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In fact, the phenomenon seems to bear a close relation to the well known case of a long-used violin becoming a more perfect instrument, and giving forth richer and fuller notes than a new instrument. The longer a gazing crystal is used, especially by the one person, the better does it seem to serve the purposes of that particular person.
Before a little waxen image of the Mother and Child, an odd little Virgin with an Indian face, brought home by Feliu as a gift after one of his Mexican voyages, Carmen Viosca had burned candles and prayed; sometimes telling her beads; sometimes murmuring the litanies she knew by heart; sometimes also reading from a prayer-book worn and greasy as a long-used pack of cards.
If the new Hoosier regiment had been quartered for a while in long-used barracks, or had pitched its tents in an old camp, Si would very soon have learned, in the school of experience, the delightful uses of finger-nails. But the 200th stayed only a single night in Louisville and then joined the procession that started on the chase after the rebel army.
It cannot, properly speaking, be learned by teachers out of books, though books can do a great deal. But a long-used quiet habit of observation gives it life and the stored-up sweetness of years "the old is better." The most charming books on nature study necessarily give a second-hand tone to the teaching.
In the graves of the ancient peoples of California a number of ollas were found in long-used burying places, and it is probable that as the bones were dug up time and again for new burials they were simply tossed into pots, which were convenient receptacles, or it may have been that bodies were allowed to repose in the earth long enough for the fleshy parts to decay, and the bones were then collected, placed in urns, and reinterred.
The aspect of that mad world below, with every condition of creation reversed; a mistake in the adjustment of the winch and gear by the excited, reluctant, disapproving men; an overstrain on the fibres of the long-used rope; a slip on the treacherous ice; the dizzy whirl of the senses that even a glance downward at those drear depths set astir in the brain, all were canvassed within his mental processes, all were duly realized in their entirety ere he said with a spare dull voice and dry lips,
Then he will use his wet and perspiring hands to turn over the volumes; then he will thump the white vellum with gloves covered with all kinds of dust, and with his finger clad in long-used leather will hunt line by line through the page; then at the sting of the biting flea the sacred book is flung aside, and is hardly shut for another month, until it is so full of the dust that has found its way within, that it resists the effort to close it.
It aids in webbing the feet of water-dogs, but fails to web the feet of the water-hen or to remove the web in the feet of upland geese. It allows the disused fibula to retain a potentiality of development fully equal to that possessed by the long-used tibia. It lengthens legs because they are used in supporting the body, and shortens arms because they are used in pulling.
This it must have done many hundred times; for the square, flat end of it, though showing the grain of a very dense wood, has been battered into a convex disk with ragged protruding edges, like the surface of a long-used printer's mallet. A priest makes a sign to me to ring the bell. I first touch the great lips with my hand very lightly; and a musical murmur comes from them.
Merivale dropped down into an easy-chair one afternoon with the greatest languor and physical depression, and declaring that "those fashionable weddings were enough to knock a body up for a month," quietly fell asleep among her comfortable cushions. There is only a little more labor for my long-used wheel, and the threads of my uneven life will have run on to the crisis.
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