Wipe Your Pen.
I know I ought to wipe my fountain pen when I am through using it. I know that the best of ink must leave sediment when it evaporates; wouldn't be ink if it didn't. I know that the best of pens cannot prevent the ink from evaporating at the tip of it. I know that nothing will more speedily put a fountain pen out of commission than the accumulation of sediment around its business end.
I know all this, know it well, could pass an examination in it; and yet there isn't a penwiper on my desk, and hasn't been for years. Once in a long while, when I happen to think of it, I fish a bit of paper out of my scrap-basket, and carelessly wipe my pen so that I can see little bits of the gold under the layer of black; but usually I don't bother with anything of the kind. Usually, therefore, the tip of my fountain pen is under a cloud. Usually, therefore, it is clogged up and will not write well, though, luckless instrument! it stumbles along and does the best that it can.
I shouldn't mind it so much, however; still less should I bother you with telling about it, were it not that my sediment-clogged, ink-blackened pen is a very good symbol of another sediment-clogged instrument of my living; namely, my mind.
I know I ought to wipe that off, also. I know how impossible it is to keep sediment from depositing itself there, and blackness from spreading over its gold. Thus a layer of worldliness settles down over my bright ideals, and the iron mud of indifference fills up the channels of expression and influence. I started out with shining hopes, but they are now all dull and black. My life has fallen into the dumps and the doldrums.
This must not continue! Fetch me a bit of clean cloth, Miss Vigorina! And a basin of pure water, while you are about it! Off with the sediment! Rub and brush and pick it all out! I'm in for a bright, fresh start, my fountain pen and I.