I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.
***
Lacey Thrush died last night. Isn’t that a name? Her mother was a Lacey. They were an old family here, but she was the last of the Laceys, and the Thrushes went on to California. She was a maiden lady. She died promptly and decorously, out of consideration for me, I suspect, since she has been concerned about my health. She was conscious half an hour, unconscious half an hour, and gone. We said the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm, then she wanted to hear “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” one last time, so I sang and she hummed a little, and then she started nodding off. I am full of admiration for her. She’s given me a lot to live up to, so to speak. At any rate, she didn’t keep me awake past my bedtime, and the peacefulness of her sleep contributed mightily to the peacefulness of mine. These old saints bless us every chance they get.
Here is a story my grandfather and his friends used to tell, and chuckle over. I can’t vouch for it entirely, since, talking among themselves the way they did, I doubt they’d have thought embellishing a story was quite the same thing as departing from the truth.
In any case, in some forgotten little abolitionist settlement around here, as soon as the people had set up a dry-goods store on one side of the road and a livery stable on the other, they set about building a tunnel between them. Tunneling was a popular activity at that time, and a great deal of ingenuity went into devising hiding places and routes of escape. The topsoil in Iowa goes down so deep that more and larger tunnels were possible here than in less favored regions, say in New England. In this part of the state the soil is also very sandy, of course.
Now, these were sensible and well-meaning people. But they became so absorbed in making this tunnel that they lost sight of certain practical considerations. They put so much zeal into it that it became a sort of subterranean civic monument. One of the old men said the only thing missing was a chandelier. Very simply, they made it too large, and too near the surface of the ground, and they couldn’t brace it, either, since wood was so scarce on the prairie in those days that the lumber for such buildings as they had was carted in from Minnesota. Even thoughtful people have lapses of judgment from time to time.
“When they had just about finished their digging, a stranger on a big black horse came through town. He paused in exactly the wrong spot to ask the name of the place, and he and his horse sank right through the road into that tunnel. When the dust settled, the horse was standing more or less shoulder deep in a hole. The man climbed off him and walked around and around him in a kind of wonderment, not drawing any conclusions at all, try as he might. And when the people came out to ponder this calamity, and took note of his bewilderment, they thought it best to be bewildered, too. So they just stood there with their arms folded, saying, “If that’s not the dangedest thing,” or words to that effect, and they discussed among themselves the risks that went with owning such a large horse. The poor thing began to struggle, of course, so somebody got a bucket of oats and poured a couple of bottles of whiskey over them, and the horse ate them and pretty soon it nodded off. Then the mood of the stranger became desolate, because the horse was not only standing in a hole but was also unconscious. This latter might not have seemed to crown his afflictions the way it did if he had not himself been a teetotaler. As it was, that snoring horse with its head lying there in the road was a spectacle of gloom for which he truly struggled to find words. Now, settlements of that kind were the work of people of high religious principle, and they
