"Why shouldst thou vex thyself, that never willingly vexed anybody?"
"A man has but two concerns in life: to be honorable in what he does, and resigned under what happens to him."
"If any one misconduct himself towards thee, what is that to thee? The deed is his; and therefore let him look to it."
"Welcome everything that happens as necessary and familiar."
Marry, a glow of honest self-satisfaction is cheaply traded for a wad of current specie, and an inkling into the ways of a bold and thirsty world. Methinks I have "arrived"; I have attained a courteous composure proof against mortal hurricanes. Life is no longer a rude and trivial comedy with the Beautifully Bulldozed, who feels able to warm to his own catastrophe, and even to cry, "Pray, madam, don't mention it," to an apologizing lady in a gig, who drives over him and kills him, and does so, moreover, in the most bungling manner in the world.
MY friend was of illustrious ancestry. While so many trace their life-stream to pirates or usurpers who shed their brothers' blood to possess their brothers' power, it is a distinction worth recording, that this Fine Gentleman was descended from a princely person in Switzerland who saved some sixty lives, and whose ancient portrait is loaded, like a French marshal's, with the ribbons and medals of recognition. Though of foreign origin, he did an American thing at my introduction to him: he shook hands. I dropped the white pebble of the Cretans to mark the day he arrived. It is needless to say I loved and understood him,--blond, aggressive, wilful, from the first. He had then, despite his extreme youth, the air of a fighting aristocrat, a taking swashbuckler attitude, as he stood at the open door: the look of one who has character, and a defined part to play, and whose career can never reach a common nor ignoble end. Comely in the full sense he was not; but impressive he was, despite the precocious leanness and alertness which come of too rapid growth.
He had every opportunity, during his babyhood and later, of gratifying his abnormal love of travel; he managed to see more of city life than was good for him, thanks to many impish subterfuges. His golden curiosity covered everything mundane, and he continued his private studies in topography until he was kidnapped, and restored by the police: an abject, shamefaced little tourist, heavy with conscience, irresponsive to any welcomes, who sidled into his abandoned residence, and forswore from that day his unholy peregrinations. But he had a roaming housemate, and grew to be supremely happy, journeying under guidance.