Chapter 17: You Can't Catch The Wind in a Net

Chapter 17.
You Can't Catch the Wind in a Net

Some people get windmills in their heads and go in for all sorts of silly things. They talk of ruling the nation as if men were to be driven like sheep, and they prate of reforms and systems as if they could cut out a world in brown paper, with a pair of scissors. Such a body thinks himself very deep, but he is as shallow as a milk-pan. You can soon know him as well as if you had gone through him with a lighted candle, and yet you will not know a great deal after all. He has a great head, and very little in it. He can talk by the dozen, or the gross, and say nothing. When he is fussing and boasting of his fine doings, you. soon discover that he makes a long harvest of very little corn. His tongue is like a pig's tail, going all day long and nothing done. This is the man who can pay off the national debt, and yet, in his little store, he sells two apples in three days. He has the secret of high farming, and loses more at it than any man in the county. The more he studies the more he misses the mark. He reminds me of a blind man on a blind horse, who rode out in the middle of a dark night, and the more he tried to keep out of the ditches the more he fell in.

Up till now, he says, he has been unlucky, and he believes that if he were to make a man a coffin he would be sure not to die. He is going to be rich next year, and you will then see what you shall see: just now he would be glad of half-a-dollar on account, for which he will give you a share in his invention for growing wheat without ploughing or sowing.

It is odd to see this wise man at times when his wits are all up in the moon. He is just like Chang, the Chinaman, who said, "Here's my umbrella, and here's my bundle, but where am I?" He cannot find his spectacles, though he is looking through them: and when he is out riding on his own ass, he pulls up and says, "Wherever is that donkey?"

I have heard of one learned man who boiled his watch and stood looking at the egg, and another who forgot that he was to be married that day, and would have lost his lady if his friend had not fetched him out of his study. Think of that, my boy, and don't fret yourself because you are not so overdone with learning as to have forgotten your common-sense. The regular wind-catcher is soft as silk and as green as grass, and yet he thinks himself very long-headed; and so indeed he would be if his ears were taken into the measurement. He is going to do—well—there's no telling what. He is full of wishes but short of will, and so his buds never come to flowers or fruit. He is like a hen that lays eggs, and never sits on them long enough to hatch a single chick.

Moonshine is the article our friend deals in, and it is wonderful what he can see by it. He cries up his schemes, and it is said that he draws on his imagination for his facts. When he is in full swing with one of his notions, he does not stick at a trifle. Will Shepherd heard one of these gentry the other day telling how his new company would lead all the shareholders on to Tom Tiddler's ground to pick up gold and silver; and when all the talk was over, Will said to me:

"That's a lie with a lid on, and a brass handle to take hold of it."

Rather sharp this of Will, for I do believe the man was caught on his own hook and believed in his own dreams: yet I did not like him, for he wanted us poor fellows to put our little savings into his hands, as if we could afford to fly kites with laborers' wages.

What a many good people there are who have religious crazes! They do nothing, but they have wonderful plans for doing everything in a jiffy. So many thousand people are to give half-a-dollar each, and so many more a dollar, and so many more five dollars, and the meeting house is to be built just so, and nohow else. The mischief is that thousands of people do not rush forward with their money, and the minister and a few hardworking friends have to get it together little by little in the old-fashioned style, while your wonderful schemer slinks out of the way and gives nothing. I have long ago found out that pretty things on paper had better be kept there.

New brooms sweep clean, but they mostly sweep up dirt. Plough with what you please, I stick to the old horses which have served me so well. Fine schemes come to nothing. It is hard work that does it, whether it be in the world or in the church.

"In the laborious husbandman you see What all true Christians are or ought to be."