--It ain't jest the thing to grease your ex with ile o' vitrul, said the
Member.

--No, the wheel of progress will soon stick fast if you do. You can't
keep a dead level long, if you burn everything down flat to make it.
Why, bless your soul, if all the cities of the world were reduced ashes,
you'd have a new set of millionnaires in a couple of years or so, out of
the trade in potash. In the mean time, what is the use of setting the
man with the silver watch against the man with the gold watch, and the
man without any watch against them both?

--You can't go agin human natur', said the Member

--You speak truly. Here we are travelling through desert together like
the children of Israel. Some pick up more manna and catch more quails
than others and ought to help their hungry neighbors more than they do;
that will always be so until we come back to primitive Christianity, the
road to which does not seem to be via Paris, just now; but we don't want
the incendiary's pillar of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night
to lead us in the march to civilization, and we don't want a Moses who
will smite rock, not to bring out water for our thirst, but petroleum to
burn us all up with.

--It is n't quite fair to run an opposition to the other funny speaker,
Rev. Petroleum V. What 's-his-name,--spoke up an anonymous boarder.

--You may have been thinking, perhaps, that it was I,--I, the Poet, who
was the chief talker in the one-sided dialogue to which you have been
listening. If so, you were mistaken. It was the old man in the