ed to his own august order. If
it fell upon one of your race for only an instant, it would consume
its object to ashes. No, we cannot love men, but we can be harmlessly
indifferent to them; we can also like them, sometimes. I like you and
the boys, I like father Peter, and for your sakes I am doing all these
things for the villagers."

He saw that I was thinking a sarcasm, and he explained his position.

"I have wrought well for the villagers, though it does not look like
it on the surface. Your race never know good fortune from ill. They are
always mistaking the one for the other. It is because they cannot see
into the future. What I am doing for the villagers will bear good fruit
some day; in some cases to themselves; in others, to unborn generations
of men. No one will ever know that I was the cause, but it will be none
the less true, for all that. Among you boys you have a game: you stand a
row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push a brick, it knocks its
neighbor 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: