Over the Teacups

by Oliver Wendell Holmes

I often wish that our Number Seven could have known and corresponded with the author of “The Budget of Paradoxes.” I think Mr. De Morgan would have found some of his vagaries and fancies not undeserving of a place in his wonderful collection of eccentricities, absurdities, ingenuities,—mental freaks of all sorts. But I think he would have now and then recognized a sound idea, a just comparison, a suggestive hint, a practical notion, which redeemed a page of extravagances and crotchety whims. I confess that I am often pleased with fancies of his, and should be willing to adopt them as my own. I think he has, in the midst of his erratic and tangled conceptions, some perfectly clear and consistent trains of thought.

So when Number Seven spoke of sending us a paper, I welcomed the suggestion. I asked him whether he had any objection to my looking it over before he read it. My proposal rather pleased him, I thought, for, as was observed on a former occasion, he has in connection with a belief in himself another side,—a curious self-distrust. I have no question that he has an obscure sense of some mental deficiency. Thus you may expect from him first a dogma, and presently a doubt. If you fight his dogma, he will do battle for it stoutly; if you let him alone, he will very probably explain its extravagances, if it has any, and tame it into reasonable limits. Sometimes he is in one mood, sometimes in another.

The first portion of what we listened to shows him at his best; in the latter part I am afraid you will think he gets a little wild.

I proceed to lay before you the paper which Number Seven read to The Teacups. There was something very pleasing in the deference which was shown him. We all feel that there is a crack in the teacup, and are disposed to handle it carefully. I have left out a few things which he said, feeling that they might give offence to some of the company. There were sentences so involved and obscure that I was sure they would not be understood, if indeed he understood them himself. But there are other passages so entirely sane, and as it seems to me so just, that if any reader attributes them to me I shall not think myself wronged by the supposition. You must remember that Number Seven has had a fair education, that he has been a wide reader in many directions, and that he belongs to a family of remarkable intellectual gifts. So it was not surprising that he said some things which pleased the company, as in fact they did. The reader will not be startled to see a certain abruptness in the transition from one subject to another,—it is a characteristic of the squinting brain wherever you find it. Another curious mark rarely wanting in the subjects of mental strabismus is an irregular and often sprawling and deformed handwriting. Many and many a time I have said, after glancing at the back of a letter, “This comes from an insane asylum, or from an eccentric who might well be a candidate for such an institution.” Number Seven's manuscript, which showed marks of my corrections here and there, furnished good examples of the chirography of persons with ill-mated cerebral hemispheres. But the earlier portions of the manuscript are of perfectly normal appearance.

Conticuere omnes, as Virgil says. We were all silent as Number Seven began the reading of his paper.

Number Seven reads.

I am the seventh son of a seventh son, as I suppose you all know. It is commonly believed that some extraordinary gifts belong to the fortunate individuals born under these exceptional conditions. However this may be, a peculiar virtue was supposed to dwell in me from my earliest years. My touch was believed to have the influence formerly attributed to that of the kings and queens of England. You may remember that the great Dr. Samuel Johnson, when a child, was carried to be touched by her Majesty Queen Anne for the “king's evil,” as scrofula used to be called. Our honored friend The Dictator will tell you that the brother of one of his Andover schoolmates was taken to one of these gifted persons, who touched him, and hung a small bright silver coin, either a “fourpence ha'penny” or a “ninepence,” about his neck, which, strange to say, after being worn a certain time, became tarnished, and finally black,—a proof of the poisonous matters which had become eliminated from the system and gathered upon the coin. I remember that at one time I used to carry fourpence ha'pennies with holes bored through them, which I furnished to children or to their mothers, under pledges of secrecy,—receiving a piece of silver of larger dimensions in exchange. I never felt quite sure about any extraordinary endowment being a part of my inheritance in virtue of my special conditions of birth. A phrenologist, who examined my head when I was a boy, said the two sides were unlike. My hatter's measurement told me the same thing; but in looking over more than a bushel of the small cardboard hat-patterns which give the exact shape of the head, I have found this is not uncommon. The phrenologist made all sorts of predictions of what I should be and do, which proved about as near the truth as those recorded in Miss Edith Thomas's charming little poem, “Augury,” which some of us were reading the other day.

I have never been through college, but I had a relative who was famous as a teacher of rhetoric in one of our universities, and especially for taking the nonsense out of sophomorical young fellows who could not say anything without rigging it up in showy and sounding phrases. I think I learned from him to express myself in good old-fashioned English, and without making as much fuss about it as our Fourth of July orators and political haranguers were in the habit of making.

I read a good many stories during my boyhood, one of which left a lasting impression upon me, and which I have always commended to young people. It is too late, generally, to try to teach old people, yet one may profit by it at any period of life before the sight has become too dim to be of any use. The story I refer to is in “Evenings at Home,” and is called “Eyes and No Eyes.” I ought to have it by me, but it is constantly happening that the best old things get overlaid by the newest trash; and though I have never seen anything of the kind half so good, my table and shelves are cracking with the weight of involuntary accessions to my library.

This is the story as I remember it: Two children walk out, and are questioned when they come home. One has found nothing to observe, nothing to admire, nothing to describe, nothing to ask questions about. The other has found everywhere objects of curiosity and interest. I advise you, if you are a child anywhere under forty-five, and do not yet wear glasses, to send at once for “Evenings at Home” and read that story. For myself, I am always grateful to the writer of it for calling my attention to common things. How many people have been waked to a quicker consciousness of life by Wordsworth's simple lines about the daffodils, and what he says of the thoughts suggested to him by “the meanest flower that blows”!