ing when he came back. I was very much
disappointed in Mr. Peary.

I know, quite as well as I know my own name, that the length of the
year is three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight
minutes, and forty-eight seconds, and if I find any one trying to lop
off even one second of my hard-learned year, I shall look upon him as
a meddler. That is one of my settled facts, and I don't care to have
it disturbed. If any one comes along trying to change the length of
my year, I shall begin to tremble for the safety of the Ten
Commandments. If I believe that a grasshopper is a quadruped, what
satisfaction could I possibly take in discovering that he has six
legs? It would merely disturb one of my settled facts, and I am more
interested in my facts than I am in the grasshopper. The trouble is,
though, that my neighbor John keeps referring to the grasshopper's
six legs; so I suppose I shall, in the end, get me a grasshopper suit
of clothes so as to be in the fashion.

This discarding of my four-legged grasshopper and supplying myself
with one that has six legs may be what the poet means when he speaks
of our dead selves. He may refer to the new suit of mental clothing
that I am supposed to get each day, to the change of mind that I am
supposed to undergo as regularly as a daily bath. Possibly Mr.
Holmes meant something like that when he wrote his "Chambered
Nautilus." At each advance from one of these compartments to
another, I suppose I acquire a new suit of clothes, or, in other
words, change my mind. Let's see, wasn't it Theseus whose eternal
punishment in Hades was just to sit there forever? That seems
somewhat heavenly to me. But here on earth I suppose I must try to
keep up with the styles, and change my mental gear day by day.

I think I might come to enjoy a change of suits every day if only
some one would provide them for me; but, if I must earn them myself,
the case is different. I'd like to have some one bestow upon me a
beautiful Greek suit for Monday, with its elegance, grace, and
dignity, a Roman suit for Tuesday, a science suit for Wednesday, a
suit of poetry for Thursday, and so on, day after day. But when I
must read all of Homer before I can have the Greek suit, the price
seems a bit stiff, and I'm not so avid about changing my mind. We
had a township picnic back home, once, and it seemed to me that I was
attending a congress of nations, for there were people there who had
driven