r ever motionless to the rock?"

"Which is better off, the roving young fellow who is sowing his wild
oats, or the man who has settled down, and become a respectable
landowner with a good house over his head?"

"And begun to propagate his species? Well, you have me there, sir, as
far as this life is concerned; but you will confess that the barnacle's
history proves that all crawling grubs don't turn into butterflies."

"I daresay the barnacle turns into what is best for him; at all events,
what he deserves. That rule of yours will apply to him, to whomsoever it
will not."

"And so does penance for the sins of his youth, as some of us are to do
in the next world?"

"Perhaps yes; perhaps no; perhaps neither."

"Do you speak of us, or the barnacle?"

"Of both."

"I am glad of that; for on the popular notion of our being punished a
million years hence for what we did when we were lads, I never could see
anything but a misery and injustice in our having come into the world at
all."

"I can," said the Major quietly.

"Of course I meant nothing rude: but I had to buy my experience, and
paid for it dearly enough in folly."

"So had I to buy mine."

"Then why be punished over and above? Why have to pay for the folly,
which was itself only the necessary price of experience'?"

"For being, perhaps, so foolish as not to use the experience after it
has cost you so dear."

"And will punishment cure me of the foolishness?"

"That depends on yourself. If it does, it must needs be so much the
better for you. But perhaps you will not be punished, but forgiven."

"Let off? That would be a very bad thing for me, unless I become a very
different man from what I have been as yet. I am always right glad now
to get a fall whenever I make a stumble. I should have gone to sleep in
my tracks long ago else, as one to do in the back woods on a long elk
hunt."

"Perhaps you may become a very different man."

"I should be sorry for that, even if it were possible."

"Why? Do you consider yourself perfect?"

"No.... But somehow, Thomas Thurnall is an old friend of mine, the first
I ever had; and I should be sorry to lose his company."

"I don't think you need fear doing so. You have seen an insect go
through strange metamorphoses, and yet remain the same individual; why
should not you and I do so likewise?"

"Well?"

"Well--There are some points about you, I suppose, which you would not
be sorry to have altered?"

"A fe