I be happy then?

I saw on my walk to-day an old woman with a crossed shawl upon her
breast creeping out painfully to feed her hens. She lives on a small,
ill-kept farm I have known for years. She is old and poor and asthmatic,
and the cold bites through her with the sharpness of knives. The path to
the hen-house is a kind of via dolorosa, a terror of slipperiness and
cold. She might avoid it: her son, worthless as he is, might do it for
her, but she clings to it as she clings to her life. It is the last
reason for staying here! But the white fields and drifted roads are
never joyfully met, never desired. She spends half the summer dreading
the return of winter from the severities of which she cannot escape.

Nor is it all mere poverty, though she is poor, for there are those who
would help to send her away, but she will not go. She is wrapped about
with Old Terrors, Ancient Tyrannies--that Terror of the Unknown which is
more painful even than the Terror of the Known: those Tyrannies of Habit
and of Place which so often and so ruthlessly rule the lives of the old.
She clings desperately to the few people she knows ("'tis hard to die
among strangers!") and the customs she has followed all her life.
Against the stark power of her tragic helplessness neither the good nor
the great of the earth may prevail. This reality too....

I had a curious experience not long ago: One of those experiences which
light up as in a flash some of the fundamental things of life. I met a
man in the town road whom I have come to know rather more than slightly.
He is a man of education and has been "well-off" in the country sense,
is still, so far as I know, but he has a sardonic outlook upon life. He
is discouraged about human nature. Thinks that politics are rotten, and
that the prices of potatoes and bread are disgraceful. The state of the
nation, and of the world, is quite beyond temperate expression. Few rays
of joy seem to illuminate his pathway.

As we approached in the town road I called out to him:

"Good morning."

He paused and, to my surprise, responded:

"Are you happy?"

It had not occurred to me for some time whether I was happy or not, so I
replied:

"I don't know; why do you ask?"

He looked at me in a questioning, and I thought rather indignant, way.

"Why shouldn't a man be happy?" I pressed him.

"Why _should_ he be? Answer me that!" he responded, "Why should he be?
Look at the world!"

With that he passed o