"How in the name of wonder did you get to Foxden?"
"How under the sun did you get to Foxden?"
"Why I am here naturally enough as the guest of my friend Colonel
Prowley."
"And I am here naturally enough as the guest of my friend Mrs.
Hunesley."
Now if I had dramatized the little event I have been trying to relate, I should have reached the precise point where the auditor would button up his coat, put on his hat, let his patent spring-seat go up with a click, and begin to leave the theatre with all expedition. What would it matter to him that I had prepared a circumstantial account of how all petty objections were got over, or that I had elaborated a peculiarly felicitous tag which Colonel Prowley would speak at a few backs as they disappeared into the lobby? The auditor referred to has got an inkling of how things are to end, and can guess out the particulars as he hurries off to his business. And here will be observed our decided advantage in having made sure of the Moral by a vigorous assertion of the same at the commencement of this narrative; for, thus relieved of the necessity of a final flutter into the empyrean of ethics, we may part company in a few easy sentences.
Although the circumstances I have set down, from being awkwardly packed in a small compass, may not appear to fit into each other with all the exactness of a dissecting-map, I am sure, that, as they really occurred spread over a necessary time, they seemed natural and simple enough. Mrs. Hunesley, Doctor Dastick's favorite niece, was the schoolmate of Miss Kate Hurribattle, and what more likely than that she should invite her friend to pass a few weeks with her at her summer-home in the country? And could there be a greater necessity than that, meeting daily as we did through those lovely August weeks, she should become—in short, that I should marry Miss Hurribattle?
And when this foolish little romance, which had taken nebulous outline in the fancy of Colonel Prowley, suddenly fell at his feet a serious indubitability, the dear, delighted old gentleman was the first to declare, that, as our engagement had existed for the last seventy years, it certainly did not seem worth while to wait much longer. At all events, we did not wait longer than the following Thanksgiving; since which period my experience leads me to declare, that, if the Miss Hurribattle of my great-great-uncle's day was at all comparable to the member of her family I met at Foxden, my respected relative made a great mistake in living a bachelor.
RESIGNATION.
You know how a little child of three or four years old kicks and howls, if it do not get its own way. You know how quietly a grown-up man takes it, when ordinary things fall out otherwise than he wished. A letter, a newspaper, a magazine, does not arrive by the post on the morning on which it had been particularly wished for, and counted on with certainty. The day proves rainy, when a fine day was specially desirable. The grown-up man is disappointed; but he soon gets reconciled to the existing state of facts. He did not much expect that things would turn out as he wished them. Yes: there is nothing like the habit of being disappointed, to make a man resigned when disappointment comes, and to enable him to take it quietly. And a habit of practical resignation grows upon most men, as they advance through life.
You have often seen a poor beggar, most probably an old man, with some lingering remains of respectability in his faded appearance, half ask an alms of a passer-by; and you have seen him, at a word of repulse, or even on finding no notice taken of his request, meekly turn away: too beaten and sick at heart for energy; drilled into a dreary resignation by the long custom of finding everything go against him in this world. You may have known a poor cripple, who sits all day by the side of the pavement of a certain street, with a little bundle of tracts in his hand, watching those who pass by, in the hope that they may give him something. I wonder, indeed, how the police suffer him to be there: for, though ostensibly selling the tracts, he is really begging. Hundreds of times in the long day, he must see people approaching, and hope that they may spare him a halfpenny, and find ninety-nine out of each hundred pass without noticing him. It must be a hard school of Resignation. Disappointments without number have subdued that poor creature into bearing one disappointment more with scarce an appreciable stir of heart. But, on the other hand, kings, great nobles, and the like, have been known, even to the close of life, to violently curse and swear, if things went against them; going the length of stamping and blaspheming even at rain and wind, and branches of trees and plashes of mud, which were of course guiltless of any design of giving offence to these eminent individuals. There was a great monarch, who, when any little cross-accident befell him, was wont to fling himself upon the floor, and there to kick and scream and tear his hair. And around him, meanwhile, stood his awe-stricken attendants: all doubtless ready to assure him that there was something noble and graceful in his kicking and screaming, and that no human being had ever before with such dignity and magnanimity torn his hair. My friend Mr. Smith tells me that in his early youth he had a (very slight) acquaintance with a great prince, of elevated rank and of vast estates. That great prince came very early to his greatness; and no one had ever ventured, since he could remember, to tell him he had ever said or done wrong. Accordingly, the prince had never learned to control himself, nor grown accustomed to bear quietly what he did not like. And when any one, in conversation, related to him something which he disapproved, he used to start from his chair, and rush up and down the apartment, furiously flapping his hands together, till he had thus blown off the steam produced by the irritation of his nervous system. That prince was a good man: and so aware was he of his infirmity, that, when in these fits of passion, he never suffered himself to say a single word: being aware that he might say what he would afterwards regret. And though he could not wholly restrain himself, the entire wrath he felt passed off in flapping. And after flapping for a few minutes, he sat down again, a reasonable man once more. All honor to him! For my friend Smith tells me that that prince was surrounded by toadies, who were ready to praise everything he might do, even to his flapping. And in particular, there was one humble retainer, who, whenever his master flapped, was wont to hold up his hands in an ecstasy of admiration, exclaiming, "It is the flapping of a god, and not of a man!"