DEAR SISTERS:—Don't be startled; don't hold up your hands in holy astonishment when I tell you that I—Phœmie Frost—your moral and—I say it meekly—religious missionary, have been to a horse-race. I am shocked myself now, in the cool of the morning, not exactly because I went, but from what happened after I got there.
Have I done wrong? Can a missionary, without knowledge, do her duty? If she knows nothing of sin, how can she warn against sin?
Then, again, is the running of swift horses sinful?
Sisters, I am troubled. The more one knows, the more one is perplexed and put about. It is so easy to condemn things by the wholesale that you know nothing about. One can speak so positive about them, for total ignorance admits of no argument, and is entirely above all evidence. That is why ignorant stubbornness is so self-satisfied and comfortable.
After all, I begin to think that "ignorance is bliss." Is there anything on this earth more snoozily comfortable than a litter of white pigs revelling with their mother in a mud-puddle—say in August? What do these contented animals care for the mud that soils their whiteness, with the pink skin shining through—rosy pigs, as one may call the kind I am speaking of. Think of them muzzling about in the rily water, free as air; then turn to your learned pig, chained to a master by the forced action of its own intellect—poor thing! obliged to play cards with its fore-foot, teach geography, and cipher out numbers like a schoolmaster—and then say if ignorance isn't bliss! Look in the little black eyes of the animal, and see the sad and hungry look that knowledge has brought to him!
To know is to want—to want is to suffer.
Where was I? Speaking about horses, naturally I wandered off down to other grades of animals—the laziest, largest, best-natured creatures of all—but, as you may observe with propriety, not suggestive of horse-races, which I admit and apologize for.
Well, right or wrong, I have been to the races at Jerome Park, which is a hollow among the hills, clear out of New York, and the other side of Harlem River. There, every spring and fall, the best horses owned about here are set a-going like wildfire, and the one that beats is thought the world of.
The park isn't much of a piece of woods, after all; a good-sized maple camp in Vermont has got twice as many trees, but then a good deal of it is turned out to grass. Then, again, a level turnpike curls in a ring all round one of the hills, and on the top of that is a kind of hotel, or long tavern, with a tremendous stoop stretched around it, where the upper-crust of fast horsedom crowd in to see the creatures run.
On the other hillside, right against the tavern, is a great long, open shed, with seats after seats sloping down from the inside, where the lower-crust of fast horsedom crowd in from the railroads, and so on. They have to pay for going in, but, for all that, haven't a right to go across to the upper side, which must be aggravating.