I paused and took them in my hand: one, two, three. There was a saint, I am told, who allowed the birds to build in his two palms, and did not rise from his knees until the fledglings were ready to fly from the nest. Neither was I a saint, nor could I afford such beneficence. I was pressed for time, as God's saints, I believe, never are, and I needed my shoe. I slipped it on as I had slipped on its mate; I tied its lace neatly, gave the bow an efficient pat, and walked away in it. It is true, I did put the three hickory-nuts on the bureau. I am not sure what I meant to do with them, but I never saw them again. Miss Layng, the terrible goddess of order, probably flung them out of the window with mutterings.
But I ask you only to picture the romance, and it may be the terror, of the thing to the one who had laid such delightful plans, who had enjoyed such anticipations! House, stores, hopes, social aggrandizement, everything—gone! carried off entire, by God knows what spirit! and not so much as a vestige left to tell the tale!
I do not forget that it is the custom to speak of mice as destructive; yet may not that word be used, after all, with something of a bias? I picture one of them on his way to seek a few bits of newspaper for the lining of a nest, and I imagine him suddenly endowed with the ability to read the inky characters. He pauses in amaze. His eyes bulge and devour the news beadily. And what news it is! Statistics! Staggering statistics of the men and officers killed since our great war's beginning; and of aged and innocent citizens shot, women violated, little children sacrificed, noble cities destroyed!
His hand goes over his heart to quiet its violent beating. Ah, what a race of gods they are! Or, he reads this from a recent account of the bayonet practice at Plattsburg—whatever "bayonet" may mean, and whatever "Plattsburg"; for these accessories of civilization lie ahead of him some eons.
"Aim for the vitals," he reads. "Do not fire until you feel your bayonet stick. Thus you will shatter the bone, and you can then withdraw the blade. At the same time, try to trip your enemy with your left foot, so that he will fall forward."
None of this is clear to him. This is the deportment, without doubt, of the immortal gods! Fancy the consequences of his attempting to trip his enemy, the mouse-trap, or the cat, or the terrier, with his left foot!
No; these are powers and potencies to which he can only look forward in dim futures, when the mouse tribe shall have attained, eons hence, perhaps, to a higher order of being, and to these godlike practices. But that, however glorious, is but a far dream! Meek and gentle and forgiving, in his inferiority, he lends himself devotedly once more to his labors, and nibbles the newspaper, carrying off small pieces of it, very destructively, to build that near-by nest in which soon are to be born tiny creatures as gentle and inferior and destructive as himself.
To one who has studied mythology with a reverence for its revelations, it must often have seemed that man is kinder than his conception of the mighty powers that try him. Job would seem to be, rather than the Deity, the hero of Job's tragical story; and how much nobler, to cite a most obvious instance, is the ancient Greek than his deities!
However impious this may appear to the pious, yet to me the thing looks hopeful. Dread and powerful as are our own gods,—Authority, Mammon, Sentiment, Public Opinion, Superstition, Fear,—and many as have been our sacrifices offered up to them, yet may it not be that humanity, frail, and so largely at their mercy, retains some sovereign nobilities still unvanquished by them?
Have we not had our own disappointments and vicissitudes? Have not our conceptions of our duties and privileges and rights and gayeties been but poorly adjusted to those powers whose awful retributions we have tempted? Yet I am inclined to hope that, notwithstanding all this, we shall still preserve some gentleness that cannot be conquered; shall still retain some virtues which, let these terrible powers descend upon us as they will, cannot be obliterated, that we shall be, till the end, something better than our fate, something more kind than our destiny.