| Show FROM MEMORY what often is accepted as plagiarism Is but the mind recalling some thing from memory mark twain affords a good of this he relates how he was taken to task by an old friend mr goodman of virginia city nevada for stealing oliver wendell holm cs dedication to his poems and appropriating it for the innocents abroad he was in the hawaiian islands in 1867 in the hotel where he stopped there was but one book and that was dr holmes poems and this is what mark twain says happened I 1 had had a fortnights fort nights chance to get well acquainted with ita contents for I 1 had ridden around the big island hawaii on horseback and had brought back so many saddle bolls that if there had been a duty on them it would have bankrupted me to pay it they kept me in my room unclothed aej in persistent pain for two weeks with no company but cigars and the little volume of poems af course I 1 read them almost constantly st I 1 road them from beginning to end then read them backwards then began in the middle aej read them both ways then read them wrong end first and upside down in a word I 1 read the book to rags and was infinitely grateful to the hand that wrote it here we have an exhibition of what repetition can do when persisted in dally and hourly over a considerable stretch of timo where one is merely reading for entertainment without thought or intention of preserving in the memory that which Is read it la a process which in the course of bears dries all the juice out ot a familiar verse of scripture leaving nothing but a sapless husk behind in that case you at least know the origin of the husk but in the case in point I 1 apparently preserve the busk but presently forgot whence it came it lay lost in some dim corner of my memory a year or two then came forward when I 1 needed a dedication and was promptly mistaken by me as a child of my own happy fancy I 1 was new I 1 was ignorant the mysteries of the human mind were a sealed book to me as yet and I 1 stupidly looked upon myself as a tough and unforgivable criminal I 1 wrote to dr holmes and told him the whole disgraceful affair implored him in impassioned language to believe that I 1 had sever intended to commit this crime and was unaware that I 1 bad committed it until I 1 was confronted with the awful evince I 1 have lost his answer I 1 could better have afforded to lose an uncle of cheso I 1 had a surplus sur many of them of no real value to me but that letter was beyond price beyond and in it dr holmes laughed the kindest and heartiest laugh over the whole matter and at length and in happy phrase assured me that there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism that I 1 committed it every day that he committed it every day that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he opens hs mouth that all our phrasings are spiritualized spi ritualized shadows cast multitudinously from our readings that no happy phrase of ours is ever quite original with us there la nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament character environment teachings and associations that this slight change differentiates it from another mans manner of saying it stamps it with our special style and makes it out own tor the time being all the rest of it being old moldy antique and smelling of the breath of a thousand generations of them that have passed it over their teeth before after drinking buttermilk ostentatiously for a whole summer mr fair banks finds that a cocktail dinner queerer queered his temperance friends what la home without a teddy bear A child fell three stories landed on its stuffed pet and turned up unhurt tolstoi predicts the downfall of the united states another wise man who know what he is talking about mrs russell Sage ought to tell hetty green how much better it Is to give away the money than to didgo tax assessors ses sors A spinsters spin club at charkes clarkes Cl arkes S D wants bachelors taxed or chloro formed why not aasc mem first and then chloroform thorn afterward the sleuth who succeeded in serving the summons on mr rockefeller 18 the very man to discover who are the cherry in the cocktail may be the hague conference will think to take up tho limitation of the size and force of tho cannon cracker used by tho american citizens to emphasize patriotism on the fourth A rapid transfer of the atlantic fleet to tho pacific will serve to remind posterity oatha hardships the american navy had to endure batore the panama canal was cut american will not be entirely happy until they haro a broad smooth highway from the atlantic to the pacific on which they can make 2400 milea in twenty four hours A columbus ind woman undertook to her son agod but cut her hand on a lead pencil ho was holding and Is in danger of dying of blood poisoning small bos should cut this out and past it on the doorpost i ta heno nevada man who lust died leaving an estate valued at had worn the same hat for it years it may have been an extraordinary good hat and besides the man may never have contracted the habit of talking through it in the matter of the tobacco trust the department of justice evidently thinks that where there Is eo much smoke there must be some fire the course of the san francisco grafting seems to indicate that it Is still a good deal safer to give than it ts to receive them it seems that the hague conference wants something in the way of floating mines that will be like a good many notes thoroughly worthless thirty days after floating the bertillion Bertil llon records in new york showed that paying runyon was five feet eight inches long and the records of the windsor trust company show that he was short it appears that the rusian terrorists overlooked a large bet when they tailed to enroll harry orchard in their membership of course a lot of carping critics will now be looking at the bottom of the presidents latest trust busting recommendations to sea it they are not labeled made in lincoln neb president roosevelt states that he knows absolutely nothing about millinery if he does not he Is luckier than the most men who have had to foot the bills what the navy department probably meant Is that the sending of the battleships tle ships to san francisco is a piece move the rest of the move will be to manilla the department ot justice has at last evolved a scheme for beating the trusts that looks good from this distance II 11 Ss so simple that the wonder Is no one has thought of it before the plan Is when a trust is convicted of lawbreaking and directed to dissolve not to leave the dissolution to the officers of the trust athla has been tried with scant effect for a number of times but to put the thing into the hands of a receiver and run it tor the benefit of tha stockholders till a dissolution la effected that really dissolves |
