by long attrition against each
other. These thoughts remain very much the same from day to day, from
week to week; and as we grow older, from month to month, and from year
to year. The tides of wakening consciousness roll in upon them daily as
we unclose our eyelids, and keep up the gentle movement and murmur of
ordinary mental respiration until we close them again in slumber. When
we think we are thinking, we are for the most part only listening to
sound of attrition between these inert elements of intelligence. They
shift their places a little, they change their relations to each other,
they roll over and turn up new surfaces. Now and then a new fragment is
cast in among them, to be worn and rounded and takes its place with the
others, but the pebbled floor of consciousness is almost as stationary
as the pavement of a city thoroughfare.

It so happens that at this particular tine I have something to tell
which I am quite sure is not one of rolled pebbles which my reader has
seen before in any of my pages, or, as I feel confident, in those of any
other writer.

If my reader asks why I do not send the statement I am going to make
to some one of the special periodicals that deal with such subjects,
my answer is, that I like to tell my own stories at my own time, in own
chosen columns, where they will be read by a class of readers with whom
I like to talk.

All men of letters or of science, all writers well known to the public,
are constantly tampered with, in these days, by a class of predaceous
and hungry fellow-laborers who may be collectively spoken of as the
brain-tappers. They want an author's ideas on the subjects which
interest them, the inquirers, from the gravest religious and moral
questions to the most trivial matters of his habits and his whims and
fancies. Some of their questions he cannot answer; some he does not
choose to answer; some he is not yet ready to answer, and when he is
ready he prefers to select his own organ of publication. I do not find
fault with all the brain-tappers. Some of them are doing excellent
service by accumulating facts which could not otherwise be attained.
Rut one gets tired of the strings of questions sent him, to which he is
expected to return an answer, plucked, ripe or unripe, from his private
tree of knowledge. The brain-tappers are like the owner of the goose
that laid the golden eggs. They would have the embryos and germs of
one's thoughts out of the mental oviducts, an