ngs he made casual mention
of the Honolulu Hotel's poverty in the matter of literature. At first I
did not see the bearing of the remark, it called nothing to my mind. But
presently it did--with a flash! There was but one book in Mr. Kirchhof's
hotel, and that was the first volume of Dr. Holmes's blue and gold
series. I had had a fortnight's chance to get well acquainted with its
contents, for I had ridden around the big island (Hawaii) on horseback
and had brought back so many saddle boils that if there had been a duty
on them it would have bankrupted me to pay it. They kept me in my room,
unclothed, and in persistent pain for two weeks, with no company but
cigars and the little volume of poems. Of course I read them almost
constantly; I read them from beginning to end, then read them backwards,
then began in the middle and read them both ways, then read them wrong
end first and upside down. In a word, I 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
daily and hourly over a considerable stretch of time, where one is
merely reading for entertainment, without thought or intention of
preserving in the memory that which is read. It is a process which in
the course of years dries all the juice out of 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
apparently preserved the husk 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 needed a dedication, and was promptly mistaken by me as a
child of my own happy fancy.

I was new, I was ignorant, the mysteries of the human mind were a sealed
book to me as yet, and I stupidly looked upon myself as a tough and
unforgivable criminal. I wrote to Dr. Holmes and told him the whole
disgraceful affair, implored him in impassioned language to believe that
I had never intended to commit this crime, and was unaware that I had
committed it until I was confronted with the awful evidence. I have lost
his answer, I could better have afforded to lose an uncle. Of these I
had a surplus, many of them of no real value to me, but that letter was
beyond price, beyond uncledom, and unsparable. In it Dr. Holmes laughed
the kindest and healingest laugh over the whole matter, and at
considerable length and in happy phrase assur