——­My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution which I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit of all concerned.

Professor,—­said he, one day,—­don’t you think your brain will run dry before a year’s out, if you don’t get the pump to help the cow?  Let me tell you what happened to me once.  I put a little money into a bank, and bought a checkbook, so that I might draw it as I wanted, in sums to suit.  Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a pen was as easy as rubbing Aladdin’s Lamp; and my blank check-book seemed to be a dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all the synonymes of happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot.  A check came back to me at last with these two words on it,—­No funds.  My checkbook was a volume of waste-paper.

Now, Professor,—­said he,—­I have drawn something out of your bank, you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul’s currency without making new deposits, the next thing will be, No funds,—­and then where will you be, my boy?  These little bits of paper mean your gold and your silver and your copper, Professor; and you will certainly break up and go to pieces, if you don’t hold on to your metallic basis.

There is something in that,—­said I.—­Only I rather think life can coin thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words.  What if one shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that falls of a June evening on the leaves of his garden?  Shall there be no more dew on those leaves thereafter?  Marry, yea,—­many drops, large and round and full of moonlight as those thou shalt have absterged!

Here am I, the Professor,—­a man who has lived long enough to have plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,—­which are not always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April, or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to decrepitude; with a brain as full of tingling thoughts, such as they are, as a limb which we call “asleep,” because it is so particularly awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps, not as yet tanned or ossified, to the finger-touch of all outward agencies; knowing something of the filmy threads of this web of life in which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding with the fox oftener than with the stork,—­loving better the breadth of a fertilizing inundation than the depth of a narrow artesian well; finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of the grammatophora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the movement of the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation Hercules;—­and the question is, whether there is anything left for me, the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend has had his straw in the bunghole of the Universe!