I was down in the perfessor's labertory one day, and that was a queer place. They was every kind of scientifics that has ever been dis-covered in it. Some was pickled in bottles and some was stuffed and some was pinned to the walls with their wings spread out. If you took hold of anything, it was likely to be a skull and give you the shivers or some electric contraption and shock you; and if you tipped over a jar and it broke, enough germs might get loose to slaughter a hull town. I was helping the perfessor to unpack a lot of stuff some friends had sent him, and I noticed a bottle that had onto it, blowed in the glass:
DANIEL, DUNNE AND COMPANY
"That's funny," says I, out loud.
"What is?" asts the perfessor.
I showed him the bottle and told him how I was named after the company that made 'em. He says to look around me. They is all kinds of glass-ware in that room--bottles and jars and queer-shaped things with crooked tails and noses--and nigh every piece of glass the perfessor owns is made by that company.
"Why," says the perfessor, "their factory is in this very town."And nothing would do fur me but I must go and see that factory. I couldn't till the quarantine was pried loose from our house. But when it was, Iwent down town and hunted up the place and looked her over.
It was a big factory, and I was kind of proud of that. I was glad she wasn't no measly, little, old-fashioned, run-down concern. Of course, I wasn't really no relation to it and it wasn't none to me.
But I was named fur it, too, and it come about as near to being a fambly as anything I had ever had or was likely to find. So I was proud it seemed to be doing so well.
I thinks as I looks at her of the thousands and thousands of bottles that has been coming out of there fur years and years, and will be fur years and years to come. And one bottle not so much different from another one. And all that was really knowed about me was jest the name on one out of all them millions and millions of bottles. It made me feel kind of queer, when I thought of that, as if I didn't have no separate place in the world any more than one of them millions of bottles. If any one will shut his eyes and say his own name over and over agin fur quite a spell, he will get kind of wonderized and mesmerized a-doing it--he will begin to wonder who the dickens he is, anyhow, and what he is, and what the difference between him and the next feller is. He will wonder why he happens to be himself and the next feller HIMSELF.
He wonders where himself leaves off and the rest of the world begins. I been that way myself--all wonderized, so that I felt jest like I was a melting piece of the hull creation, and it was all shifting and drifting and changing and flowing, and not solid anywhere, and I could hardly keep myself from flowing into it. It makes a person feel awful queer, like seeing a ghost would. It makes him feel like HE wasn't no solider than a ghost himself. Well, if you ever done that and got that feeling, you KNOWwhat I mean. All of a sudden, when I am trying to take in all them millions and millions of bottles, it rushed onto me, that feeling, strong. Thinking of them bottles had somehow brung it on. The bigness of the hull creation, and the smallness of me, and the gait at which everything was racing and rushing ahead, made me want to grab hold of something solid and hang on.
I reached out my hand, and it hit something solid all right. It was a feller who was wheeling out a hand truck loaded with boxes from the shipping department. I had been standing by the shipping department door, and I reached right agin him.
He wants to know if I am drunk or a blanked fool. So after some talk of that kind I borrows a chew of tobacco of him and we gets right well acquainted.
I helped him finish loading his wagon and rode over to the freight depot with him and helped him unload her. Lifting one of them boxes down from the wagon I got such a shock I like to of dropped her.
Fur she was marked so many dozen, glass, handle with care, and she was addressed to Dr. Hartley L. Kirby, Atlanta, Ga.
I managed to get that box onto the platform with-out busting her, and then I sets down on top of her awful weak.
"What's the matter?" asts the feller I was with.
"Nothing," says I.
"You look sick," he says. And I WAS feeling that-a-way.
"Mebby I do," says I, "and it's enough to shake a feller up to find a dead man come to life sudden like this.""Great snakes, no!" says he, looking all around, "where?"But I didn't stop to chew the rag none. I left him right there, with his mouth wide open, staring after me like I was crazy. Half a block away Ilooked back and I seen him double over and slap his knee and laugh loud, like he had hearn a big joke, but what he was laughing at I never knew.
I was tickled. Tickled? Jest so tickled I was plumb foolish with it. The doctor was alive after all--I kept saying it over and over to myself--he hadn't drownded nor blowed away. And I was go-ing to hunt him up.
I had a little money. The perfessor had paid it to me. He had give me a job helping take care of his hosses and things like that, and wanted me to stay, and I had been thinking mebby I would fur a while. But not now!
I calkelated I could grab a ride that very night that would put me into Evansville the next morning.
I figgered if I ketched a through freight from there on the next night I might get where he was almost as quick as them bottles did.
I didn't think it was no use writing out my resignation fur the perfessor. But I got quite a bit of grub from Biddy Malone to make a start on, fur I didn't figger on spending no more money than Ihad to on grub. She asts me a lot of questions, and I had to lie to her a good deal, but I got the grub.
And at ten that night I was in an empty bumping along south, along with a cross-eyed feller named Looney Hogan who happened to be travelling the same way.
Riding on trains without paying fare ain't always the easy thing it sounds. It is like a trade that has got to be learned. They is different ways of doing it. I have done every way frequent, except one.
That I give up after trying her two, three times.
