And are we not, we mortals, so many billiard-balls, launched forth upon our little arena by we know not what force, and rolling we know not whither? It may be a little wider or a trifle narrower, perhaps, the stage on which we play our several parts; but all the same, around it rise the unscalable barriers of human life, the adamantine limitations of human endeavor. And we, embracing within our little selves (as did the tusk whence that ball was cut) countless conflicting forces, the inextricably intermingled traits, that is, of numberless ancestors,—fashioned, too, by the loving hands of father, mother, brother, sister, teacher; we spin forth on the journey of life. And a seemly roll of it we may have, and a safe, perhaps, if we be but smooth and round and mediocre (not bulging on this side, say, with big thoughts, or jagged on that with untamable conscience). There stands the goal, and making for it, merrily we spin forth,—but, click! click! and where are we? Nay, may not a pinch of cigar-ashes wrest victory from an expert? And hath not, sometime, a mere rumpled thread sufficed to bring triumph to a tyro? Surely it is not a great matter to stoop and pick up a pin; but was it not enough, once, as we are told, to make a beggar a millionaire? And who shall say that the merest casual fly, alighting on the intent nose of some gunner in beleaguered Toulon, might not have so warped the parabola of a shell as to have rendered needless the slaughter of Waterloo? I have made life a parallelogram, I see, though it is notoriously a circle; and I have symbolized failure in life by carroming on the light and dark reds; whereas, as we all know, that is success in billiards. But, my Ah Yung Whack, is it not night in China when it is day with us? And does not white raiment signify grief there? And do they not take off their shoes instead of their hats when calling on a friend, and shake their own hands rather than the other fellow’s? We will let the illustration stand, my boy, for your sake; for, in the new Flowery Kingdom which is coming, all things will be changed. In that day, when the wielder of the cue shall also wear one (spell it how he will), the game will be to miss rather than to hit; so that what seemed, at the first blush, to be due to the buck-jumping of a mustang Pegasus, turns out to be, in reality, the prophetic vision of a philosophic Bushwhacker. But the environment of Mary? And now, at last, it has come,—that chapter which I have so long dreaded,—my chapter on Virginia theology. “Dearest Alice, could you not manage it for me?” A backward toss in her rocking-chair, one ejaculatory clapping together of her plump hands, one shout of laughing amazement was her answer. “I?” said Charley. “You must have forgotten that I am hard at work on that _Essay on Military Glory_ which you say you will shortly need.” ----- [1] Conspicuously inexact; but the reader must judge for herself.—_Ed._ CHAPTER LVII.