The Arkansaw traveler., 1888-09-15

the least to be wondered at that the wise men of old, irritated at this pre- posterous sequence, attempted to de- feat it and refresh themselves by the invention and practice of magic. Magic professes to give you an effect without a cause; and successful ma- gicians have ever been venerated and gratefully remembered by posterity. It has been said that the man who plants tree deserves we'll of his race what, then, shall be said of the man who grows you tree out of hand, without any planting at all? Canon ization is not good enough for him.
 The sequence of cause and effect, however, bad as it is, is not the most infuriating feature of the situation. This is found in the fact that our en- tire lives, from birth to death, and possibly even after that, is one long and dreary series of consequences. The misfortunes of Afr. Tristram Shandy, we are informed, began before he was born; and that pre- natal calamity col ored all his after life. Nay, we must go back to Adam to get at the real source of the disastrous series; in his fall we sinned all. Therefore, in all our meditations upon our past career, and not less in those forecasts to which is given the mocking name of Hope, we find ourselves forced to enumerate one rigid link of our chain of fate after another, and thus contemplate an array of facts which are not only disa- greeable in themselves. but which are myriad times more distasteful be- cause they had to be so, and not other wise, from the garden of Eden down. And what was the garden of Eden before the fall? Unquestionably it was a place where, if you hit your finger with hammer, it sometimes hurt you and sometimes did not, just as it happened; where water was only occasionally wet, and could often be used to broiled beefsteak; where distant mountain-top was just as likely as not to be closer at hand than the tip of your nose; where children were liable to come into the world full grown and without parents; and where, in short, there was nothing to prevent two and two from making five, if they felt like it.
 That garden of Eden is no more and yet it has left some reflection of itself behind it in what is known as the world of imagination, and, con- cretely, as the domain of fiction. There the soul of man, defeated but not subdued, still tries to be free. It is true that certain authors, descend ants, doubtless, of that old serpent who tempted our first mother, are aiming to destroy this transcendental Eden by importing into it the same strict laws of Because and Therefore that enslave us here. No doubt, too, we are too deeply inured to our captivity to be able to escape wholly from it, even on imagination's wings; and our ficti- tious world will bear a semblance to this which hustles forever through the abyss of space. But, at least, it is world whose vicissitudes and events are in measure subject to our con- trol, and which, above all, is con- nected by no sequence or deduction with the complex of circumstance which makes our concrete existence
 The fact that stammer in my utter ance, or owe bill to an undertaken, has no effect upon the eloquence or solvency of the personages who peo- pie my story. So that when the stammer and the undertaken annoy me too much, have but to embark in the left side of my brain, and behold all is well with me. Then all things are, not as fate wills, but as choose. The sense of helplessness is exchanged for the assurance of power; remorse is unknown; and, instead of a blind and anxious waiting upon events, there is clear and pregnant foreknowledge and comprehension. This, I say, is an in- estimable privilege; and if our over- worked population would but take to imagining novels, I am sure there would be fewer suicides, bankrupts, and insane asylums. -AmerSca.