--Why, of course I don't. Bless your honest legislative soul, I suppose
I have as many bound volumes of notions of one kind and another in my
head as you have in your Representatives' library up there at the State
House. I have to tumble them over and over, and open them in a hundred
places, and sometimes cut the leaves here and there, to find what I think
about this and that. And a good many people who flatter themselves they
are talking wisdom to me, are only helping me to get at the shelf and the
book and the page where I shall find my own opinion about the matter in
question.
--The Member's eyes began to look heavy.
--It 's a very queer place, that receptacle a man fetches his talk out
of. The library comparison does n't exactly hit it. You stow away some
idea and don't want it, say for ten years. When it turns up at last it
has got so jammed and crushed out of shape by the other ideas packed with
it, that it is no more like what it was than a raisin is like a grape on
the vine, or a fig from a drum like one hanging on the tree. Then,
again, some kinds 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.
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