Page:Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp Volume 1.djvu/32

26 and pay all the price. I would as soon spend my life walking the drawn sword which they say is the bridge to Mahomet's paradise."

"Ah! ah! I fancy I see you doing it! What a figure you'd make, my dear fellow, balancing and posturing on the sword-blade, and making horrid wry faces! Yet I know you'd be as comfortable there as you would in political life. And yet, after all, you are greatly superior to me in every respect. It would be a thousand pities if such a man as you couldn't have the management of things. But our national ship has to be navigated by second-rate fellows, Jerry-go-nimbles, like me, simply because we are good in dodging and turning. But that's the way. Sharp's the word, and the sharpest wins."

"For my part," said Clayton, "I shall never be what the world calls a successful man. There seems to be one inscription written over every passage of success in life, as far as I 've seen,—'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?'"

"I don't understand you, Clayton."

"Why, it seems to me just this. As matters are going on now in our country, I must either lower my standard of right and honor, and sear my soul in all its nobler sensibilities, or I must be what the world calls an unsuccessful man. There is no path in life, that I know of, where humbuggery and fraud and deceit are not essential to success—none where a man can make the purity of his moral nature the first object. I see Satan standing in every avenue, saying,-'All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.'"

"Why don't you take to the ministry, then, Clayton, at once, and put up a pulpit-cushion and big Bible between you and the fiery darts of the devil?"

"I'm afraid I should meet him there, too. I could not gain a right to speak in any pulpit without some profession or pledge to speak this or that, that would be a snare to my conscience, by and by. At the door of every pulpit I