Wouldn't it carry you off
into contemplatin' of the planet whose daily course and speed it
measures so exact? Wouldn't you go on from that point, and ask
yourself what must be the wisdom and power of Him who made innumerable
worlds, and caused them to form part of a great, grand, magnificent,
and harmonious system, and fly off the handle, as you call it, in
admiration and awe? To be sure you would. And if anybody said you was
full of romance who heard you, wouldn't you have pitied his ignorance,
and said there are other enjoyments we are capable of besides
corporeal ones? Wouldn't you be a wiser and a better man? Don't you go
now for to run down romance, Sam; if you do, I shall think you don't
know there is a divinity within you," and so he would preach on for an
hour, till I thought it was time for him to say Amen and give the
dismissal benediction.
1 It is manifest Mr Hopewell must have had Paley's illustration in his
mind.
Well, that's the way I came by it, I was inoculated for it, but I was
always a hard subject to inoculate. Vaccination was tried on me over
and over again by the doctor before I took it, but at last it came and
got into the system. So it was with him and his romance, it was only
the continual dropping that wore the stone at last, for I didn't
listen as I had ought to have done. If he had a showed me where I
could have made a dollar, he would have found me wide awake, I know,
for I set out in life with a determination to go ahead, and I have;
and now I am well to do, but still I wish I had a minded more what he
did say, for, poor old soul, he is dead now.
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