We do not lounge about and take our meals in the public squares
as people used to do in Athens and still do in Sicily. We no longer fill
our pitchers at a common fountain or dance on the village green or
regulate the life of an entire city to the same signal from a campanile.
Ours is an age of exaggerated privacy, where every one works behind
closed doors and glances furtively at his watch. But precisely because
it is a precious survival the public clock ought to keep itself above
reproach and above suspicion.
XXV
THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR--III
Cooper's museum of Proverbial Realities had proven such a source of
delight to himself and his friends that the news of its destruction by
fire came with a shock to all who knew him. Of all his treasures he
succeeded in saving only part of his priceless collection of straws--the
straw that showed which way the wind blew, the straw grasped at by a
drowning man, the straw that does not enter into the manufacture of
bricks, and the last straw that broke the camel's back. How would Cooper
stand the blow, his friends wondered.
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