not born to it, drink shuts the door on you
tighter nor ever. There's not one man in ten that drink doesn't make a
bigger fool of than he is already. Look at Shoemaker Hankin. Half a pint
of cider'll set him hee-hawin' like the Rectory donkey. But there's some
men as can't get a lift no other way. It's like that wi' me sometimes.
There's weeks and weeks together when I'm fair stuck inside my own skin
and can't get out on it nohow. That's when I know a drop'll do me good.
I can a'most hear something go click in my head, and then I gets among
'em" (the spirits) "in no time. A pint's mostly enough to do it; but
sometimes it takes a quart; and once or twice I've had to go on till
somebody's had to help me home. But when once I begins I never stops
till I see the door openin'--and then not a drop more!"

"SNARLEYCHOLOGY"

II. EXPERIMENTAL

One day I was discussing with Mrs. Abel the oft-recurrent problem of
Snarley's peculiar mental constitution, a subject to which she had given
the name "Snarleychology."[2] Her knowledge of the old man's ways was of
longer date than mine, and she understood him infinitely better than I.
"Suppose, now," I said "that Snarley had been able to express himself
after the manner of superlative people like you and me, what would have
come of it?" "Art," said Mrs. Abel, "and most probably poetry. He's just
a mass of intuitions!" "What a pity they are inarticulate!" I answered,
repeating the appropriate commonplace. "But they are not inarticulate,"
said Mrs. Abel. "Snarley has found a medium of expression which gives
him perfect satisfaction." "Then the poems ought to be in existence,"
said I. "So they are," was the answer; "they exist in the shape of
Farmer Perryman's big rams. The rams are the direct creations of genius
working upon appropriate material. None but a dreamer of dreams could
have brought them into being; every one of them is an embodied ideal.
Don't make the blunder of thinking that Snarley's sheep-raising has
nothing to do with his star-gazings and spirit-rappings. It's all one.
Shakespeare writes _Hamlet_, and Snarley produces 'Thunderbolt.'[3] To
call Snarley inarticulate because he hasn't written a _Hamlet_ is as
absurd as it would be to call Shakespeare inarticulate because he didn't
produce a 'Thunderbolt.' Both _Hamlet_ and 'Thunderbolt' were born in
the highest heaven of invention. Both are the fruit of intuitions
concentrated on their object with incredible pertina