The odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim
recesses.
----Do I remember Byron's line about "striking the electric chain"?--To
be sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs the
automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves us. What
can be more trivial than that old story of opening the folio Shakspeare
that used to lie in some ancient English hall and finding the flakes of
Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up in them perhaps a hundred
years ago? And, lo! as one looks on those poor relics of a bygone
generation, the universe changes in the twinkling of an eye; old George
the Second is back again, and the elder Pitt is coming into power, and
General Wolfe is a fine, promising young man, and over the Channel they
are pulling the Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the
Atlantic the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at
Fort William Henry; all the dead people that have been in the dust so
long--even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry--are alive
again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils, and the
precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of heaven! And all
this for a bit of pie-crust!
----I will thank you for that pie,--said the provoking young fellow whom
I have named repeatedly.
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