The actual life of to-day is to the dreams of that day as the
wheat plant to the lily. It starts to be a lily, but the finger and
thumb of destiny--mainly in the form of heredity--turn it into the
wheat, and then into the prosaic flour and bran in the bins.
As I came driving into Monterey County, every day had its event,
different from that of the day before; but now comes a period when I
must count by years, not days, and a lot of time passes without much to
record. As for the awful to-do about the county's lost money, I heard
nothing of it, except when, once in a while, somebody, nosing into the
matter for one reason or another, would come prying around to ask me
about it. I began by telling them the whole story whenever they asked,
and Henderson L. Burns once took down what I said and made me swear to
it. Whenever I came to the jingle of the money in the bag as we put it
in the carriage on starting for the Wades', they cross-examined me till
I said I sort of seemed to kind of remember that it jingled, and anyhow
I recollected that Judge Stone had said "Hear it jingle, Jake!" This
proved either that the money was there and jingled, or that it wasn't
there and that the judge was, as N.V. said, "As guilty as hell."
Dick McGill didn't know which way the cat would jump, and kept pretty
still about it in his paper; but he printed a story on me that made
everybody laugh. "There was once a Swede," said the paper, "that was
running away from the minions of the law, and took refuge in a cabin
where they covered him with a gunny sack.
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