Presently the
stranger said, whiffing, "Do something for me."
The boy started up.
"No; stay where you are. I don't want you to go anyowhere; I want you to
talk to me. Tell me what you have been doing all your life."
The boy slunk down again. Would that the man had asked him to root up
bushes with his hands for his horse to feed on; or to run to the far end of
the plain for the fossils that lay there, or to gather the flowers that
grew on the hills at the edge of the plain; he would have run and been back
quickly--but now!
"I have never done anything," he said.
"Then tell me of that nothing. I like to know what other folks have been
doing whose word I can believe. It is interesting. What was the first
thing you ever wanted very much?"
The boy waited to remember, then began hesitatingly, but soon the words
flowed. In the smallest past we find an inexhaustible mine when once we
begin to dig at it.
A confused, disordered story--the little made large and the large small,
and nothing showing its inward meaning. It is not till the past has
receded many steps that before the clearest eyes it falls into co-ordinate
pictures. It is not till the I we tell of has ceased to exist that it
takes its place among other objective realities, and finds its true niche
in the picture. The present and the near past is a confusion, whose
meaning flashes on us as it slinks away into the distance.
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