"While the Evil Days come not"

We duck through the court, reminded a
bit by our feelings of our first love, who hadn't
the cleanest of faces, or the nicest of manners;
but she takes her station in our memory because
we were boys then, and the golden halo
of youth is upon her.--_George Meredith_.

What little things turn great events! Tragedies swing on such
inconsequential hinges. It is so exasperating to look back over the
path of a calamity and see how easily it might have been averted! If
one man in the little town of Lawrence a generation ago had eaten two
pieces of pie-plant pie instead of three for supper, the night of a
certain party caucus, he would have attended that caucus and another
set of delegates would have gone to the County convention, another
would have been sent to the State Convention, another Governor of
Kansas would have been nominated and elected, and he would have chosen
another United States Senator, who would have voted for, instead of
against, the impeachment of a President of the United States, and the
history of the civilized world would have been an entirely different
affair from the one now in use. Similarly, if Winfield Hancock
Pennington, of the town of Boyville, had slipped his shoes off in the
second block from his home, instead of slipping them off in the first
block, on his way to school, a great shadow that settled over his life
might have been lifted. For if he had not been sitting exactly where
he sat on the curbing of the street, on that bright, beautiful Monday
morning in September, removing his shoes and stockings, he would have
found no garter snake to kill; and not having killed the snake, he