THE CASE FOR PIGEON-HOLES
The gigantic desk at which the Essayist was seated displayed row on row of pigeon-holes, and above them all was a big white card, on which appeared, in distinct black letters:
Saturday, January 31, 1914
| 7.30 a. m. | ..... | 12.30 p. m. | ......... | Pigeon-holes |
| 12.30 p. m. | ..... | 3.00 p. m. | ......... | Miscellany |
| 3.00 p. m. | ..... |
but the rest of the day need not concern us.
The Essayist had been reared in a stronghold of Method—a home where the dishes were never left over and the tools were always returned to their places, where the children always went to Sunday School and never stopped to think that they didn't enjoy it, and their elders always went to prayer-meeting and never missed church—in a word, where everybody was always doing everything never and always, and nobody ever doing anything sometimes.
Thus it came to pass that the Madness of Method followed, or rather pursued, him all his days, and his existence was filled with devices for the facilitation of the business of life. The big desk was one of these devices. It had a hundred and twenty pigeon-holes, and their labelling, especially in the rows that were to receive classified ideas, was a triumph of invention. He had had trouble with ideas. They got wrongly assorted, or lost, got away over night, flew at him in parabolic curves and never came back, or flitted about his head and would not submit to scrutiny, and otherwise flouted him. He would have no more of it.
Just now he was contemplating with a glow of satisfaction not only his own particular pigeon-holes, but Pigeon-holes Universal. Blessings on the soul of that primitive man, the first really deserving to be called ancestor of the human race, who noticed that some things were like other things—that the world about him was not a mere agglomeration of endless individual objects and phenomena! What an impulse to the setting in order of the world's business, for example, and what relief to himself, when the Lucretian father of astronomy and history settled to the satisfaction of himself and his hairy fellows that the same sun they saw sink behind the hills at night would appear again next morning: