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.

--Why, those chaps that are setting folks on to burn us all up in our
beds. Political firebugs we call 'em up our way. Want to substitoot the
match-box for the ballot-box. Scare all our old women half to death.

--Oh--ah--yes--to be sure. I don't believe they say what the papers put
in their mouths any more than that a friend of mine wrote the letter
about Worcester's and Webster's Dictionaries, that he had to disown the
other day. These newspaper fellows are half asleep when they make up
their re