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The Times and the Morning Post were laid out on the little table by his accustomed chair near the massive marble mantelpiece. "The dear old idiots," said Doggie, and he sat down for a moment and unfolded the newspapers and strewed them around, to give the impression that he had read and enjoyed them.
The yard was at present silent, but as he moved to give himself up in the prison-hall, five night-warders with bull's-eyes fell out, still seeking him. And as he knelt with clasped hands of supplication and bent bare back, like a captured slave, they fell savagely upon him, and cried one: "Well, of all the idiots...!"
At the end of the book were German proverbs and "Idiomatic Phrases," by which latter would appear to be meant in all languages, "phrases for the use of idiots": "A sparrow in the hand is better than a pigeon on the roof." "Time brings roses." "The eagle does not catch flies."
I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things 'on principle, as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact. I view all reported 'hauntings' as unproven until I have examined into them, and I am bound to admit that ninety-nine cases in a hundred turn out to be sheer bosh and fancy. But the hundredth!
Alice and I are poor in purse, but I deny that we are idiots. I dare say we shall eventually come back to our original plan, for it is already as clear as the noonday sun that if we adopt the suggestion of any one neighbor we shall have all the rest of our neighbors down on us for the rest of our lives. We had an unpleasant experience of this character in the matter of wall-paper.
Organization may reduce the power of the will to nothing, as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale mounts upwards by slight gradations. Education is only second to nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and Timbuctoo to change places! Condition does less, but "Give me neither poverty nor riches" was the prayer of Agur, and with good reason.
"Why!" he said slowly, "there are three people in that buggy. A man and " "And two women; that's what I thought. Dum idiots comin' over to picnic and spend the day, sure's taxes. And they'll want to be showed round the lights and everywheres, and they'll ask more'n forty million questions. Consarn the luck!" Brown looked troubled. He had no desire to meet strangers.
In snatching the black man from our side, the Republicans, out of pure sympathy doubtless, lest we should be without any "male" compeer in our degradation, leave the innocent Chinaman to comfort and console us. Are we not most unreasonable in our dissatisfaction with the company our fathers and brothers constitutionally rank with us idiots, lunatics, convicts, Chinamen?
We laugh at it, we dare treat these peoples as barbarous idiots, because they innocently thanked God for having given them existence. What would they have said if they had seen us enter our temples with the instrument of destruction at our side? At Thebes the sins of the people were represented by a goat. On the coast of Phoenicia a naked woman, with a fish's tail, was the emblem of nature.
"You are wrong," returned the king, playing with the jewels on his robe, "that is because you have been reared as you have in your unsystematic world. Here we make life a serious study. It is our object to assist nature in all things. The efforts of your people amount to nothing because they are not carried far enough. Your scientists are dreaming idiots.
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