precious delusions of dementia. I have never pictured a character more
contented with himself than the "Scarabee" of this story.

BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 1, 1891.
O. W. H.

THE POET

AT THE

BREAKFAST-TABLE.
I

The idea of a man's "interviewing" himself is rather odd, to be sure. But
then that is what we are all of us doing every day. I talk half the time
to find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his pockets inside out
to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of personal
property he had forgotten in his inventory.

--You don't know what your thoughts are going to be beforehand? said the
"Member of the Haouse," as he calls himself.

--Why, of course I don't. Bless your honest legislative soul, I suppose
I have as many bound volumes of notions of one kind and another in my
head as you have in your Representatives' library up there at the State
House. I have to tumble them over and over, and open them in a hundred
places, and sometimes cut the leaves here and there, to find what I think
about this and that. And a good many people who flatter themselves they
are talking wisdom to me, are only helping me to get at the shelf and the
book and the page where I shall find my own opinion about the matter in