--It isn't quite so handy as a few specimens of the modern currency would
be, but you can pump him on numismatics.

--To be sure, to be sure. I've pumped a thousand men of all they could
teach me, or at least all I could learn from 'em; and if it comes to
that, I never saw the man that couldn't teach me something. I can get
along with everybody in his place, though I think the place of some of my
friends is over there among the feeble-minded pupils, and I don't believe
there's one of them, I couldn't go to school to for half an hour and be
the wiser for it. But people you talk with every day have got to have
feeders for their minds, as much as the stream that turns a millwheel
has. It isn't one little rill that's going to keep the float-boards
turning round. Take a dozen of the brightest men you can find in the
brightest city, wherever that may be,--perhaps you and I think we
know,--and let 'em come together once a month, and you'll find out in the
course of a year or two the ones that have feeders from all the
hillsides. Your common talkers, that exchange the gossip of the day,
have no wheel in particular to turn, and the wash of the rain as it runs
down the street is enough for them.

--Do you mean you can always see the sources from which a man fills his
mind,--his feeders, as you call them?

-I don't go quite so far as that,--the Master said.---I've seen men whose
minds were always overflowing, and yet they did n't read much nor go much
into the world. Sometimes you'll find a bit of a pond-hole in a pasture,
and you'll plunge your walking-stick into it and think you are going to
touch bottom. But you find you are mistaken. Some of these little
stagnant pond-holes are a good deal deeper than you think; you may tie a
stone to a bed-cord and not get soundings in some of 'em. The country