174: CEKONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



dumb reflections, and not the least emphatic of 

 these have grown out of the every day phenomena 

 of mind acting upon mind. You tell a man some- 

 thing, to-day, or express an opinion, or assert a 

 fact, about a thing which he has perhaps never 

 noticed or never heard, before ; he smiles, starts, 

 shakes his head, or delivers himself in some other 

 way, for the ways are various in which men " be- 

 have " (as the chemists call it) under the infiltration 

 of a new idea. "Whatever the mode may be, one 

 thing you may be sure of, that in the grunt, the 

 smile, the laugh perhaps, in fact whatever it may be 

 that meets you, the attitude of mind betokened is 

 that of dissent. I am far from complaining of it : 

 some of my best hands have given me infinitely the 

 most mental graveling in this respect. But what I 

 do complain of, and want to know where to apply 

 for remedy, (since the Law tells us that for every 

 "Wrong there lies one) is that these same hard- 

 headed fellows, workmen, neighbors, friends, kind 

 advisers, or whatever other relation they may hold 

 six, twelve or eighteen months afterward, coolly come 

 to me, and with all that air of profound thought that 

 becomes a man of reflective character, down-calving 

 as one may say with something intensely wise, an- 

 nounce to me in new language of their own, the 



