pebbles, shaped, smoothed, and polished by long attrition against each
other. These thoughts remain very much the same from day to day, from
week to week; and as we grow older, from month to month, and from year to
year. The tides of wakening consciousness roll in upon them daily as we
unclose our eyelids, and keep up the gentle movement and murmur of
ordinary mental respiration until we close them again in slumber. When
we think we are thinking, we are for the most part only listening to
sound of attrition between these inert elements of intelligence. They
shift their places a little, they change their relations to each other,
they roll over and turn up new surfaces. Now and then a new fragment is
cast in among them, to be worn and rounded and takes its place with the
others, but the pebbled floor of consciousness is almost as stationary as
the pavement of a city thoroughfare.

It so happens that at this particular tine I have something to tell which
I am quite sure is not one of rolled pebbles which my reader has seen
before in any of my pages, or, as I feel confident, in those of any other
writer.

If my reader asks why I do not send the statement I am going to make to
some one of the special periodicals that deal with such subjects, my
answer is, that I like to tell my own stories at my own time, in own
chosen columns, where they will be read by a class of readers with whom I
like to talk.

All men of letters or of science, all writers well known to the public,
are constantly tampered with, in these days, by a class of predaceous and
hungry fellow-laborers who may be collectively spoken of as the
brain-tappers. They want an author's ideas on the subjects which
interest them, the inquirers, from the gravest religious and moral