The Thing
Was Different, He Declared, And Nothing Was Serviceable But What
Had To Do With Food.
'Eat, eat, eat!' he cried; 'that's the bottom
and the top.' By an odd irony of circumstance, he grew so much
interested in this discussion that he let the hour slip by
unnoticed and had to go without his tea.
He had enough sense and
humour, indeed he had no lack of either, to have chuckled over this
himself in private; and even to me he referred to it with the
shadow of a smile.
Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of religion. I have
seen him waste hours of time in argument with all sorts of poor
human creatures who understood neither him nor themselves, and he
had had the boyishness to dissect and criticise even so small a
matter as the riddler's definition of mind. He snorted aloud with
zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle. Anything, whatever
it was, that seemed to him likely to discourage the continued
passionate production of corn and steam-engines he resented like a
conspiracy against the people. Thus, when I put in the plea for
literature, that it was only in good books, or in the society of
the good, that a man could get help in his conduct, he declared I
was in a different world from him. 'Damn my conduct!' said he. 'I
have given it up for a bad job. My question is, "Can I drive a
nail?"' And he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously
seeking to reduce the people's annual bellyful of corn and steam-
engines.
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