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Show 220. In an early draft of his essay, Muir attacked his audience fiercely, saying that the impressions that storms excite in individuals depended "almost exclusively upon the way in which their own small, material immediate interests are affected." He tempered this statement for publication, yet the original expressed his impatience with the limited perspective which he found in the "civilized" town where he witnessed the flood, Knoxville, or Brownsville, as it is now called. This was the home of Emily Pel ton, whom he had come to visit, another friend who was concerned that Muir might need the refining influence of civilization. According to his biographer, he returned to the Pelton home, soaking wet, and the homebodies took a pitying attitude toward his suffering in the rain. He replied, "Don't pity me. Pity yourselves. You stay here at home, dry and defrauded of all the glory I have seen. Your souls starve in the midst of abundance!" He had little humor or patience with these people, but when he came to write this sermon for Overland, he tried to use a more moderate voice, and speak to civilization using its own terms, gains and losses: "True, some goods were destroyed, and a few rats and people were drowned, and some took cold on the house-tops and died, but the total loss was less than the gain." Goods - he could never resist the obvious pun - dry goods one might suppose. Hiding indoors, or climbing onto the tops of houses which were hardly suitable as ships, the people themselves were spoiled dry goods. A man who is worried about his house cannot look upon |