"There are plenty of others, and the way they refute one another is to me a constant source of delight," said the Idiot. "There's 'Procrastination is the thief of time,' for instance. That's a clear injunction to youth to get up and hustle, and he starts in with all the impulsiveness of youth, and the first thing he knows--bang! he runs slap into 'Look before you leap,' or 'Second thoughts are best.' That last is what Samuel Johnson would have called a beaut. What superior claims the second thought has over the first or the seventy-seventh thought, that it should become axiomatic, I vow I can't see. If it's morality you're after I am dead against the teachings of that proverb. The second thought is the open door to duplicity when it comes to a question of morals. You ask a small boy, who has been in swimming when he ought to have been at Sunday-school, why his shirt is wet. His first thought is naturally to reply along the line of fact and say, 'Why, because it fell into the pond.' But second thought comes along with visions of hard spanking and a supperless bed in store for him, and suggests the idea that 'There was a leak in the Sunday-school roof right over the place where I was sitting,' or, 'I sat down on the teacher's glass of water.' That's the sort of thing second thought does in the matter of morals. "I admit, of course, that there are times when second thoughts are better than first ones--for instance, if your first thought is to name the baby Jimmie and Jimmie turns out to be a girl, it is better to obey your second thought and call her Gladys or Samantha--but it is not always so, and I object to the nerve of the broad, general statement that it _is_ so. Sometimes fifth thoughts are best. In science I guess you'll find that the man who thinks the seven hundred and ninety-seventh thought along certain lines has got the last and best end of it. And so it goes--out of the infinitesimal number of numbers, every mother's son of 'em may at the psychological moment have a claim to the supremacy, but your self-sufficient old proverb-maker falls back behind the impenetrable wall of his own conceit, and announces that because he has nothing but second-hand thoughts, therefore the second thought is best, and we, like a flock of sheep, follow this leader, and go blatting that sentiment down through the ages as if it were proved beyond peradventure by the sum total of human experience." "Well, you needn't get mad about it," said the Lawyer. "I never said it--so you can't blame me." "Still, there are some proverbs," said Mr. Whitechoker, blandly, "that we may not so summarily dismiss. Take, for instance, 'You never miss the water till the well runs dry.'"