use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same stereotypes. A
thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of
associations.

Sometimes, but rarely, one may be caught making the same speech twice over,
and yet be held blameless. Thus, a certain lecturer, after performing in
an inland city, where dwells a _Litteratrice_ of note, was invited to meet
her and others over the social teacup. She pleasantly referred to his many
wanderings in his new occupation. "Yes," he replied, "I am like the Huma,
the bird that never lights, being always in the ears, as he is always on
the wing,"--Years elapsed. The lecturer visited the same place once more
for the same purpose. Another social cup after the lecture, and a second
meeting with the distinguished lady. "You are constantly going from place
to place," she said.--"Yes," he answered, "I am like the Huma,"--and
finished the sentence as before.

What horrors, when it flashed over him that he had made this fine speech,
word for word, twice over! Yet it was not true, as the lady might perhaps
have fairly inferred, that he had embellished his conversation with the
Huma daily during that whole interval of years. On the contrary, he had
never once thought of the odious fowl until the recurrence of precisely
the same circumstances brought up precisely the same idea. He ought to
have been proud of the accuracy of his mental adjustments. Given certain
factors, and a sound brain should always evolve the same fixed product with
the certainty of Babbage's calculating machine.

--What a satire, by the way, is that machine on the mere mathematician! A
Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid
to make a blunder; that turns out formulae like a corn-sheller, and never