And what has all this to do with it? I will tell you. With the means of doing a thing, nothing is difficult, if you only understand thoroughly the nature of the thing. The obstacles that commonly deter you are not in the thing, but in you; and until you understand this, you will keep gaping and shrinking, and saying, 'It is impossible.' Some folk, when looking out of a three or four storey window, feel as if they were going to fall. This is their own fault, not the fault of the window, for that is just like a parlour window, where they have no sensation of the sort. A man sits peaceably enough on the top of a tall, three-legged stool, and could hitch himself round and round, and then get up and stand upon it erect for half a day, without any risk of falling. Now, a steeple is much more securely fixed than a stool; its top is as broad as a table; and there is nothing to prevent anybody from standing upon it as long as he pleases, if he only will not think he is going to fall. You go up half-a-dozen steps of a ladder without fear, and then persuade yourself you can go no farther; but there is nothing more dangerous in the next half-dozen, so far as they are themselves concerned; nor in the next hundred, nor the next thousand, for that matter. My secret consists in my _knowing_ all this, although I feel that I have only described when, not how the knowledge came. Perhaps you, who are book-learned, may be able to make it out, and shew how it is that, when anything occurs to awaken the mind, and enable one to work from knowledge, not habit, he is ten times the man he was. Without this, I should have climbed a mast all my life; but with it, I took to leaping up steeples by means of a kite, in a way that makes many ignorant persons report that I manage it by holding on by the tail.
But a man who goes up a steeple must take care how he behaves, for the eyes of the world are upon him. He is not lost in a crowd, where he is seen only by his next neighbours. That man must pull off his cap and be affable; but he must not do even that to extravagance. When the Queen was passing up the Clyde, an American seaman got on the topgallant, and stood on his head. What was that for, I should be glad to know? Suppose her Majesty was coming along Princes Street, just to take the air like a lady, and look into the shop-windows, and I was to go right up to her, and stand on my head--what would she say? I surmise, that she would turn round to her Lord Gold Stick, and order him to give me a knock on the shins. I know she would, for she is a regular trump, and knows how people in every station should behave. I am ashamed of that American: he is a Yankee Noodle!