“What you are, and what you will be, that we will not now consider. Now tell me how it has fared with you?”
Dami thrust aside with his foot a half-burnt log, called a useless brand, and said, “Look! exactly such am I; not wholly burnt to a coal, and yet no longer sound wood.”
Barefoot reminded him, that he should tell his story without complaint; and Dami entered upon a long, long history, amounting to this:—“That he could not remain with his uncle, who was hard-hearted and selfish, and his wife grudged every mouthful that he put into his mouth; that he left him, and sought work elsewhere; but that he always experienced more and more of the selfishness of men. In America they could see a man fall into misery, and never look after him.”
Barefoot could not help smiling, as his relation always ended in——“And then they threw me upon the street.” She could not help saying,—
“Yes, that is like you. You always allow yourself to be thrust aside. You were so as a child. When you stumbled a little, you let yourself fall like a log of wood. ‘Out of a stumbler we must make a hopper.’ From this comes the Proverb.[B] Be cheerful! Do you know what you must do when people would annoy you?”
“We must go out of the way.”
“No; we must annoy them if we can. It will always annoy them most, to see us keep an upright position, and a bold face. You stand before the world, and say,—‘Treat me well, if you please, or treat me ill. Kiss me, or beat me, whichever you please.’ This is easy enough. You submit to their treatment, and then you pity yourself. Would I allow any one to send me here or there, if I did not choose it myself? You must stand up like a man for yourself. You have been knocked about in the world long enough. It is time to show yourself as master of yourself.”
Reproach and advice often appear to the unlucky like unjust severity. Such appeared to Dami the words of his sister. It was horrible that she could not look upon him as the most unfortunate of men. It is the most difficult thing in the world to give a man confidence in himself. Most people gain it only after they have been successful. Dami would not relate another word to his heartless sister, and it was only later that she succeeded in gaining a particular account of all his adventures, and how at last he came back to the Old World as a stoker on board a steam-vessel. And now, when she reproached him for his self-tormenting susceptibility, was she secretly aware that she was not free from it herself.
Through her almost exclusive intercourse with Mariann, she had been betrayed into thinking and speaking too much of herself, and had become too sad at heart. Now, that she had to raise and cheer her brother, she unconsciously cheered herself; for there is this mysterious power in sympathy, that when we help another, we also help ourselves.
“We have four strong, healthy hands,” she said, in conclusion; “and we will see if we cannot force our way through the world; and to force one’s way through, is a thousand times better than to beg one’s way through. Come, Dami! now come home with me.”