But it was not long before all the good folks had subsided into the old calm. The girls went on working: there was the old occasional snip of scissors and bump of worsted balls as they run over the floor; and as there is considerable Liberty Hall in our circle, I lit a segar, and rolling back into the big chair, (such a giant old nest of elastic softness you never did,) I began to think.
First I turned to what Nella had been saying of the small amount of care the world's genius takes of the growing generation, just at the time when it needs it most.
Then what a raft of things—here I made a short discursion off, trying to recal a story I once heard of a nigger preacher, who was also a boatman, and who exhorted his hearers to flee frum de raft to come—de great big raft all on fiah dat'll smash yer boats and burn 'em up—glory!
Then I came up to time again, remembering what the world didn't care for, and what a wholesale careless, head-over-heels way it has of caring for what it does attend to, and crack up and idolize. There's history for instance. I'm not smart—wish I was—but one thing don't humbug me, and that's the fashion people teach the boys history.
'All the individuals on our side, in all great times, were all saints. I don't believe it,' I spoke aloud.
'I wouldn't believe it, Mr. Sloper,' said Nella, smiling. 'Every revolution had some heroes in it and some fools.'
'A great many of every body, I shouldn't wonder,' I replied. 'Some of the cream and a great deal of skim. Lots of notional people, such as turn Mormons; lots of small-pattern folk, who do the loud talk for their corner-grocery; any quantity of owly follows, who've got hold of a Tom Paine or a Volney, and nothing much else—the same sort who get moony over tracts or perpetual motion. We lose sight of them, though. Yet they make up an immense lot of the rank and file in all great carryings-on which have a new idea in the middle.'
'There was a canaille on both sides in the great Protestant Reformation,' said Nella.
('French for tag-rag and bob-tail,' quoth Hiram.)
'And I suppose that even the Christians of the first age had one.'