I remember how I watched this man, week in and week out. It was a
trivial matter, but it irritated me unendurably to find that this
circus-rider had human blood precisely like my own it outraged my early
religion.

We talk a great deal of the rose-colored illusions in which youth wraps
the world, and the agony it suffers as they are stripped from its bare,
hard face. But the fact is, that youth (aside from its narrow-passionate
friendships) is usually apt to be acrid and watery and sour in its
judgment and creeds--it has the quality of any other unripe fruit: it is
middle age that is just and tolerant, that has found room enough in the
world for itself and all human flies to buzz out their lives
good-humoredly together. It is youth who can see a tangible devil at
work in every party or sect opposed to its own, whose enemy is always a
villain, and who finds treachery and falsehood in the friend who is
occasionally bored or indifferent: it is middle age that has discovered
the reasonable sweet _juste milieu_ of human nature--who knows few
saints perhaps, but is apt to find its friend and grocer and shoemaker
agreeable and honest fellows. It is these vehement illusions, these
inherited bigotries and prejudices, that tear and cripple a young man as
they are taken from him one by one. He creeps out of them as a crab from
the shell that has grown too small for him, but he thinks he has left
his identity behind him.

It was such a reason as this that made me follow the miller assiduously,
and cultivate a quasi intimacy with him, in the course of which I picked
the following story from him. It was told at divers times, and with many
interruptions and questions from me. But for obvious reasons I have made
it continuous. It had its meaning to me, coarse and common though it