hurry, and I wished we could get this business permanently mapped out, so that I could go on with my work.  He said, “I could have put up those eight rods, and marched off about my business—­some men would have done it.  But no; I said to myself, this man is a stranger to me, and I will die before I’ll wrong him; there ain’t lightning-rods enough on that house, and for one I’ll never stir out of my tracks till I’ve done as I would be done by, and told him so.  Stranger, my duty is accomplished; if the recalcitrant and dephlogistic messenger of heaven strikes your—­” “There, now, there,” I said, “put on the other eight—­add five hundred feet of spiral-twist—­do anything and everything you want to do; but calm your sufferings, and try to keep your feelings where you can reach them with the dictionary.  Meanwhile, if we understand each other now, I will go to work again.”

I think I have been sitting here a full hour this time, trying to get back to where I was when my train of thought was broken up by the last interruption; but I believe I have accomplished it at last, and may venture to proceed again.]

wrestled with this great subject, and the greatest among them have found it a worthy adversary, and one that always comes up fresh and smiling after every throw.  The great Confucius said that he would rather be a profound political economist than chief of police.  Cicero frequently said that political economy was the grandest consummation that the human mind was capable of consuming; and even our own Greeley had said vaguely but forcibly that “Political—­

[Here the lightning-rod man sent up another call for me.  I went down in a state of mind bordering on impatience.  He said he would rather have died than interrupt me, but when he was employed to do a job, and that job was expected to be done in a clean, workmanlike manner, and when it was finished and fatigue urged him to seek the rest and recreation he stood so much in need of, and he was about to do it, but looked up and saw at a glance that all the calculations had been a little out, and if a thunder-storm were to come up, and that house, which he felt a personal interest in, stood there with nothing on earth to protect it but sixteen lightning-rods—­“Let us have peace!” I shrieked.  “Put up a hundred and fifty!  Put some on the kitchen!  Put a dozen on the barn!  Put a couple on the cow!  Put one on the cook!—­scatter them all over the persecuted place till it looks like a zinc-plated, spiral-twisted, silver-mounted canebrake!  Move!  Use up all the material you can get your hands on, and when you run out of lightning-rods put up ramrods, cam-rods, stair-rods, piston-rods—­anything that will pander to your dismal appetite for artificial scenery, and bring respite to my raging brain and healing to my lacerated soul!” Wholly unmoved—­further than to smile sweetly—­this iron being simply turned back his wrist-bands daintily, and said he would now proceed to hump himself.  Well, all that was nearly three hours ago.  It is questionable whether I am calm enough yet to write on the noble theme of political economy, but I cannot resist the desire to try, for it is the one subject that is nearest to my heart and dearest to my brain of all this world’s philosophy.]