mation of Adam's fears as to
the ultimate result of these new-fangled ideas as to dress, and, what
interested me more than anything else, he predicted a machine called a
Moh-Thor-Cah, that not only runs along without outside assistance,
but is propelled entirely by the same vapor that I have spoken of
before as striking the high C in the nozzle of my tea-kettle. He goes
too far with this, as well as with his other prophecies, for he says
that there will be a time when ships larger than Noah's Ark will be
forced across great bodies of water by this same power. The idea of
anybody, after Noah's experience, being foolish enough to build a
craft of that kind, to say nothing of working it with a tea-kettle, is
preposterously abs ... In one of his visions he claims to have seen a
gathering of people, called a city, in which there are to be more than
four million souls, and governed not by the virtuous, as in our own
day, but by the most desperate political malefactors that ever banded
together for plunder, and this at the direct request of the people
themselves! I am perfectly aware that human nature is weak, and given
over at times to strange delusions, but that any body of
self-respecting persons should deliberately and of their own free will
turn the management of their affairs over to those who would more
properly grace a jail than a City Hall, surpasses belie ...

MISCELLANEOUS FRAGMENTS

... cannot be denied that a daily newspaper would be an interesting
thing, if it were possible to print it, but I doubt its real value. I
dislike gossip, and I do not see how the newspaper could fill up
without it. What advantage is it to me to know that Hiram
Wigglesworth, of Ararat Corners, who is unknown to me, was arrested on
Thursday evening for beating his wife? Why should I be called upon to
impair the value of my eyes by reading in small type all the
scandalous details of the separation proceedings between two people I
never saw and would not permit to enter my front door if they came to
call? It is nothing to me that Mrs. Zebulon Zebedee, of Enochsville,
has spent thirty thousand clam-shells a year on bottled grape-juice,
and run up bills against her husband's account at the diamond-quarries
for two or three hundred thousand tons of wampum, and if she chooses
to go joy-riding on a Diplodocus with a gentleman from the Circus, it
is Zebulon Zebedee's business, not mine, and a newspaper that insisted
upon dumping this unsavory