"I might give you my personal history----" Mrs.Fanhall looked at him curiously, and the elder Worcester girl cried, "Oh, do!" After another scanning of the figures at the top of the cliff, Hollanden established himself in an oratorical pose on a great weather-beaten stone.

"Well--you must understand--I started my career--my career, you understand--with a determination to be a prophet, and, although I have ended in being an acrobat, a trained bear of the magazines, and a juggler of comic paragraphs, there was once carved upon my lips a smile which made many people detest me, for it hung before them like a banshee whenever they tried to be satisfied with themselves.

I was informed from time to time that I was making no great holes in the universal plan, and I came to know that one person in every two thousand of the people I saw had heard of me, and that four out of five of these had forgotten it.
And then one in every two of those who remembered that they had heard of me regarded the fact that I wrote as a great impertinence.

I admitted these things, and in defence merely builded a maxim that stated that each wise man in this world is concealed amid some twenty thousand fools.

If you have eyes for mathematics, this conclusion should interest you.