The Man Who Knows Everything

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Title:     The Man Who Knows Everything
Author: John S. Adams [More Titles by Adams]

SANSECRAT is one of that class of persons who think they know everything. If anything occurs, and you seek to inform him, he will interrupt you by saying that he knows it all,--that he was on the spot when the occurrence happened, or that he had met a man who was an eye-witness.

Such a person, though he be the possessor of much assurance, is sadly deficient in manners; and no doubt the super-abundancy of the former is caused by the great lack of the latter.

Such men as he will thrive; there is no mistake about it. This has been called an age of invention and of humbug. Nothing is so popular, or so much sought after, as that which cannot be explained, and around which a mysterious shroud is closely woven.

My friend Arcanus came sweating and puffing into my room. I had just finished my dinner, and was seated leisurely looking over a few pages of manuscript, when he entered.

"News!" said he; and before I could hand him a chair he had told me all about the last battle, and his tongue flew about with so much rapidity, that a conflagration might have been produced by such excessive friction, had not a rap at the door put a clog under the wheels of his talkative locomotive, and stayed its progress, which luckily gave me an opportunity to take his hat and request him to be seated.

The door was opened, and who but Sansecrat stood before me.

"Have you heard the news?" was the first interrogatory of my friend Arcanus, in reply to which Sansecrat said that he knew it all half an hour previous,--was at the railroad station when the express arrived, and was the first man to open the Southern papers.

In vain Arcanus told him that the information came by a private letter. He averred, point blank, that it was no such thing; that he had the papers in his pocket; and was about to exhibit them as proof of what he had said, when he suddenly recollected that he had sold them to an editor for one-and-sixpence.

Notwithstanding the proverb of "Man, know thyself," Sansecrat seems to know everything but himself. Thousands of times has it been said that man can see innumerable faults and foibles in his neighbors, but none in himself. Very true; and man can see his own character, just as he can see his own face in a mirror. His own associates mirror forth his own character; and the faults, be they great or small, that he sees in them, are but the true reflection of his own errors. Yet, blind to this, and fondly imagining that he is the very "pink of excellence," he flatters his own vain feeling with the cherished idea that, while others have faults, he has none, and so slumbers on in the sweet repose of ignorance.

Sansecrat imagines that he knows everything; that to teach him would be like "carrying coals to Newcastle," or sending ship-loads of ice to Greenland, or furnaces to the coast of Africa; yet he is as ignorant as the greatest dunce, who, parrot-like, repeats that he has heard, without having the least understanding of what he says.

Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless true that Sansecrat will prosper in the world; for, though destitute of those qualifications which render their possessor worthy of success, he has an abundance of brazen-facedness, with which he will work himself into the good opinion of not a few, who look more closely upon exterior appearance than they do upon inward worth, and judge their fellowmen more by the good quality of their cloth than by the good quality of their hearts, and set more value on a shining hat and an unpatched boot than they do on a brilliant intellect and a noble soul.

[The end]
John S. Adams's short story: Man Who Knows Everything

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