FullReads

The secret channels of the earth and the fullness thereof made a joyful gurgle in his thoughts. And if he ever wandered in the country and ever saw a primrose on the river’s brim–which I consider unlikely, his attention being engaged at the moment on figuring the cost of oil barrels, with special consideration for the price of bungs–if this man ever did see a primrose, would it have been a yellow primrose to him and nothing more? Bless your dear eyes, it would have been a compound of by-products–parafine, wax-candles, cup-grease, lamp-black, beeswax and peppermint drops–not to mention its proper distillation into such rare odors as might be sold at so much a bottle to jobbers, and a set price at retail, with best legal talent to avoid the Sherman Act.

This man has lived–my spleen rises at the thought–in many of the capitals of Europe. For six months at a time he has walked around one end of the Louvre on his way home at night without once putting his head inside. Indeed, it is probable he hasn’t noticed the building, or if he has, thinks it is an arsenal. Now in all humility, and unbuttoned, as it were, for a spanking by whomsoever shall wish to give it, I must confess that I myself have no great love for the Louvre, regarding it somewhat as an endurance test for tired tourists, a kind of blow-in-the-nozzle-and-watch-the-dial-mount-up contrivance, as at a country fair. And so I am not sure but that the band playing in the gardens is a better amusement for a bright afternoon, and that a nursemaid in uniform with her children–bare-legged tots with fingers in the sand–that such sight is more worthy of respect than a dead Duchess painted on the wall. It is but a ritualistic obeisance I have paid the gods inside. My finer reverence has been for benches in the sun and the vagabondage of a bus-top.

If ever my friend gets to heaven it will be but another point for exportation. How closely he will listen for any squeaking of the Pearly Gates, with a nostrum ready for their dry complaint! When he is once through and safe (the other pilgrims still coming up the hill–for heaven, I’m sure, will be set on some wind-swept ridge, with purple distance in the valleys–) how he will put his ear against the hinge for nice diagnosis as to the weight of oil that will give best result! How he will wink upon the gateman that he write his order large!

Reader, I have sent you off upon a wrong direction. I have twisted the wooden finger at the crossroads. The man of oil does not exist. He is a piece of fiction with which to point a moral. Pig-iron or cotton-cloth would have served as well; anything, in fact, whereon, by too close squinting, one may blunt his sight.

We have all observed a growing tendency in many persons to put, as it were, electric lights in all the corners and attics of their brains, until it is too much a rarity to find any one who will admit a twilight in his whole establishment. This is carrying mental housekeeping too far. I will confess that I prefer a light at the foot of the back stairs, where the steps are narrow at the turn, for Annie is precious to us. I will confess, also, that it is well to have a switch in the kitchen to throw light in the basement, on the chance that the wood-box may get empty before the evening has spent itself. There is comfort, too, in not being forced to go darkling to bed, like Childe Roland to the tower, but to put out the light from the floor above. But we are carrying this business too far in mental concerns. Here is properly a place for a rare twilight. It is not well that a man should always flare himself like a lighted ballroom.

Much of our best mental stuff–if you exclude the harsher grindings of our business hours–fades in too coarse a light. ‘Tis a brocade that for best preservation must not be hung always in the sun. There must be regions in you unguessed at–cornered and shadowed places–recesses to be shown at peep of finger width, yielding only to the knock of fancy, dim sequesterings tucked obscurely from the noises of the world, where one must be taken by the hand and led–dusky closets beyond the common use. It is in such places–your finger on your lips and your feet a-tiptoe on the stairs–that you will hide away from baser uses the stowage of moonlight stuff and such other gaseous and delightful foolery as may lie in your inheritance.