A STORY WITHOUT A MORAL.
On my return journey from Washington City in 1863, when traveling in the stage coach with driver and two other passengers, we halted for supper and a change of animals at a village seventy miles north of Fort Craig, where, falling in with some officers who had served with me during the then recent campaign, I accompanied them to their tents and there became so interested in telling and hearing stories that I forgot all about time and the stage went forward without me. I was the more to blame for this thoughtlessness because I was at the time bearing important official dispatches.
With many regrets and self-reproaches and good resolutions for the future, I procured a Government horse and started alone for Fort Craig, riding all night. I arrived at Fort Craig in due time safe and well, but learned that the stage coach had been attacked by Indians and that the driver and two passengers had been killed. It is certainly right to teach schoolboys (as I did forty years ago) that promptness, perseverance, diligence and watchfulness will greatly increase their chances for success, but is it right to teach them that by these means or by any other means they can command success? But I am not writing moral philosophy or solving riddles.