a vessel I saw once being launched: it would stick on the stocks, instead
of sliding away into the expectant waters.




CHAPTER III.

MY WEDDING.


I confess the first thing I did when I knew myself the next morning was
to have a good cry. To leave the place where I had been born was like
forsaking the laws and order of the Nature I knew, for some other Nature it
might be, but not known to me as such. How, for instance, could one who has
been used to our bright white sun, and our pale modest moon, with our soft
twilights, and far, mysterious skies of night, be willing to fall in with
the order of things in a planet, such as I have read of somewhere, with
three or four suns, one red and another green and another yellow? Only
perhaps I've taken it all up wrong, and I do like looking at a landscape
for a minute or so through a colored glass; and if it be so, of course it
all blends, and all we want is harmony. What I mean is, that I found it
a great wrench to leave the dear old place, and of course loved it more
than I had ever loved it. But I would get all my crying about that over
beforehand. It would be bad enough afterwards to have to part with my
father and mother and Connie, and the rest of them. Only it wasn't like
leaving them. You can't leave hearts as you do rooms. You can't leave
thoughts as you do books. Those you love only come nearer to you when you
go away from them. The same rules don't hold with _thinks_ and _things_, as
my eldest boy distinguished them the other day.