"Speaking of lunatics," said Mr. Dolan to Mr. Hendricks one June night, a few weeks after the women had persuaded Mrs. McHurdie not to drag the poet into politics,--"speaking of lunatics, you may remember that I was born in Boston, and 'twas my duty as a lad to drive the Cambridge car, and many a time I have heard Mr. Holmes the poet and Mr. Emerson the philosopher discussing how the world was made; whether it was objective or subjective,--which I take it to mean whether the world is in the universe or only in your eye. One fine winter night we were waiting on a switch for the Boston car, when Mr. Holmes said to Mr. Emerson: 'What,' says he, 'would you think if Jake Dolan driving this car should come in and say, "Excuse me, gentlemen, but the moon I see this moment is not some millions of miles away, but entirely in my own noddle?"' 'I'd think,' says the great philosopher, never blinking, 'that Mr. Dolan was drunk,' says he. And there the discussion ended, but it has been going on in my head ever since. Here I am a man climbing up my sixties, and when have I seen the moon? Once walking by this very creek here trying to get me courage up to put me arm around her that is now Mary Carnine; once with me head poked up close to the heads of Watts McHurdie, Gabe Carnine, and Philemon Ward, serenading the girls under the Thayer House window the night before we left for the army. And again to-night, sitting here on the dam, listening to the music coming down the mill-pond. Did you notice them, Robert--the young people--Phil Ward's boy, and John Barclay's girl, and Mary Carnine's oldest, and Oscar Fernald's youngest, with their guitars and mandolins, piling into the boats and rowing up stream? And now they're singing the songs we sang--to their mothers, God bless 'em--the other day before these children were born or thought of, and now I sit here an old man looking at the moon." "But is it the moon?" he went on after a long silence, puffing at his pipe. "If the moon is off there, three or thirty or three hundred million miles away in the sky, where has it been these forty years? I've not seen it. And yet here she pops out of my memory into my eye, and if I say the moon has always been in my eye, and is still in my eye, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson says I'm drunk. But does that settle the question of who's got the moon--me or the cosmos--as the poets call it?" After that the two men smoked in silence, and as Hendricks threw away the butt of his cigar, Dolan said, "'Tis a queer, queer world, Robert--a queer, queer world." Now do not smile at Mr. Dolan, gentle reader, for Adam must have thought the same thing, and philosophy has been able to say nothing more to the point.