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338 "Maybe something, and maybe nothing; we am not just quite exactly able to tell. It might help us for to find your wife."

"Find hell!" replied Mark. "That's about all we'll ever find here; and we are apt to find it mighty soon, if we don't get out of it."

"Likely as not," assented Dubb, serenely; "just as likely as not, if that am the way it am meant to be. This isn't so awfully a nice place, Marky, that I be wanting to stay here; but we am staying here to find her, and that be what we must do before we git out."

It might have been Dubb's lack of grammatical directness, or it might have been something in his manner, which subdued Mark; anyway, he suddenly became calm, almost to passiveness, in his outward demeanor. Yet the pain-lines at the corners of his mouth were tightly drawn, and there was a pathetic bitterness in his tones, when he answered Dubb:

"You do not understand me, my friend, any more than my parents understand me. I would sacrifice what the preachers would call my immortal soul, if, by so doing, I could put my poor wife back where she was two years ago. But that is impossible. I never shall see her again. She is lost, forever, from me. I was sure of it within three months after they stole her away, and everything which has since happened only the more fully convinces me that my idea was right. All through this long search, I have known how utterly useless it was. And so"

"Wait a minute," interrupted Dubb. "Wait just a little minute, and tell me if it am not because you was all the while a-thinking that what we was doing wasn't no use, that it has come out in just this here way? Don't you think it all went bad just because you had it in your mind that it would go bad?"

"Sophistry,—downright sophistry," said Mark, snapping his fingers, and frowning.

"It may be, it may very easily be," replied Dubb, "seeing that I don't know what that thing am what you just said."

Mark resumed the thread of what he had begun saying, without explaining to Dubb the word which puzzled him.

"You see, Dubb," he said, "losing her and not being allowed to find her is all perfectly natural. It could not be any other way. Life, at best, is a thing that is all mixed up. Nobody ever finds it as they expect to. The trouble is all in the start. You are taught to believe a whole lot of things, and, when that is all firmly settled, all at once you begin finding out that these things you have been believing in are all wrong,—all lies. Then you set about hunting out things for yourself, and you only go over the same race-course on another horse: you put your faith in a lot of new things, only to find out that they, too, are false. Your lights all go out, and you stand all alone in the dark. You don't dare move, because you can't see what direction to go in. You can't call out for help, because no one would hear you but those who have already deceived you. If you asked new advice of them, they would only tell you new lies. Falsehood and deception are the pap and pabulum on which we are all suckled and fed. We get the wrong start, because we are given the wrong idea of life. All through