“Ah, sir, wisdom was ever deluding me, for I’m not more than half done—like a poor potato. First, of course, there’s the things you don’t know; then there’s the things you do know but can’t understand; then there’s the things you do understand but which don’t matter. Saving your presence, sir, there’s a heap of understanding to be done before you’re anything but a fool.”
“He is not a fool who is happy; mortal pleasures decline as the bubble of knowledge grows; that’s the long of it, and it’s the short of it too.”
Simon was silent, adding up the buttons on the scholar’s tidy coat. He counted five of them, they shone like gold and looked—oh, very well they looked.
“I was happy once,” then he said. “Ah, and I remember I was happy twice, yes, and three times I was happy in this world. I was not happy since....”
“Yes, since what?” the scholar asked him: but the old man was dumb.
“Tell me, Simon, what made you happy.”
“I was happy, sir, when I first dwelled in the wood and made with my own hands a house of boards. Why—you’d not believe—but it had a chimney then, and was no ways draughty then, and was not creaky then, nor damp then; a good fine house with a door and a half door, birds about it, magpies and tits and fine boy blackbirds! A lake with a score of mallards on it! And for conies and cushats you could take your oath of a meal any day in the week, and twice a day, any day. But ’tis falling with age and weather now, I see it go; the rain wears it, the moss rots it, the wind shatters it. The lake’s as dry as a hen’s foot, and the forest changes. What was bushes is timber now, and what was timber is ashes; the forest has spread around me and the birds have left me and gone to the border. As for conies, there’s no contriving with those foxes and weasels so cunning at them; not the trace of a tail, sir, nothing but snakes and snails now. I was happy when I built that house; that’s what I was; I was then.”
“Ah, so, indeed. And the other times—the second time?”
“Why, that was the time I washed my feet in the lake and I saw....”
“What, man Simon, what did you see?”