From their original inch or so of private handwriting they have spread and spread out across the world, and now whole generations of men find intellectual accommodation within them,--drinking fountains and other public institutions are erected upon them; yea, Carlyle has become a Chelsea swimming-bath, and "Highland Mary" is sold for whiskey, while Mr.Gladstone is to be met everywhere in the form of a bag.
Does Mr.Gladstone, I wonder, instruct his valet "to pack his Gladstone"?
How strange it must seem! Try it yourself some day and its effect on your servant.

Ask him, for example, to "pack your -- --" and see how he'll stare.
Coming nearer and nearer to earth, I wondered if Colonel Boycott ever uses the word "boycott," and how strange it must have seemed to the late MacAdam to walk for miles and miles upon his own name, like a carpet spread out before him.
Then I once more rebounded heavenwards, at the vision of the eager dreamy lad whose question had set going all this odd clockwork of association.

He wouldn't lose his Shelley for the world! How like twenty! And how many things that he wouldn't lose for the world will he have to give up before he is thirty, I reflected sententiously,--give up at last, maybe, with a stony indifference, as men on a sinking ship take no thought of the gold and specie in the hold.
And then, all of a sudden, a little way up the ferny grassy hillside, I caught sight of the end of a book half hidden among the ferns.

I climbed up to it.

Of course it was that very green Shelley which the young stranger wouldn't lose for the world..