Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/490

472 I began as a child to reason on this question, and even then I could not understand why happiness was not regarded as a sacred possession, and why people did not band together to protect it. When our neighbor Aaron Garlic was arrested for robbing a hen-roost, it appeared to me that he should rather have been punished for ruining the life of his wife. Her existence was a curse to her because of him. He was harsh to her, and cruel, and she could not even be glad when he was away from her, because she dreaded news of him,—news of disgrace and wrong-doing. He got money, and she went hungry. She could not speak of him without shame, so worthless was he. Yet who cared to rescue her from the prison he made for her, where he was her jailer, and where, at his will, he tortured her? For her there was no deliverance; for him no penalty. And I was but young when I perceived that it was not just that one man should ruin the life of another and go free of judgment. And, perhaps, because I saw how this poor woman's burdens were laid upon her, I have never desired to make another carry the weight of my troubles, and I have lived my own life. Yet never have I been resigned to misfortune. I have not complained, and I have not asked that another should be miserable in order that I might be happy, but I have resented the coals of fire over which my feet have passed. I have never called misery a blessing. I have known the difference between ease and labor, joy and grief, stagnation and peace, and I have called them by their names. Never, never, but once, has my cowardice tried to cheat my brain by compromise or fiction.

It is possible that I have expected more of life because I was taught that our heaven was to come to us, not that we were to go to it. The earth was to be the inheritance of the saints. The people to whom was promised the kingdom of heaven were the very people who lived in the house with me, who ate, slept, and talked under my father's roof. The line between the heirs and the strangers was sharply drawn, and it was only those who were born again who were "conditioned for immortality." All others were dead in their trespasses and sins, and for want of repentance had no souls, so when their bodies died they were dead altogether. And at the Second Coming, many would fly out of existence at the first sound of the trumpet.

Thus, more kindly than some other creeds, ours gave man the choice between eternal bliss and eternal sleep, and to-day I hardly know which is the better.

I lived in a little village in the southern part of Pennsylvania, among the hills, and many a time from the stump of an oak-tree have I jumped over Mason and Dixon's line from Pennsylvania into Virginia. Over in Virginia our minister, Mr. McMasters, lived, while Mrs. Garlic had a small house almost on the boundary, and this her husband sometimes found convenient when the law disturbed him.

My father was not a preacher, but it was his innocent vanity to desire to look like one. Clad in sober black, with a huge white neck-tie, he would ride miles to strange churches, expecting the minister to ask him into the pulpit. He never accepted the invitation, but it pleased him. He was a man almost absolutely without color. His eyes