Because one of
the strangest things about life seems to be our incapacity to
decide beforehand, or even at the time, where the real and fruitful
joys, and where the dark dangers and distresses lie. The things
that at certain times filled all one's mind, kindled hope and aim,
seemed so infinitely desirable, so necessary to happiness, have
faded, many of them, into the lightest and most worthless of husks
and phantoms, like the withered flowers that we find sometimes shut
in the pages of our old books, and cannot even remember of what
glowing and emotional moment they were the record!
How impossible it is ever to learn anything by being told it! How
necessary it is to pay the full price for any knowledge worth
having! The anxious father, the tearful mother, may warn the little
boy before he goes to school of the dangers that await him. He does
not understand, he does not attend, he is looking at the pattern of
the carpet, and wondering for the hundredth time whether the oddly-
shaped blue thing which appears and reappears at intervals is a
bird or a flower--yes, it is certainly meant for a bird perched on
a bough! He wishes the talk were over, he looks at the little scar
on his father's hand, and remembers that he has been told that he
cut it in a cucumber-frame when he was a boy.
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