McHurdie, is a problem ranging off the subject, into the
theories of the essence of time and space, and I