Elaborate precautions often defeat themselves, like a corporal who kept all his squad out as pickets till they were cut off one by one.
I once saw a family going off to the country, five “masters” and three servants, eight hand-packages, coachman, footman, and an extra servant, and the family doctor to get them off. The cautious doctor got the tickets days before, and even got checks for the trunks. An extra trunk, taken at the last hour to hold some extra things that might be needed, upset all that arranging.
The doctor went to the baggage-room in the gray dawn to get that precautionary trunk checked: after a long discussion about the place, he arranged to meet the family at the railway news-stand. The caretaker was shown once more how to work the burglar alarm, from which a necessary knob came off in the nervous hand of the Master of Cares—“telephone for the electrician” but at last the blinds were carefully pulled down, the house shut up and committed to Providence and the caretaker, and the family and its familiars arrived at the station nearly an hour before train-time, “getting off so nicely.” The Genius of Forethought sent out a pair of scouts to find the doctor. They returned, to report that there were three news-stands, but the doctor was not at any of them.
Then this Genius of Care went himself with one of the scouts, a long and hurried walk to the baggage-room,—not there.
Meanwhile, the doctor, who had stayed to see the trunks off, had found the main body with its camp-followers and light baggage. All stood in the station near a news-stand and waited for the return of the expedition, till the doctor got impatient as train-time approached and went off to find the Head of the House, who arrived in a flurry, having lost his own head a few minutes after he had gone with the tickets.
At last, after the pilgrimage from the ticket-gate down to the parlor-car, they are in the train, all safe, thank God; but the Genius of Care did not sleep that night “on account of the worry and fuss of getting off.” That was not the doctor’s fault. Like Martha, he had made his own punishment the same as the rest of us by being “careful about many things.” I remember an Irish servant who was shown one of our big banks with its huge window-bars, to make it safe. “Sure,” she said, “what’s the good of them things? The thieves is inside and not out.” Worry is inside and not out, and Sleep, like the Kingdom of Heaven, is not taken by force.