strawberries. England owes me a sixpence with interest from date, for I
gave the woman a shilling, and the coach contrived to start or the woman
timed it so that I just missed getting my change. What an odd thing
memory is, to be sure, to have kept such a triviality, and have lost
so much that was invaluable! She is a crazy wench, that Mnemosyne; she
throws her jewels out of the window and locks up straws and old rags in
her strong box.

[De profundis! said I to myself, the bottom of the bushel has dropped
out! Sancta--Maria, ora pro nobis!]

--But as I was saying, I was riding on the outside of a stage-coach from
London to Windsor, when all at once a picture familiar to me from my New
England village childhood came upon me like a reminiscence rather than a
revelation. It was a mighty bewilderment of slanted masts and spars and
ladders and ropes, from the midst of which a vast tube, looking as if
it might be a piece of ordnance such as the revolted angels battered the
walls of Heaven with, according to Milton, lifted its muzzle defiantly
towards the sky. Why, you blessed old rattletrap, said I to myself, I
know you as well as I know my father's spectacles and snuff-box! And
that same crazy witch of a Memory, so divinely wise and foolish, travels
thirty-five hundred miles or so in a single pulse-beat, makes straight
for an old house and an old library and an old corner of it, and whisks
out a volume of an old cyclopaedia, and there is the picture of which
this is the original. Sir William Herschel's great telescope! It was
just about as big, as it stood there by the roadside, as it was in the
picture, not much different any way. Why should it be? The pupil of your
eye is only a gimlet-hole, not so very much bigger than the eye of a
sail-needle, and a camel has to go through it before you can see him.
You look into a stereoscope and think you see a miniature of a
building or a mountain; you don't, you 're made a fool of by your lying
intelligence, as you call it; you see the building and the mountain just
as large as with your naked eye looking straight at the real objects.
Doubt it, do you? Perhaps you'd like to doubt it to the music of a
couple of gold five-dollar pieces. If you would, say the word, and
man and money, as Messrs. Heenan and Morrissey have it, shall be
forthcoming; for I will make you look at a real landscape with your
right eye, and a stereoscopic view of it with your left eye, both at
once, and you can