Adventures in Contentment

How the great one-book men remain with us! I can see Marcus Aurelius sitting in his camps among the far barbarians writing out the reflections of a busy life. I see William Penn engaged in great undertakings, setting down "Some of the Fruits of Solitude," and Abraham Lincoln striking, in the hasty paragraphs written for his speeches, one of the highest notes in our American literature. "David?" "Yes, Harriet." "I am going up now; it is very late." "Yes." "You will bank the fire and see that the doors are locked?" "Yes." After a pause: "And, David, I didn't mean--about the story you read. Did the Knight finally kill the lions?" "No," I said with sobriety, "it was not finally necessary." "But I thought he set out to kill them." "He did; but he proved his valour without doing it." Harriet paused, made as if to speak again, but did not do so. "Valour"--I began in my hortatory tone, seeing a fair opening, but at the look in her eye I immediately desisted. "You won't stay up late?" she warned. "N-o," I said. Take John Bunyan as a pattern of the man who forgot himself into immortality. How seriously he wrote sermons and pamphlets, now happily forgotten! But it was not until he was shut up in jail (some writers I know might profit by his example) that he "put aside," as he said, "a more serious and important work" and wrote "Pilgrim's Progress." It is the strangest thing in the world--the judgment of men as to what is important and serious! Bunyan says in his rhymed introduction: