That Fortune | Page 6

were and had been.
Every Sunday the preacher denounced the glitter and frivolity and
corruption of what he called Society, until the boy longed to see this
splendid panorama of cities and hasting populations, the seekers of
pleasure and money and fame, this gay world which was as fascinating
as it was wicked. The preacher said the world was wicked and vain. It
did not seem so to the boy this summer day, not at least the world he
knew. Of course the boy had no experience. He had never heard of
Juvenal nor of Max Nordau. He had no philosophy of life. He did not
even know that when he became very old the world would seem to him
good or bad according to the degree in which he had become a good or
a bad man.
In fact, he was not thinking much about being good or being bad, but of
trying his powers in a world which seemed to offer to him infinite
opportunities. His name--Philip Burnett--with which the world, at least
the American world, is now tolerably familiar, and which he liked to
write with ornamental flourishes on the fly-leaves of his schoolbooks,
did not mean much to him, for he had never seen it in print, nor been
confronted with it as something apart from himself. But the Philip that
he was he felt sure would do something in the world. What that
something should be varied from day to day according to the book, the
poem, the history or biography that he was last reading. It would not be
difficult to write a poem like "Thanatopsis" if he took time enough,
building up a line a day. And yet it would be better to be a soldier, a
man who could use the sword as well as the pen, a poet in uniform.
This was a pleasing imagination. Surely his aunt and his cousins in the

farmhouse would have more respect for him if he wore a uniform, and
treat him with more consideration, and perhaps they would be very
anxious about him when he was away in battles, and very proud of him
when he came home between battles, and went quite modestly with the
family into the village church, and felt rather than saw the slight flutter
in the pews as he walked down the aisle, and knew that the young
ladies, the girl comrades of the district school, were watching him from
the organ gallery, curious to see Phil, who had gone into the army.
Perhaps the preacher would have a sermon against war, and the
preacher should see how soldierlike he would take this attack on him.
Alas! is such vanity at the bottom of even a reasonable ambition?
Perhaps his town would be proud of him if he were a lawyer, a
Representative in Congress, come back to deliver the annual oration at
the Agricultural Fair. He could see the audience of familiar faces, and
hear the applause at his witty satires and his praise of the nobility of the
farmer's life, and it would be sweet indeed to have the country people
grasp him by the hand and call him Phil, just as they used to before he
was famous. What he would say, he was not thinking of, but the
position he would occupy before the audience. There were no
misgivings in any of these dreams of youth.

II
The musings of this dreamer in a tree-top were interrupted by the
peremptory notes of a tin horn from the farmhouse below. The boy
recognized this not only as a signal of declining day and the withdrawal
of the sun behind the mountains, but as a personal and urgent
notification to him that a certain amount of disenchanting drudgery
called chores lay between him and supper and the lamp-illumined
pages of The Last of the Mohicans. It was difficult, even in his own
estimation, to continue to be a hero at the summons of a tin horn--a
silver clarion and castle walls would have been so different--and Phil
slid swiftly down from his perch, envying the squirrels who were under
no such bondage of duty.
Recalled to the world that now is, the lad hastily gathered a bouquet of

columbine and a bunch of the tender leaves and the red berries of the
wintergreen, called to "Turk," who had been all these hours watching a
woodchuck hole, and ran down the hill by leaps and circuits as fast as
his little legs could carry him, and, with every appearance of a lad who
puts duty before pleasure, arrived breathless at the kitchen door, where
Alice stood waiting for him. Alice, the somewhat feeble performer on
the horn, who had been watching for the boy with her hand shading her