Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/694

 The Law of the Land.

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THE LAW OF THE LAND. XV. CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS. BY WM. ARCH. McCbEAN. THE saying that accidents will happen in the best regulated families admits of various interpretations. It may be only a metaphor. The accident may be a black sheep, supposed to be in every family. The one who, instead of taking steps heavenward, runs a pace the other way, yet black sheep have their uses to show how human all of us are. There is no best regulated family which has been able to assimilate all the virtues, so that the surname stands but for an expression of them. When a family reaches that con dition, the type is generally a Pharisee. The family possessed of a belief that the accident is an impossibility with them is the family that will soon run upon a streak of the blood of the old Adam in their veins. The accident may be no more than a fam ily skeleton we are all supposed to have clos eted in our castles. It may be a thing re lated to the black sheep, except instead of having vitality and life, it has only bones, something to scare children with, to frighten them into being lambs. We cannot all be lambs, if we were they would be a drug on the market. The existence of lambs neces sitates some one to do the shearing. A skeleton is the past tense of which black sheep is the present and future tense. Their uses are supposed to be the curbing of the pride of families, as Saxe puts it, Depend upon it, my snobbish friend, Your family line you can't descend Without good reason to apprehend You'll find it waxed at the farther end By some plebian vocation. Or, worse than that, your boasted line May end in a loop of stronger twine That plagued some worthy relation.

It may be some family has been attempted to be so regulated as to eliminate the possi bilities of an actual bodily accident. It is curious, however, how these attempts over shoot the mark, and how things in this world go by reverses. There are mothers who will not let children be children, run and play, for fear the darlings will perspire and catch a cold, or become short of breath and have heart disease, or meet with some other accident. They had heard of this, that and the other thing, and they shake their heads, saying, "No, no, no." These are the children reared like hot house plants, indoors in sight of fond mother and out of reach of harm. Let such a child walk abroad, and we all have known of such incidents, and let a brickbat be hurled into the air by some other child, singing, " Whatever goes up is sure to come down," while all other children will get out of reach of harm's ways, the hot house plant will, in spite of fate and his rearing, get un der that descending brick if there is any way to do it. They never go out of doors with out stumbling over their own feet or some thing else, being bitten by a dog, tearing their clothes and disfiguring themselves, while other little ragamuffins, whom fond mothers pity, go through perilous childhood scot free from accident. The pity has been wrongly placed. There comes a time when fond mothers cannot make life smooth. Then the little ragamuffins step as gingerly through such times as their bare feet once missed broken glass and rusty nails, while the hot house plants watch the performance. Of course it is not meant to insinuate that one's parents ought to turn loose their young to grow up like ragged robins, but it is simply