LIPPINCOTT'S
MONTHLY MAGAZINE
OCTOBER, 1887.
Apple Seed and Brier Thorn.
CHAPTER I.
I HAVE had the courage to dare for happiness. A life of negation, of surrender, drove me to the conviction that to each of us belongs the right to the happiness we most desire. If life is but an experiment, why not try the experiment each in his own way? It appeared to me, as I thought on the subject, that many souls are lost because of misery and of thwarting, and this did not seem to be the Divine order. For years I looked at my happiness through the eyes of another, and I found it bitter, barren, and without color. Then, when the time came, I said that Fate having refused to me what I most wished for, it should give me what I chose for the one who was dearest to me. And I took it.
In my strife for happiness I did not think of myself. My mistakes were made, my headlong course was taken, thinking only of another. Looking only at her, I did not see the path into which my feet were going. When I was but a child I used to hear that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, that his days are few and full of evil, and I did not believe it. In ray heart I said that happiness, not grief, is our natural heritage, and because this is so, the whole race of man longs and strives for it. If this life shuts upon us the door of Paradise, Ave picture the next life opening it, and as here our miseries outweigh our joys, there our joys are to know no shadow. If here we are forlorn, there our destinies are splendid. Here the cross of anguish, there the crown of blissfulness, and the hermit's cell opens into the eternal palaces. All this, I said, is but the invention of poverty. Starved, we prophesy a feast; blind, we dream of color and of Light. And in no such paltry subterfuge had I then faith. Of this life only was I sure, and of it—not of death—asked I the completion of life.
