176 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



"The mind," says an old author, "like the body, 

 must digest before it can assimilate. The hungry 

 dog bites your fingers as he takes your morsel : but 

 the food becomes flesh, and the want is forgotten 

 with the giver." 



And so I have found it : and so, no doubt, have 

 others. No sooner is a new thought imparted, than 

 it sets up for itself, and denies its pedigree. "Why, 

 that is exactly what I told you three years ago, 



when you came &c. !" you feel on the point 



of rapping out, struck with amazement. 



Spare your breath! and your reproach. He can- 

 not remember any thing but what he now knows. 

 He forgets that he ever thought otherwise! Tell 

 him, now, something new, and you will see again 

 the same derisive smile, the same look of idle won- 

 der, aye of contempt, at your fanciful, ideal, 

 "theoretic" notions: and twice twelvemonths hence, 

 when your idea has taken root and become a fact, 

 the scene of to-day will be acted over again. Then 

 go to your Library large or small and look back 

 over the history of the world ; and you will see that 

 the annals of human invention and discovery are 

 the true history of Martyrdom, and that to be stoned 

 by his own generation, and worshiped by the next, 

 is at once the penalty of human pioneership, and 



