Interrupting herself, and looking up towards the clouds, she pointed out to me, with her whip, a portion of blue sky, perhaps intimating a cessation of the storm. Regardless of either, I coolly as thoughtlessly put my hand out to take hers! but owing to the action of our horses, missed it. She never saw the attempt, and I narrowly escaped making a great fool of myself.
The most egregious act of folly, I think, a man can be guilty of, is to allow himself to meet with "a refusal."
We may easily have tact enough to know, beforehand, the real state and probable result of the case.
In the present one, this girl and her family would have seen me at the bottom of the Red Sea, ere my hopes and wishes on the subject had met with, "a consummation so devoutly to be wished."
Two days afterwards, I was standing once more on the deck of a steamer, with my carpet-bag at my feet, bound for a foreign port.
The Church I have resigned for ever--my parish, Winthra Park, both deserted--and my humble abode! "its hearth is desolate."
We are aware that, when we "train up a child in the way he should go, he will not depart from it;" but fortunately, when it is that in which he ought not to go, he certainly will depart from it when he can.
Thus having consumed nearly half my life--at all events, the _better_ half--at a public school and the University, preparatory to a profession, my antipathy for which was exactly proportioned by my inaptitude for it, the sole result is, that I can now answer to the definition of a real gentleman, "one who has no visible means of a maintenance."
I begin to suspect, then, that it may be, now and then, just worth while to condescend and observe how a child's disposition may incline him to go; and though, as an humble disciple of John Locke, I am quite sensible of the absurdity of "innate ideas," yet it is very evident that, at an early period of our lives, we evince traits which are infallibly indicative of the bent of our dispositions, which are just as our natures may have been constituted, and this bent is better known by the name of genius.
Now it has been beneficently, and I will say beautifully ordained, that an individual, by gratifying this instinctive impulse of his genius, not only augments his own happiness, but that of his species also, and, I sometimes fondly hope, even that of the Creator himself.