go Orton
had a huge army of devotees and incorrigible adherents, many of whom
remained stubbornly unconvinced after their fat god had been proven an
impostor and jailed as a perjurer, and to-day Mrs. Eddy's following is
not only immense, but is daily augmenting in numbers and enthusiasm.
Orton had many fine and educated minds among his adherents, Mrs. Eddy has
had the like among hers from the beginning. Her church is as well
equipped in those particulars as is any other church. Claimants can
always count upon a following, it doesn't matter who they are, nor what
they claim, nor whether they come with documents or without. It was
always so. Down out of the long-vanished past, across the abyss of the
ages, if you listen you can still hear the believing multitudes shouting
for Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.

A friend has sent me a new book, from England--_The Shakespeare Problem
Restated_--well restated and closely reasoned; and my fifty years'
interest in that matter--asleep for the last three years--is excited once
more. It is an interest which was born of Delia Bacon's book--away back
in that ancient day--1857, or maybe 1856. About a year later my
pilot-master, Bixby, transferred me from his own steamboat to the
_Pennsylvania_, and placed me under the orders and instructions of George
Ealer--dead now, these many, many years. I steered for him a good many
months--as was the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice: stood a daylight
watch and spun the wheel under the severe superintendence and correction
of the master. He was a prime chess player and an idolater of
Shakespeare. He would play chess with anybody; even with me, and it cost
his official dignity something to do that. Also--quite uninvited--he
would read Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it
was his watch, and I was steering. He read well, but not profitably for
me, because he constantly injected commands into the text. That broke it
all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all up--to that degree, in fact, that
if we were in a risky and difficult piece of river an ignorant person
couldn't have told, sometimes, which observations were Shakespeare's and
which were Ealer's. For instance:

What man dare, _I_ dare!

Approach thou _what_ are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of
an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her off! rugged
Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the _there_ she goes! meet h