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464 manus—enough words to name all the essential affairs of life. “Hand,” with quotations and compounds, occupies twenty-four columns, eight pages of this dictionary, in all ten times as long as this essay. The hand is defined as “the organ of apprehension.” How perfectly the definition fits my case in both senses of the word “apprehend”! With my hand I seize and hold all that I find in the three worlds—physical, intellectual, and spiritual.



Think how man has regarded the world in terms of the hand. All life is divided between what lies on one hand and on the other. The products of skill are manufactures. The conduct of affairs is management. History seems to be the record—alas for our chronicles of war!—of the manœuvers of armies. But the history of peace, too, the narrative of labor in the field, the forest, and the vineyard, is written in the victorious sign manual—the sign of the hand that has conquered the wilderness. The laborer himself is called a hand.

The minor idioms are myriad; but I will not recall too many, lest you cry, “Hands off!” I cannot desist, however, from this word-game until I have set down a few. Whatever is not one’s own by first possession is second-hand. That is what I am told my knowledge is. But my well-meaning friends come to my defense, and, not content with endowing me with natural first-hand knowledge which is rightfully mine, ascribe to me a preternatural sixth sense and credit to miracles and heaven-sent compensations all that I have won and discovered with my good right hand. And with my left hand too; for with that I read, and it is as true and honorable as the other. By what half-development of human power has the left hand been neglected? When we arrive at the acme of civilization shall we not all be ambidextrous, and in our hand-to-hand contests against difficulties shall we not be doubly triumphant? It occurs to me, by the way, that when my teacher was training my unreclaimed spirit, her struggle against the powers of darkness, with the stout arm of discipline and the light of the manual alphabet, was in two senses a hand-to-hand conflict.

No essay would be complete without quotations from Shakspere. In the field which, in the presumption of my youth, I thought was my own he has reaped before me. In almost every play there are passages where the hand plays a partpart. [sic] Lady Macbeth’s heartbroken soliloquy over her little hand, from which all the perfumes of Arabia will not wash the stain, is the most pitiful moment in the tragedy. Mark Antony rewards Scarus, the bravest of his soldiers, by asking Cleopatra to give him her hand: “Commend unto his lips thy favoring hand.” In a different mood he is enraged because Thyreus, whom he despises, has presumed to kiss the hand of the queen, “my playfellow, the kingly seal