"More or less,--more or less," said Number Seven prudently. "But I don't care who has written it before me. I will agree to write the story of two worlds, this and the next, in such a compact way that you can commit them both,to memory in less time than you can learn the answer to the first question in the Catechi**."
What he had got into his head we could not guess, but there was no little curiosity to discover the particular bee which was buzzing in his bonnet. He evidently enjoyed our curiosity, and meant to keep us waiting awhile before revealing the great secret.
"How many words do you think I shall want?"
It is a formula, I suppose, I said, and I will grant you a hundred words.
"Twenty," said the Professor. "That was more than the wise men of Greece wanted for their grand utterances."
The two Annexes whispered together, and the American Annex gave their joint result. One thousand was the number they had fixed on. They were used to hearing lectures, and could hardly conceive that any subject could be treated without taking up a good part of an hour.
"Less than ten," said Number Five. "If there are to be more than ten, I don't believe that Number Seven would think the surprise would be up to our expectations."
"Guess as much as you like," said Number Seven.
"The answer will keep. I don't mean to say what it is until we are ready to leave the table." He took a blank card from his pocket-book, wrote something on it, or appeared, at any rate, to write, and handed it, face down, to the Mistress. What was on the card will be found near the end of this paper. I wonder if anybody will be curious enough to look further along to find out what it was before she reads the next paragraph?
In the mean time there is a train of thought suggested by Number Seven and his whims. If you want to know how to account for yourself, study the characters of your relations. All of our brains squint more or less. There is not one in a hundred, certainly, that does not sometimes see things distorted by double refraction, out of plumb or out of focus, or with colors which do not belong to it, or in some way betraying that the two halves of the brain are not acting in harmony with each other. You wonder at the eccentricities of this or that connection of your own. Watch yourself, and you will find impulses which, but for the restraints you put upon them, would make you do the same foolish things which you laugh at in that cousin of yours. I once lived in the same house with the near relative of a very distinguished person, whose name is still honored and revered among us. His brain was an active one, like that of his famous relative, but it was full of random ideas, unconnected trains of thought, whims, crotchets, erratic suggestions. Knowing him, I could interpret the mental characteristics of the whole family connection in the light of its exaggerated peculiarities as exhibited in my odd fellow-boarder. Squinting brains are a great deal more common than we should at first sight believe. Here is a great book, a solid octavo of five hundred pages, full of the vagaries of this class of organizations. I hope to refer to this work hereafter, but just now I will only say that, after reading till one is tired the strange fancies of the squarers of the circle, the inventors of perpetual motion, and the rest of the moonstruck dreamers, most persons will confess to themselves that they have had notions as wild, conceptions as extravagant, theories as baseless, as the least rational of those which are here recorded.
