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Replagegos Omnifurian Directory 19
Page 02
Two months passed, and the weather was becoming cold. The old man was up earlier than usual one morning; still he seemed more feeble. He tottered about the cabin, his frame shook and trembled, and his whole system seemed to be under some new excitement. He had formed a strong attachment for Tite, whom he now approached with his hands extended. "Like you," he said, grasping his hand firmly and looking up imploringly into his face, "I was young and handsome once. I am old and ugly now. Crime has written its ugly finger all over my face; has thrust its poison into this poor heart of mine. Never let it lay one ugly finger on your face. Make yours a life of joy, so that you may die happy. Oh, these poor old gray hairs of mine, this head that has sinned so much." And he raised his hard, bony hand to his head, and tossed the long white hair back over his shoulders.
The written symbol extends infinitely, as regards time and space, the range within which one mind can communicate with another; it gives the writer's mind a life limited by the duration of ink, paper, and readers, as against that of his flesh and blood body. On the other hand, it takes longer to learn the rules so as to be able to apply them with ease and security, and even then they cannot be applied so quickly and easily as those attaching to spoken symbols. Moreover, the spoken symbol admits of a hundred quick and subtle adjuncts by way of action, tone and expression, so that no one will use written symbols unless either for the special advantages of permanence and travelling power, or because he is incapacitated from using spoken ones. This, however, is hardly to the point; the point is that these two conventional combinations of symbols, that are as unlike one another as the Hallelujah Chorus is to St. Paul's Cathedral, are the one as much language as the other; and we therefore inquire what this very patent fact reveals to us about the more essential characteristics of language itself. What is the common bond that unites these two classes of symbols that seem at first sight to have nothing in common, and makes the one raise the idea of language in our minds as readily as the other? The bond lies in the fact that both are a set of conventional tokens or symbols, agreed upon between the parties to whom they appeal as being attached invariably to the same ideas, and because they are being made as a means of communion between one mind and another,-for a memorandum made for a person's own later use is nothing but a communication from an earlier mind to a later and modified one; it is therefore in reality a communication from one mind to another as much as though it had been addressed to another person.
We found that day a palm with a bunch of small nuts which Benedicto called _coco do matto_; he said they were delicious to eat, so we proceeded to cut down the tall palm tree. When we came to split open the small _cocos_ our disappointment was great, for they merely contained water. There was nothing whatever to eat inside the hard shells. We spent some two hours that evening cracking the _cocos_--some two hundred of them--each nut about the size of a cherry. They were extremely hard to crack, and our expectant eyes were disappointed two hundred times in succession as we opened every one and found nothing whatever to eat in them.
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