l the cities of the world were reduced ashes,
you'd have a new set of millionnaires in a couple of years or so, out
of the trade in potash. In the mean time, what is the use of setting the
man with the silver watch against the man with the gold watch, and the
man without any watch against them both?

--You can't go agin human natur', said the Member

--You speak truly. Here we are travelling through desert together like
the children of Israel. Some pick up more manna and catch more quails
than others and ought to help their hungry neighbors more than they do;
that will always be so until we come back to primitive Christianity, the
road to which does not seem to be via Paris, just now; but we don't want
the incendiary's pillar of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night
to lead us in the march to civilization, and we don't want a Moses who
will smite rock, not to bring out water for our thirst, but petroleum to
burn us all up with.

--It is n't quite fair to run an opposition to the other funny speaker,
Rev. Petroleum V. What 's-his-name,--spoke up an anonymous boarder.

--You may have been thinking, perhaps, that it was I,--I, the Poet, who
was the chief talker in the one-sided dialogue to which you have
been listening. If so, you were mistaken. It was the old man in the
spectacles with large round glasses and the iron-gray hair. He does a
good deal of the talking at our table, and, to tell the truth, I rather
like to hear him. He stirs me up, and finds me occupation in various
ways, and especially, because he has good solid prejudices, that one
can rub against, and so get up and let off a superficial intellectual
irritation, just as the cattle rub their backs against a rail (you
remember Sydney Smith's contrivance in his pasture) or their sides
against an apple-tree (I don't know why they take to these so
particularly, but you will often find the trunk of an apple-tree as
brown and smooth as an old saddle at the height of a cow's ribs). I
think they begin rubbing in cold blood, and then, you know, l'appetit
vient en mangeant, the more they rub the more they want to. That is the
way to use your friend's prejudices. This is a sturdy-looking personage
of a good deal more than middle age, his face marked with strong manly
furrows, records of hard thinking and square stand-up fights with life
and all its devils. There is a slight touch of satire in his discourse
now and then, and an odd way of answering one that make