Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/346

 MARK TWAIN

born to us, but it certainly is ours, was not possessed by any century before us, is our peculiar mark and badge, and is doubtless the bottom reason why we are a race of lightning-shod Mercuries, and proud of it instead of being, like our ancestors, a race of plodding crabs, and proud of that.

So recent is this change from a three or four thou sand year twilight to the flash and glare of open day that I have walked in both, and yet am not old. Nothing is to-day as it was when I was an urchin; but when I was an urchin, nothing was much different from what it had always been in this world. Take a single detail, for example medicine. Galen could have come into my sick-room at any time during my first seven years I mean any day when it wasn t fishing weather, and there wasn t any choice but school or sickness and he could have sat down there and stood my doctor s watch without asking a question. He would have smelt around among the wilderness of cups and bottles and vials on the table and the shelves, and missed not a stench that used to glad him two thousand years before, nor dis covered one that was of a later date. He would have examined me, and run across only one dis appointment I was already salivated; I would have him there; for I was always salivated, calomel was so cheap. He would get out his lancet then; but I would have him again; our family doctor didn t allow blood to accumulate in the system. However, he could take dipper and ladle, and freight me up with old familiar doses that had come down from Adam to his time and mine; and he could go out with

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