see children poking the fire and wishing they had as many dollars or
knives or something else as there are sparks; when I see the old man
smoking and the smoke curling above his head like incense from the
altar of domestic peace, the other children reading or doing something,
and the old lady with her needle and shears--I never pass such a scene
that I do not feel a little ache of joy in my heart.

Awhile ago they were talking about annexing San Domingo. They said it
was the finest soil in the world, and so on. Says I, "It don't raise
the right kind of folks; you take five thousand of the best people in
the world and let them settle there and you will see the second
generation barefooted, with the hair sticking out of the top of their
sombreros; you will see them riding barebacked, with a rooster under
each arm, going to a cockfight on Sunday." That is one excuse I have.

Another is, I think we came from the lower animals, I am not dead sure
of it. On that question I stand about eight to seven. If there is
nothing of the snake, or hyena, or jackal in man, why would he cut his
brother's throat for a difference of belief? Why would he build
dungeons and burn the flesh of his brother man with red hot irons? I
think we came from the lower animals. When I first heard that doctrine
I did not like it. I felt sorry for our English friends, who would
have to trace their pedigree back to the Duke of Orangutan, or the Earl
of Chimpanzee. But I have read so much about rudimentary bones and
rudimentary muscles that I began to doubt about it. Says I: "What do
you mean by rudimentary muscles?" They say: "A muscle that has gone
into bankruptcy--" "Was it a large muscle?" "Yes." "What did our
forefathers use it for?" They say: "To flap their ears with." After I
found that out I was astonished to find that they had become
rudimentary; I know so many people for whom it would be handy today, so
many people where that would have been on an exact level with their
intellectual development. So after while I began to like it, and says
I to myself: "You have got to come to it." I thought after all I had
rather belong to a race of people that came from skull-less vertebrae
in the dim Laurentian period, that wiggled without knowing they were
wiggling, that began to develop and came up by a gradual development
until they struck this gentleman in the dug-out; coming up
slowly--up-up-up--until, for instance, they produced such a m