“I think you have been treated outrageously!” said the young man. “But yours is not so extraordinary a case of injustice as you suppose. I advise you to read history a little: you will find it for the most part only a record of wrong and oppression. Human nature is about the same to-day it always has been. Most people—I am sorry to say it—are capable of seeing only their own selfish interest in anything that concerns them. As you go through life you must expect to see friends and neighbors start out into enemies and oppressors, when their personal interest is touched. The worst of it will be, that people of whom you expect better things—who are supposed to know something of the Golden Rule, and to be actuated by feelings of justice and benevolence—will for the sake of a few dollars grasp and scramble, and show no more regard for reason and right than so many hungry wolves.”
This picture of the worst side of human society was well calculated to show Jack that his was not the only or the worst case of wrong in the world. “But what is a fellow to do?” he asked.
Percy sat down on the ground, and, opening his handkerchief, talked on, while he assorted his mosses and ferns.
“You must make up your mind, in the first place, that you have got to bear a good deal of this sort of thing in going through life. Beware of briers and thistles, but remember that they exist, and be patient when you get pricked. In reading stories of persecution and martyrdom, I always feel that I had rather be the just man who suffered for the right, than the tyrants and bigots who tried to destroy him. Be true to yourself, and nobody can do you any real, permanent harm. Let ’em rage! what do you and I care? There is something in our minds superior to all their spites. You have done what almost any boy would do, that was smart enough; and I can’t help laughing to think how you locked up the court, and afterwards went through the culvert whilst we were trying to fish you out of the pond.”
Jack laughed too, as he mechanically looked over Percy’s plants.
“But you might have done better,—you might do better now,” said the young man. And his scarred and pitted features looked somehow radiant and beautiful to Jack.
“What could I do?”
“Why, let ’em take you to jail, if they want to. What hurt will it do you? Stand up and say, ‘I thought I was right; I meant to do right; and now if you want to send me to jail, go ahead! I can stand it! I’m willing!’ Throw yourself boldly on your honesty, rest on that rock, and let ’em do their worst!”
Jack, feeling how little honesty there had been in his heart a little while before, hung his head over a sprig of fern he was twirling between thumb and finger.
“Mind, I don’t advise you to do just that, for I’m not sure you’re up to it. But if you could do it, ’t would be grand in you! People talk of good and bad fortunes; but fortunes are good or bad according to the use we make of ’em. This disgrace you are suffering now you may turn into one of the blessings of your life; or it may make a thief or a vagabond of you. Understand?”