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
_know_ what 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.
[Illustration: 0197]
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 without 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?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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