it,--silent and looking, in it, until
sleep falls.

It is because men lie down under it, allow themselves to be rolled over
by it, that the modern newspaper, against its will, has become the great
distracting machine of modern times. As I live and look about me,
everywhere I find a great running to and fro of editors across the still
earth. Every editor has his herd, is a kind of bell-wether, has a great
paper herd flocking at his heels. "Is not the world here?" I say, "and
am I not here to look at it? Can I really see a world better by joining
a Cook's Excursion on it, sweeping round the earth in a column, seeing
everything in a column, looking over the shoulder of a crowd?" Sometimes
it seems as if the whole modern, reading, book-and-paper outfit were
simply a huge, crunching Mass-Machine--a machine for arranging every
man's mind from the outside.

Originality may be said to depend upon a balance of two things, the
power of being interested in other people's minds and the power of being
more interested in one's own. In its last analysis, it is the power a
man's mind has of minding its own business, which, even in another man's
book, makes the book real and absorbing to him. It is the least
compliment one can pay a book. The only honest way to commune with a
real man either in a book or out of it is to do one's own share of
talking. Both the book and the man say better things when talked back
to. In reading a great book one finds it allows for this. In reading a
poor one the only way to make it worth while, to find anything in it, is
to put it there. The most self-respecting course when one finds one's
self in the middle of a poor book is to turn right around in it, and
write it one's self. As has been said by Hoffentotter (in the fourteenth
chapter of his great masterpiece): "If you find that you cannot go on,
gentle reader, in the reading of this book, pray read it backwards."

The original man, the man who insists on keeping the power in a mind of
minding its own business, is much more humble than he looks. All he
feels is, that his mind has been made more convenient to him than to
anybody else and that if anyone is going to use it, he must. It is not a
matter of assuming that one's own mind is superior. A very poor mind, on
the premises, put right in with one's own body, carefully fitted to it,
to one's very nerves and senses, is worth all the other minds in the
world. It may be conceit to believe this, and it ma