is whims and wishes? Would not Louis
XVI. have been the son of a goldsmith, if he could have had his way?
Would Burns have been born a slaving, starving peasant, if he had been
consulted beforehand? Would not the children of vice be the children of
virtue, if they could have had their choice? and would not the whole
tenor of their lives have been changed thereby? Would a good many of
us have been born at all, if we could have helped it? Control
circumstances, forsooth! when a mother's sudden terror brings an idiot
child into the world,--when the restive eye of his great-grandfather,
whom he never saw, looks at you from your two-year-old, and the spirit
of that roving ancestor makes the boy also a fugitive and a vagabond on
the earth! No, no. We may coax circumstances a little, and shove them
about, and make the best of them, but there they are. We may try to get
out of their way; but they will trip us up, not once, but many times.
We may affect to tread them under foot in the daylight, but in the
night-time they will turn again and rend us. All we can do is first to
accept them as facts, and then reason from them as premises. We cannot
control them, but we can control our own use of them. We can make them a
savor of life unto life, or of death unto death.

Application.--If mind could have been supreme over matter, Halicarnassus
should, in the first place, have taken the world at second-hand from
me, and, in the second place, he should not have stood smiling on the
front-door steps when the coach set me down there. As it was, I made the
best of the one case by following in his footsteps,--not meekly, not
acquiescently, but protesting, yet following,--and of the other, by
smiling responsive and asking pleasantly,--

"Are the things planted yet?"

"No," said Halicarnassus.

This was better than I had dared to hope. When I saw him standing there
so complacent and serene, I felt certain that a storm was brewing, or
rather had brewed, and burst over my garden, and blighted its fair
prospects. I was confident that he had gone and planted every square
inch of the soil with some hideous absurdity which would spring up a
hundred-fold in perpetual reminders of the one misfortune to which I
have alluded.

So his ready answer gave me relief, and yet I could not divest myself of
a vague fear, a sense of coming thunder. In spite of my endeavors,
that calm, clear face would lift itself to my view as a mere
"weather-breeder"; but