Yes, yes, I have amused a summer or two with insects, among other things.  I described a new tabanus,—­horsefly, you know,—­which, I think, had escaped notice.  I felt as grand when I showed up my new discovery as if I had created the beast.  I don’t doubt Herschel felt as if he had made a planet when he first showed the astronomers Georgium Sidus, as he called it.  And that reminds me of something.  I was riding on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Windsor in the year—­never mind the year, but it must have been in June, I suppose, for I bought some strawberries.  England owes me a sixpence with interest from date, for I gave the woman a shilling, and the coach contrived to start or the woman timed it so that I just missed getting my change.  What an odd thing memory is, to be sure, to have kept such a triviality, and have lost so much that was invaluable!  She is a crazy wench, that Mnemosyne; she throws her jewels out of the window and locks up straws and old rags in her strong box.

[De profundis! said I to myself, the bottom of the bushel has dropped out!  Sancta—­Maria, ora pro nobis!]

—­But as I was saying, I was riding on the outside of a stage-coach from London to Windsor, when all at once a picture familiar to me from my New England village childhood came upon me like a reminiscence rather than a revelation.  It was a mighty bewilderment of slanted masts and spars and ladders and ropes, from the midst of which a vast tube, looking as if it might be a piece of ordnance such as the revolted angels battered the walls of Heaven with, according to Milton, lifted its muzzle defiantly towards the sky.  Why, you blessed old rattletrap, said I to myself, I know you as well as I know my father’s spectacles and snuff-box!  And that same crazy witch of a Memory, so divinely wise and foolish, travels thirty-five hundred miles or so in a single pulse-beat, makes straight for an old house and an old library and an old corner of it, and whisks out a volume of an old cyclopaedia, and there is the picture of which this is the original.  Sir William Herschel’s great telescope!  It was just about as big, as it stood there by the roadside, as it was in the picture, not much different any way.  Why should it be?  The pupil of your eye is only a gimlet-hole, not so very much bigger than the eye of a sail-needle, and a camel has to go through it before you can see him.  You look into a stereoscope and think you see a miniature of a building or a mountain; you don’t, you ’re made a fool of by your lying intelligence, as you call it; you see the building and the mountain just as large as with your naked eye looking straight at the real objects.  Doubt it, do you?  Perhaps you’d like to doubt it to the music of a couple of gold five-dollar pieces.  If you would, say the word, and man and money, as Messrs. Heenan and Morrissey have it, shall be forthcoming; for I will make you look at a real landscape with your right eye, and a stereoscopic view of it with your left eye, both at once, and you can slide one over the other by a little management and see how exactly the picture overlies the true landscape.  We won’t try it now, because I want to read you something out of my book.