Such is the allegory, or morality, of the Lost Train.
I am not alluding to those of Semiramis. Though, now I come to think of it, this is the moment for protesting against one of those unnecessary deceptions from which the candid mind of children is allowed to suffer. For the verb _to hang_ invariably implies that the hanging object (or, according to our jurisprudence, person) is supported by a rope, nail, or other device, from above, while remaining unsupported from below. And it was in such relations to the forces of gravitation that my infancy conceived those gardens of the Babylonish Queen. So that I quite remember my bitter disappointment (the first germ, doubtless, of a general scepticism about Gods and Men) when a cut in an indiscreet _Handbook of Antiquities_ displayed these flowery places as resting flatly on a housetop, and no more hanging, in any intelligible sense, than I hung myself.
Having lodged this complaint, I will, however, admit that this misleading adjective comes as a boon in the discourse I am now meditating. Since, returning to my old theme of the _Garden of Life_, I find that the misapplication of that word _Hanging_, and its original literal suggestion, lends added significance to this allegoric dictum: Of all the _Gardens of Life_ the best worth cultivating are often the Hanging Ones. Yes! Hanging between the town pavement, a hundred feet below, and the open sky, with gales ready to sweep down every flower-pot into smithereens, the kind or wicked sky, immediately above. Moreover, as regards legal claim to soil, leasehold, freehold, or copyhold, why, simply none, the earth having been carried up to that precarious place in arduous basketfuls.
One of the wisest of women (I say it with pride, for she is my godchild) put this skyey allegory of mine into plain words, which I often repeat to myself, and never without profit. The circumstances and character of her husband had involved her in wanderings from her very wedding-day; and each of her six children had been born in a different place, and each in a more unlikely one. "It must have been very difficult to settle down at last like this," I said, looking in admiration from the dainty white walls and white carpets to the delicately laid table, with the flowers upon it and around it--I mean the garland of pink little faces and pink little pinafores. "I wonder you could do it after so long." "But I have always been what you call _settled_," she answered, and added very simply--"As soon as I took in that we should always be eternally uprooting, I made up my mind that the only way was to live as if we should never move at all. You see, everything would have gone to bits if I had let myself realise the contrary, and I think I should have gone crazy into the bargain."