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The imagination is allowed as little play as possible. Interest is carefully concentrated upon the mechanical details of spars, sails, rigging, watertight compartments, wheels, rods, cranks, levers, and the thousand-and-one items which go to make up a mechanical contrivance.
After the hundreds of sanitary tracts in which the deadliness of sewer-gas has been an axiom of faith, after the thousand-and-one deaths from it in the contemporary novel, it is grimly diverting to learn that sewer-gas may be welcomed without fear to our hearths and homes.
By day or night no ant or other edible thing seemed ever to approach or be entrapped; and month after month there was no sign of change to imago. Yet each pit held a fat, enthusiastic inmate, ready at a touch to turn steam-shovel, battering-ram, bayonet, and gourmand. Among the first thousand-and-one mysteries of Kartabo I give a place to the source of nourishment of the sub-bungalow ant-lions.
But this, at the best, is not true clairvoyance it is merely the statement of "probable" results, and effects of existing causes, wonderfully exact and clear though the deduction may be in some cases. But a thousand-and-one unforeseen things may arise to completely upset the prediction, or deduction, for it is never actually true until it occurs.
"The rooms were beautiful, Daisy," continued Arthur "because the walls were papered with Goodness and the chairs, and the tables, and the carpets, and the sofas, and the thousand-and-one little knick-knacks, were placed in the rooms by Self-Denial, and the windows were polished very brightly by Love herself, and she kept the key which opened the chamber doors." "How sweet!" said Daisy.
"But were this the only question a man has to settle in his short span of years, he might cheerfully engage in its solution. But life bristles with a hundred questions equally capital, and with a thousand-and-one minor problems on which he is expected to have an opinion, and about which he is asked at one time or other, if only at dinner."
In many nervous children we find a faulty contact with environment, so that instead of becoming interested in the thousand-and-one happenings of everyday life and experiences, they become introspective and self-conscious.
After a few commonplace remarks, Julian ventured on a question or two as to the purchases which he would immediately require, the hours of lecture and hall, and the thousand-and-one trifles of which a newcomer is necessarily ignorant. Mr Admer seemed to think this a great bore, and answered languidly enough, advising Julian not to be "more fresh" than he could help.
In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.
Not that there was any blood-thirstiness or exceptional evil in their nature more than in that of the thousand-and-one toilers that are met on the highway, but simply because they worked such hard work of hands and stooping backs, and I was idle, for all they knew. Because they were going from one field of labour to another field of labour, and I walked slowly and did no visible work.
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