How many events and occurrences linked in an endless series unite to form the sum-total of ordinary human life!  Incident to it, they are in fact all ordinary.  If any appear extraordinary, it is because they occur in the life of an extraordinary individual, or remarkable consequences flow from them.  Like all parts of human life, in and of themselves they are always fragmentary:  springing from what precedes them, they have no beginning proper; causing and flowing into others, they have no ending, in effect; and as the dramatic in actual life is never framed with reference to the unities, so results are constantly being produced and worked out by accidents, and the prominent events often contribute nothing to any supposed final catastrophe.  Strangers interlope for a moment, and change destinies, coming out for a day, from nothing, and going to nowhere, but marring and misshaping everything.

No plot is to develop as this sketch of old-time life continues, and incidents will be of value only as they tend to mould and develop the character and powers of one, and little will be noticed save that which concerns him.  It is, perhaps, already apparent that he is very impressible, that slight forces which would produce little effect on different natures, are capable of changing his shape, will beat him flat, roll him round, or convert him into a cube or triangle, and yet, that certain strong, always acting forces will restore him, with more or less of the mark or impress of the disturbing cause upon him.  He has a strong, tenacious nature, unstained with the semblance of a vice.  He forms quick resolutions, but can adhere to them.  He is tender to weakness, and fanciful to phantasy.  His aptitude for sarcasm and ridicule, unsparingly as it had been turned upon everybody, brought upon him general dislike.  His indecision and vacillation in adopting and pursuing a scheme in life, lost him the confidence of his acquaintances—­ready to believe anything of one who had dealt them so many sharp thrusts.  He was sensitive to a fault, and a slight word would have driven him forever from Julia Markham, and turned him back upon himself, as a dissolving and transforming fire.  Mentally, he was quick as a flash, with a strong grasp, and a power of ready analysis; and so little did his mental achievements cost him, that his acquirements were doubted.  He already paid the penalty of a nervous and brilliant intellect—­that of being adjudged not profound.  Men are always being deceived as to the real value of things, by their apparent cost.

We see this illustrated in the case of some grave and ponderous weakling, who has nothing really in him, and yet who creaks, and groans, and labors, and toils, to get under way, until our sympathy with his painful effort leads us so to rejoice over his final delivery that we have lost all power or disposition to weigh or estimate his half-strangled, commonplace bantling, when it is finally born, and we are rather inclined to wonder over it as a prodigy.  No doubt the generation of men who witnessed the mountain in labor, regarded the sickly, hairy little mouse, finally brought forth, as a genuine wonder.