The Portland daily press., 1871-12-25
The Member of the HaOuse.
By 0. w. HoLME!


The idea of a mans interviewing himself ,
Is rather odd, to be sure. But then that is
what we are all of us doing every day.
talk half the time to find out my own thoughts
as school-boy turns his pockets inside out to
see what is in them. He brings to light all
sorts of personal property he had forgotten
in his inventory.
lou don't know what your thoughts
are going to be before hand? said the
Member OF the Haouse', as he calls him
self
Why, OF course don't Bless your honest
legislative soul, 1 suppose have as many
bound volumes of notions of one kind and an
other in my head as you have in your repre-
sentatives' library up there at the State
House. have to tumble them over and over
and open them in a hundred places, and
sometimes cut the leave here and there. and
to find what l think about this and that.
And good many people who fatter them
selves they are talking wisdom to me, are
only helping me to get at the shelf and the
book and the page where shall find my own
opinion about the matter in question.
The Members eyes began to look heavy.
It's very queer place, that receptacle
man fetches his talk out of The library
comparison doesn't exactly hit it. You stow
away some idea and don't want it, saw for
ten years. When it turns up at last it has
got so jammed and crushed out of shape by
the other ideas packed with it, that it is no
more like what it was than rasin is like a
grape on the vine, or fig from drum like
one hanging on the tree. Then, again, some
kinds of thoughts breed in the dark of ones
mind like the blind fishes in the Mammoth
Cave. We can't see them, and they can't see
us; but sooner or later the daylight gets in
and we find that some cold, fishy little mega
tive has been spawning all over our beliefs,
and the brood of blind questions it has given
birth to are burrowing round and under and
butting their blunt noses against the pillars of
faith we thought the whole world might lean
on. And then, again, some of our own be-
liefs are dying out everv year, and others feed
on them and grow fat, or get poisoned, as the
case may be. And so, you see, you can't tell
what the thoughts are that you have got salt
ed down, as one may say, till you run a streak
of talk through them, as the market people
run butter-scoOp through firkin.
Don't talk, thinking you are going to find
ou. your neighbor, for you won't do it, but
talk to find it out yourself. There is more of
you-and less of you, in spots, very likely
than you know.
The Member gave slight but unequvocal
start just here. 1t does seem as if perpetual
somnolence was the price of listening to other
peoples wisdom. This was one of those tran
sient nightmares that one may have in doze
of twenty seconds. He thought certain i'm
aginary Committee of Safety of a certain i'm
aginary Legislature was proceeding to burn
down his haystack, in accordance with an
act, entitled an act to make the poor richer
by making the rich poorer And the chair
man of the committees was inStitutino a fOrci-
BILE exchange of hats with him, to his mani
fest disadvantage, for he had just bought him
a new beaver. He told this dream after
wards to one of the boarders.-Fronl "1He
Poet at the Breakfast Table," IN January
atlantic. I.