Why should not Philip trust the future? He was a free man. He had given
no hostages to fortune. Even if he did not succeed, no one else would
be involved in his failure. Why not follow his inclination, the dream of
his boyhood?

He was at liberty to choose for himself. Everybody in America is; this
is the proclamation of its blessed independence. Are we any better off
for the privilege of following first one inclination and then another,
which is called making a choice? Are they not as well off, and on the
whole as likely to find their right place, who inherit their callings in
life, whose careers are mapped out from the cradle by circumstance and
convention? How much time do we waste in futile experiment? Freedom to
try everything, which is before the young man, is commonly freedom to
excel in nothing.

There are, of course, exceptions. The blacksmith climbs into a city
pulpit. The popular preacher becomes an excellent insurance agent. The
saloon-keeper develops into the legislator, and wears the broadcloth and
high hat of the politician. The brakeman becomes the railway magnate,
and the college graduate a grocer's clerk, and the messenger-boy,
picking up by chance one day the pen, and finding it run easier than
his legs, becomes a power on a city journal, and advises society how to
conduct itself and the government how to make war and peace. All this
adds to the excitement and interest of life. On the whole, we say
that people get shaken into their right places, and the predetermined
vocation is often a mistake. There is the anecdote of a well-known
clergyman who, being in a company with his father, an aged and
distinguished doctor of divinity, raised his monitory finger and
exclaimed, "Ah, you spoiled a first-rate carpenter when you made a poor
minister of me."

Philip thought he was calmly arguing the matter with himself. How often
do we deliberately weigh such a choice as we would that of another
person, testing our inclination by solid reason? Perhaps no one could
have told Philip what he ought to do, but every one who knew him, and
the circumstances, knew what he would do. He was, in fact, already doing
it while he was paltering with his ostensible profession. But he never
would have confessed, probably he would then have been ashamed to
confess, how much his decision to break with the pretense of law was
influenced by the thought of what a certain dark little maiden, whose
image was always in his mind, wou