“I can’t speak for you,” sez she, “but as for me, I always do.”
Sez I, “Is it always easy for you to decide right, Tamer, when two or three paths are in front of you to decide from? Do you always choose the right one?”
“I always have!” sez she severely.
“Well,” sez I, “you’re different from most folks; most of us git into the wrong paths time and agin, and go blunderin’ along over rocks and sand and stun and weeds, etc., and we may count ourselves happy if we ever git back into the right road agin.”
“Well,” sez Tamer, “Jack might have known he wuz goin’ wrong, it wuzn’t a blunder, he chose deliberate.”
Sez I, “Jack said he thought he wuz goin’ right, and I believe him. But even if he had chosen the wrong road deliberate, lots of us look back onto times when we had to choose different paths to walk in, and deliberately, though unbeknown to us, chose the wrong way. There is so many paths to choose from in this life, the roads branch out into so many different ways, why, if the compass had as many pints on it as the porcupine has quills it couldn’t begin to pint to the different paths we have to choose from.
“Sometimes,” sez I, growin’ real eloquent, “they go down into the shadows with the pale shapes of Renunciation and Martyrdom, and a cross shinin’ faint and far down in the gloom. Some through the garden of the gods, where the air is fine and clear, and music and chanted song float along down the beautiful pathway. Some through the crowds of bizness, and gay pleasure-seekers through pleasures and palaces. Some into the dark highways, where Want and Misery walk hand in hand. Some down into the tomb, some up the mount of crucifixion. There are paths, long, cold, shinin’, that go up the mountain side, where the glitterin’ tops gleam and beckon, and we are willin’ to drop every weight that would hender us from climbin’.
“Oh, those times to look back upon when life wuz to be chosen, or what proved to be (onbeknown to us) a livin’ death! How calm the fields lay under the light of that autumn sky, long flat fields, green and calm and stretchin’ back to the quiet woods. How the road in front lengthened out in a long, shinin’, yellow-brown ribbon with cozy sheltered homes layin’ by its side. How soft and cloud flecked wuz the sky overhead, broodin’ down over the sheltered home nests. Only a question to be made and answered, a breath of air, light thing indeed, lighter than the lightest fleck of soft blue-gray cloud overhead, maybe a few tears, a farewell not so loud as the lowest bird song in the branches along the brown wayside fences. Ah! but has there not been times since when that low word has risen into a mighty voice that filled the skies of the worlds, this world and the onknown? The great dread that it wuz indeed final, that nowhere, nowhere could the lives that touched each other, and then drifted so wide asunder, would ever meet side by side agin.
“Oh, the blindness, the fatal blindness of ignorance, the mistakes that arise from pride, from ambition, from any and every cause, and whose fatality cannot be seen until afterward, until the sun has gone down and the night brings reflection and—heartache! These are the true tragedies of life, enacted by them who weep with no grave for their tears to fall upon. These are the real mourners who do not go about the streets, but who sit inside the gayly curtained box and see the play of life go on before them till the lights are put out, the curtain down, and the real play of life is at an end.
“But they watch the gayly plumed puppets play and act their part, and applaud and smile and the play goes on. Poor playgoers, poor actors on the stage, all, all waiting for the finale of the seen.