But the airship rose higher as the
sand was poured out, and so it seems to me I have felt myself getting
above the mists and clouds whenever I have lightened myself of some
portion of the mental ballast I have carried with me. Why should I hope
or fear when I send out my book? I have had my reward, for I have
wrought out my thought, I have said my say, I have freed my soul. I can
afford to be forgotten.
Look here!--he said. I keep oblivion always before me.---He pointed to a
singularly perfect and beautiful trilobite which was lying on a pile of
manuscripts.---Each time I fill a sheet of paper with what I am writing,
I lay it beneath this relic of a dead world, and project my thought
forward into eternity as far as this extinct crustacean carries it
backward. When my heart beats too lustily with vain hopes of being
remembered, I press the cold fossil against it and it grows calm. I
touch my forehead with it, and its anxious furrows grow smooth. Our
world, too, with all its breathing life, is but a leaf to be folded with
the other strata, and if I am only patient, by and by I shall be just as
famous as imperious Caesar himself, embedded with me in a conglomerate.
He began reading:--"There is no new thing under the sun," said the
Preacher. He would not say so now, if he should come to life for a
little while, and have his photograph taken, and go up in a balloon, and
take a trip by railroad and a voyage by steamship, and get a message from
General Grant by the cable, and see a man's leg cut off without its
hurting him.
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