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Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894

"The Poet at the Breakfast-Table"

All this interests me, but I do not see how it
is going to interest my reader. I do not feel very happy about the
Register of Deeds. What can I do with him? Of what use is he going to
be in my record of what I have seen and heard at the breakfast-table?
The fact of his being one of the boarders was not so important that I was
obliged to speak of him, and I might just as well have drawn on my
imagination and not allowed this dummy to take up the room which another
guest might have profitably filled at our breakfast-table.
I suppose he will prove a superfluity, but I have got him on my hands,
and I mean that he shall be as little in the way as possible. One always
comes across people in actual life who have no particular business to be
where we find them, and whose right to be at all is somewhat
questionable.
I am not going to get rid of the Register of Deeds by putting him out of
the way; but I confess I do not see of what service he is going to be to
me in my record. I have often found, however, that the Disposer of men
and things understands much better than we do how to place his pawns and
other pieces on the chess-board of life. A fish more or less in the
ocean does not seem to amount to much. It is not extravagant to say that
any one fish may be considered a supernumerary.


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