not the ‘dear people’ through them cheered and refreshed?  Besides, they may have so reluctantly dropped the wine and sandwiches because they were loth to leave them to ‘give aid and comfort to the enemy.’  There are always envious people to rail at those above them; pawns on the world’s chess-board, they pride themselves on their own straightforward course; but let them push their way to the highest row, how soon do they exchange this course for the ’crooked policy of the knight,’ or jump over principles with queen, castle, or bishop!  Woe to the poor pawn in their way.

How I have skipped! what connection can there be between members of Congress and crooked policy, or jumping over principles? yet there must have been a train of association that led me off the track; doubtless it was purely arbitrary.  Well, we’ll let it go; poor pawn as I am, I have but stepped aside to nab an idea.

But to return to the Yankee.  The form which selfishness takes in his system is not that of the most intensified exclusiveness.  You know the story of Rosicrucius’ sepulcher, with its ever-burning lamp, guarded by an armor-encased, truncheon-armed statue, which statue, on the entrance of a man who accidentally discovered the sepulcher, arose, and at his advance, raised its truncheon and shivered the lamp to atoms, leaving the intruder in darkness.  On examination, under the floor springs were found, connecting with others within the statue.  Rosicrucius wished thus to inform the world that he had reinvented the ever-burning lamp of the ancients, but meant that the world shouldn’t profit by the information.  Had a Yankee reinvented those lamps, he would have got out a patent, and some brother Yankee would have improved upon it, and invented one warranted to burn ‘forever and a day.’  They would probably have thus raked together a great deal of the ‘filthy lucre;’ possibly this would have been their main object; but the world would have been benefited by them.  All selfishness, to be sure, but exclusive selfishness benefits the world.

[Speaking of filthy lucre, I begin to see why those who have lost it all are said to be ‘cleaned out.’  But this is only par parenthese.]

But exclusiveness is not peculiar to the Rosicrucians; there is too much of it in even the religious sects of this enlightened age; it is too much, ‘Lord, bless me and my sect;’ ‘Lord, bless us, and no more.’  There are self-constituted mountain-tops that would extract all the mercy and grace with which the winds come freighted from the great ocean of Love, so that they would pass over beyond them hot, dry winds of wrath.  But I am glad that this is impossible; that in the moral world there are no Andes, no rainless regions.

I fear that I have not stuck very closely to the text furnished me by thick-headed, thick-tongued Dogberry.