BY GAIL HAMILTON


If things would not run into each other so, it would be a thousand times
easier and a million times pleasanter to get on in the world. Let the
sheepiness be set on one side and the goatiness on the other, and
immediately you know where you are. It is not necessary to ask that
there be any increase of the one or any diminution of the other, but
only that each shall preëmpt its own territory and stay there. Milk is
good, and water is good, but don't set the milk-pail under the pump.
Pleasure softens pain, but pain embitters pleasure; and who would not
rather have his happiness concentrated into one memorable day, that
shall gleam and glow through a lifetime, than have it spread out over a
dozen comfortable, commonplace, humdrum forenoons and afternoons, each
one as like the others as two peas in a pod? Since the law of
compensation obtains, I suppose it is the best law for us; but if it had
been left with me, I should have made the clever people rich and
handsome, and left poverty and ugliness to the stupid people;
because--don't you see?--the stupid people won't know they are ugly, and
won't care if they are poor, but the clever people will be hampered and
tortured. I would have given the good wives to the good husbands, and
made drunken men marry drunken women. Then there would have been one
family exquisitely happy instead of two struggling against misery. I
would have made the rose stem downy, and put all the thorns on the
thistles. I would have gouged out the jewel from the toad's head, and
given the peacock the nightingale's voice, and not set everything so at
half and half.

But that is the way it is. We find the world made to our hand. The wise