Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple
and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest,
under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more
distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the
races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as the
century was to offer; but, on the other hand, the ordinary
traveller, who does not enter the field of racing, finds
advantage in being, so to speak, ticketed through life, with the
safeguards of an old, established traffic. Safeguards are often
irksome, but sometimes convenient, and if one needs them at all,
one is apt to need them badly. A hundred years earlier, such
safeguards as his would have secured any young man's success; and
although in 1838 their value was not very great compared with
what they would have had in 1738, yet the mere accident of
starting a twentieth-century career from a nest of associations
so colonial, -- so troglodytic -- as the First Church, the Boston
State House, Beacon Hill, John Hancock and John Adams, Mount
Vernon Street and Quincy, all crowding on ten pounds of
unconscious babyhood, was so queer as to offer a subject of
curious speculation to the baby long after he had witnessed the
solution. What could become of such a child of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself
required to play the game of the twentieth? Had he been
consulted, would he have cared to play the game at all, holding
such cards as he held, and suspecting that the game was to be one
of which neither he nor any one else back to the beginning of
time knew the rules or the risks or the stakes? He was not
consulted and was not responsible, but had he been taken into the
confidence of his parents, he would certainly have told them to