This discarding of my four-legged grasshopper and supplying myself with one that has six legs may be what the poet means when he speaks of our dead selves.  He may refer to the new suit of mental clothing that I am supposed to get each day, to the change of mind that I am supposed to undergo as regularly as a daily bath.  Possibly Mr. Holmes meant something like that when he wrote his “Chambered Nautilus.”  At each advance from one of these compartments to another, I suppose I acquire a new suit of clothes, or, in other words, change my mind.  Let’s see, wasn’t it Theseus whose eternal punishment in Hades was just to sit there forever?  That seems somewhat heavenly to me.  But here on earth I suppose I must try to keep up with the styles, and change my mental gear day by day.

I think I might come to enjoy a change of suits every day if only some one would provide them for me; but, if I must earn them myself, the case is different.  I’d like to have some one bestow upon me a beautiful Greek suit for Monday, with its elegance, grace, and dignity, a Roman suit for Tuesday, a science suit for Wednesday, a suit of poetry for Thursday, and so on, day after day.  But when I must read all of Homer before I can have the Greek suit, the price seems a bit stiff, and I’m not so avid about changing my mind.  We had a township picnic back home, once, and it seemed to me that I was attending a congress of nations, for there were people there who had driven five or six miles from the utmost bounds of the township.  That was a real mental adventure, and it took some time for me to adjust myself to my new suit.  Then I went to the county fair, where were gathered people from all the townships, and my poor mind had a mighty struggle trying to grasp the immensity of the thing.  I felt much the same as when I was trying to understand the mathematical sign of infinity.  And when I came upon the statement, in my geography, that there are eighty-eight counties in our State, the mind balked absolutely and refused to go on.  I felt as did the old gentleman who saw an aeroplane for the first time.  After watching its gyrations for some time he finally exclaimed:  “They ain’t no sich thing.”

My college roommate, Mack, went over to London, once, on some errand, and of course went to the British Museum.  Near the entrance he came upon the Rosetta Stone, and stood inthralled.  He reflected that he was standing in the presence of a monument that marks the beginning of recorded history, that back of that all was dark, and that all the books in all the libraries emanate from that beginning.  The thought was so big, so overmastering, that there was no room in his mind for anything else, so he turned about and left without seeing anything else in the Museum.  Since then we have had many a big laugh together as he recounts to me his wonderful visit to the Rosetta Stone.  I see clearly that in the presence of that modest stone he got all the mental clothing he could possibly wear at the time.  Changing the mind sometimes seems to amount almost to surgery.