into action.  “How is this?” said a brother officer to him.  “Surely you are not afraid?” “No,” he answered, “but my flesh trembles at the thought of the dangers into which my intrepid spirit will carry me.”  I knew the risk of undertaking to carry through a series of connected papers.  And yet I thought it was better to run that risk, more manly, more sensible, than to give way to the fears which made my flesh tremble as did Sir Cloudesley Shovel’s.  For myself the labor has been a distraction, and one which came at a time when it was needed.  Sometimes, as in one of those poems recently published,—­the reader will easily guess which,—­the youthful spirit has come over me with such a rush that it made me feel just as I did when I wrote the history of the “One-hoss Shay” thirty years ago.  To repeat one of my comparisons, it was as if an early fruit had ripened on a graft upon an old, steady-going tree, to the astonishment of all its later-maturing products.  I should hardly dare to say so much as this if I had not heard a similar opinion expressed by others.

Once committed to my undertaking, there was no turning back.  It is true that I had said I might stop at any moment, but after one or two numbers it seemed as if there were an informal pledge to carry the series on, as in former cases, until I had completed my dozen instalments.

Writers and speakers have their idiosyncrasies, their habits, their tricks, if you had rather call them so, as to their ways of writing and speaking.  There is a very old and familiar story, accompanied by a feeble jest, which most of my readers may probably enough have met with in Joe Miller or elsewhere.  It is that of a lawyer who could never make an argument without having a piece of thread to work upon with his fingers while he was pleading.  Some one stole it from him one day, and he could not get on at all with his speech,—­he had lost the thread of his discourse, as the story had it.  Now this is what I myself once saw.  It was at a meeting where certain grave matters were debated in an assembly of professional men.  A speaker, whom I never heard before or since, got up and made a long and forcible argument.  I do not think he was a lawyer, but he spoke as if he had been trained to talk to juries.  He held a long string in one hand, which he drew through the other band incessantly, as he spoke, just as a shoe maker performs the motion of waxing his thread.  He appeared to be dependent on this motion.  The physiological significance of the fact I suppose to be that the flow of what we call the nervous current from the thinking centre to the organs of speech was rendered freer and easier by the establishment of a simultaneous collateral nervous current to the set of muscles concerned in the action I have described.