The Choir Invisible

A jest may be the smallest pebble that was ever dropped into the sunny

mid-ocean of the mind; but sooner or later it sinks to a hard bottom, sooner

or later sends it ripples toward the shores where the caves of the fatal

passions yawn and roar for wreckage. It is the Comedy of speech that forever

dwells as Tragedy's fondest sister, sharing with her the same unmarked

domain; for the two are but identical forces of the mind in gentle and in

ungentle action as one atmosphere holds within itself unseparated the zephyr

and the storm.

The following afternoon O'Bannon was ambling back to town--slowly and

awkwardly, he being a poor rider and dreading a horse's back as he would

have avoided its kick. He was returning from the paper mill at Georgetown

whither he had been sent by Mr. Bradford with an order for a further supply

of sheets. The errand had not been a congenial one; and he was thinking now

as often before that he would welcome any chance of leaving the editor's

service.

What he had always coveted since his coming into the wilderness was the

young master's school; for the Irish teacher, afterwards so well known a

figure in the West, was even at this time beginning to bend his mercurial

steps across the mountains. Out of his covetousness had sprung perhaps his

enmity toward the master, whom he further despised for his Scotch blood, and

in time had grown to dislike from motives of jealousy, and last of all to

hate for his simple purity. Many a man nurses a grudge of this kind against

his human brother and will take pains to punish him accordingly; for success

in virtue is as hard for certain natures to witness as success in anything

else will irritate those whose nerveless or impatient or ill-directed grasp

it has wisely eluded.

On all accounts therefore it had fallen well to his purpose to make the

schoolmaster the dupe of a disagreeable jest. The jest had had unexpectedly

serious consequences: it had brought about the complete discomfiture of John

in his love affair; it had caused the trouble behind the troubled face with

which he had looked out upon every one during his illness.

The two young men had never met since; but the one was under a cloud; the

other was refulgent with his petty triumph; and he had set his face all the

more toward any further aggressiveness that occasion should bring happily to

his hand.

The mere road might have shamed him into manlier reflections.

It was one of the forest highways of the majestic bison opened ages before into what must

have been to them Nature's most gorgeous kingdom, her fairest, most magical

Babylon: with hanging gardensof verdure

everywhere swung from the tree-domes to the ground; with the earth one vast

rolling garden of softest verdure and crystal waters: an ancient Babylon of

the Western woods, most alluring and in the end most fatal to the luxurious,

wantoning wild creatures, which know no sin and are never found wanting.