Then Emily will go off into hysterics, and Emily's male progenitor will firmly but quietly lead that ill-starred yet true-hearted young man to the public side of the garden-gate; and the engagement will be "off." Too much of anything is a mistake, as the man said when his wife presented him with four new healthy children in one day. We should practice moderation in all matters. A little enamel paint would have been good. They might have enameled the house inside and out, and have left the furniture alone. Or they might have colored the furniture, and let the house be. But an entirely and completely enameled home--a home, such as enamel-paint manufacturers love to picture on their advertisements, over which the yearning eye wanders in vain, seeking one single square inch of un-enameled matter--is, I am convinced, a mistake. It may be a home that, as the testimonials assure us, will easily wash. It may be an "artistic" home; but the average man is not yet educated up to the appreciation of it. The average man does not care for high art. At a certain point, the average man gets sick of high art. So, in these coming Utopias, in which out unhappy grandchildren will have to drag out their colorless existence, there will be too much electricity. They will grow to loathe electricity. Electricity is going to light them, warm them, carry them, doctor them, cook for them, execute them, if necessary. They are going to be weaned on electricity, rocked in their cradles by electricity, slapped by electricity, ruled and regulated and guided by electricity, buried by electricity. I may be wrong, but I rather think they are going to be hatched by electricity. In the new world of our progressionist teachers, it is electricity that is the real motive-power. The men and women are only marionettes--worked by electricity. But it was not to speak of the electricity in them, but of the originality in them, that I referred to these works of fiction. There is no originality in them whatever. Human thought is incapable of originality. No man ever yet imagined a new thing--only some variation or extension of an old thing. The sailor, when he was asked what he would do with a fortune, promptly replied: "Buy all the rum and 'baccy there is in the world." "And what after that?" they asked him. "Eh?" "What would you buy after that--after you had bought up all the rum and tobacco there was in the world--what would you buy then?" "After that? Oh! 'um!" (a long pause). "Oh!" (with inspiration) "why, more 'baccy!" Rum and tobacco he knew something of, and could therefore imagine about. He did not know any other luxuries, therefore he could not conceive of any others.