In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food
of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything
at any hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods,
and you might as well attempt to regulate the time of high-water to
suit a fishing-party as to change these periods.
The crucial experiment is this. Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the
suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner. If this is
eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established. If
the subject of the question starts back and expresses surprise and
incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of
maturity is no less clear.
--Excuse me--I return to my story of the Commons table. Young fellows
being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meager fare of
the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the boys to impale a
slice of meat upon a fork at dinner time and stick the fork holding
it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea time. The
dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick
at last and kept a sharp lookout for missing forks--they knew where
to find one if it was not in its place. Now the odd thing was that,
after waiting so many years to hear of this college trick, I should
hear it mentioned a _second time_ within the same twenty-four
hours by a college youth of the present generation. Strange, but
true. And so it has happened to me and to every person, often and
often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts or
thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.
I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it
as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow
of subsoil in it. The explanation is, of course, that in a great many
thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest
our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the
enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness,
until in some future life we see the photographic record of our
thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more
pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body than you think
for. Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of mine told you
there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle. How many
"swimming glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed, rounded disks,
taking an active part in all your vital processes, part and parcel,
each one of them, of your corporal being--do you suppose are whirled
along like pebbles in a stream with the blood which warms your frame
and colors your cheeks? A noted German physiologist spread out a
minute drop of blood under the microscope, in narrow streaks, and
counted the globules, and then made a calculation. The counting by
the micrometer took him a _week_. You have, my full-grown friend, of
these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on your
vital errands day and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions
five hundred and seventy thousand millions, errors excepted. Did I
hear some gentleman say "Doubted"? I am the Professor; I sit in my
chair with a petard under it that will blow me through the skylight of
my lecture-room if I do not know what I am talking about and whom I am
quoting.
Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads
and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you
had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is
it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of
all that I have been saying and its bearing on what is now to come?
Listen, then. The number of these living elements in our body
illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of
our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of;
these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we
constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the
presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the
daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the
special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections,
and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl's story,
which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to
learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the
unconscious subject of my brief delineation.