t
sentence was read.

Readers must be either very good-natured or very careless. I have laid
myself open to criticism by more than one piece of negligence, which has
been passed over without invidious comment by the readers of my papers.
How could I, for instance, have written in my original "copy" for the
printer about the fisherman baiting his hook with a giant's tail instead
of a dragon's? It is the automatic fellow,--Me--Number-Two of our
dual personality,--who does these things, who forgets the message
Me--Number--One sends down to him from the cerebral convolutions, and
substitutes a wrong word for the right one. I suppose Me--Number--Two
will "sass back," and swear that "giant's" was the message which came
down from headquarters. He is always doing the wrong thing and excusing
himself. Who blows out the gas instead of shutting it off? Who puts the
key in the desk and fastens it tight with the spring lock? Do you
mean to say that the upper Me, the Me of the true thinking-marrow, the
convolutions of the brain, does not know better? Of course he does, and
Me-Number-Two is a careless servant, who remembers some old direction,
and follows that instead of the one just given.

Number Seven demurred to this, and I am not sure that he is wrong in so
doing. He maintains that the automatic fellow always does just what he
is told to do. Number Five is disposed to agree with him. We will talk
over the question.

But come, now, why should not a giant have a tail as well as a dragon?
Linnaeus admitted the homo caudatus into his anthropological catalogue.
The human embryo has a very well marked caudal appendage; that is, the
vertebral column appears prolonged, just as it is in a young quadruped.
During the late session of the Medical Congress at Washington, my
friend Dr. Priestley, a distinguished London physician, of the highest
character and standing, showed me the photograph of a small boy, some
three or four years old, who had a very respectable little tail, which
would have passed muster on a pig, and would have made a frog or a toad
ashamed of himself. I have never heard what became of the little boy,
nor have I looked in the books or journals to find out if there are
similar cases on record, but I have no doubt that there are others. And
if boys may have this additional ornament to their vertebral columns,
why not men? And if men, why not giants? So I may not have made a very
bad blunder, after all, and my reader has l