over, the neighbor knocks over the next brick—­and so on till all the row is prostrate.  That is human life.  A child’s first act knocks over the initial brick, and the rest will follow inexorably.  If you could see into the future, as I can, you would see everything that was going to happen to that creature; for nothing can change the order of its life after the first event has determined it.  That is, nothing will change it, because each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another, and so on to the end, and the seer can look forward down the line and see just when each act is to have birth, from cradle to grave.”

“Does God order the career?”

“Foreordain it?  No.  The man’s circumstances and environment order it.  His first act determines the second and all that follow after.  But suppose, for argument’s sake, that the man should skip one of these acts; an apparently trifling one, for instance; suppose that it had been appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and second and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn’t go.  That man’s career would change utterly, from that moment; thence to the grave it would be wholly different from the career which his first act as a child had arranged for him.  Indeed, it might be that if he had gone to the well he would have ended his career on a throne, and that omitting to do it would set him upon a career that would lead to beggary and a pauper’s grave.  For instance:  if at any time—­say in boyhood—­Columbus had skipped the triflingest little link in the chain of acts projected and made inevitable by his first childish act, it would have changed his whole subsequent life, and he would have become a priest and died obscure in an Italian village, and America would not have been discovered for two centuries afterward.  I know this.  To skip any one of the billion acts in Columbus’s chain would have wholly changed his life.  I have examined his billion of possible careers, and in only one of them occurs the discovery of America.  You people do not suspect that all of your acts are of one size and importance, but it is true; to snatch at an appointed fly is as big with fate for you as is any other appointed act—­”

“As the conquering of a continent, for instance?”

“Yes.  Now, then, no man ever does drop a link—­the thing has never happened!  Even when he is trying to make up his mind as to whether he will do a thing or not, that itself is a link, an act, and has its proper place in his chain; and when he finally decides an act, that also was the thing which he was absolutely certain to do.  You see, now, that a man will never drop a link in his chain.  He cannot.  If he made up his mind to try, that project would itself be an unavoidable link—­a thought bound to occur to him at that precise moment, and made certain by the first act of his babyhood.”

It seemed so dismal!

“He is a prisoner for life,” I said sorrowfully, “and cannot get free.”