Page:Under the Sun.djvu/346

322 a stone, which no girl ever can attain. From ancient practice” (note this) “I was somewhat of a proficient in this art, and was discussing the philosophy of female failures, illustrating my doctrine with pebbles, as the case happened to demand, when — ” he met the king, and the narrative diverges from the subject.

Nor is stone-throwing without some dignity in its traditions, for it has happened probably to many of us ourselves, and it has certainly been a custom from time immemorial, to take augury more or less momentous from this act, and make oracles of our pebbles. Among the many cases of this species of divination on record, none is more notable than that of Rousseau’s, where he put the tremendous issues of his future state to the test of stone-throwing. “One day,” says he, “I was pondering over the condition of my soul and the chances of future salvation or the reverse, and all the while mechanically, as it were, throwing stones at the trunks of the trees I passed, and with all my customary dexterity, — or in other words never hitting one of them. All of a sudden the idea flashed into my mind that I would take an augury, and thus, if possible, relieve my mental anxiety. I said to myself, I will throw this stone at that tree opposite. If I hit it, I am to be saved; if I miss it, I am to be damned eternally!” And he threw the stone, and hit it plumb in the middle, — “ce qui véritablement n’était pas difficile; car j’avais eu soin de choisir un arbre fort gros et fort près.”

It is very possible, moreover, that the English boy throws stones from hereditary instinct; that he bombards the. passing locomotives even as in primeval forests the ancestral ape “shelled” with the cocoanuts of