Young Ofeg's Ditties/Ditty 28

​The town of my birth was one of the oldest in the country, it made the same impression on me as a good description of the moyenage. The streets were winding and narrow, the houses a dirty yellow, with two storeys, of which the upper jutted out above the under in the true mediaeval style. The children played in the gutter-stone, and the cattle cropped the weeds in the market place.

One day I went out for a walk. My thoughts flew low as swifts before rain cometh. And some place, I knew not where, a voice lurked, seeking to call something to me, what I knew not, only that it came thundering down I knew not where from. At the marketplace my friend the locksmith stood at the entry leading to his garret, dozing in the sunshine.

"Answer me a question," I begged of him. "Why does one yearn for the snow when one ​sits in the midst of flowers, for verdure and summer tidings when the sea is ice-bound? Why is that which man possesses without worth, and why does one yearn just for the thing one lacks? Why do the lovely harmonies of rural solitude haunt us in the midst of the city noise, and why does life and its motley flash before us with ever fresh delights, a fata morgana of Paradise, luring us away from peaceful dreaming in meadows green? Why do we yearn forward or backward in hope or remembrance?"

My friend the locksmith answered never a word, but, chuckling to himself, swung round on his heel and entered his house.

When I reached the principal street, my friend the rabbit breeder stood on his steps, that jutted out over the foot-walk, playing the concertina.

"Answer me a question," I besought him. "Suppose you found out that those who hold the reins of Government in our town emptied their slops into your and your neighbours' wells, would you go up to the market​place and tell it to all the people, even if you knew that they would raze your house and violate your wife and put you yourself in the pillory?"

My friend answered never a word; he only laughed in embarrassment, struck up a waltz on his concertina and began to dance.

But, down in Mob Alley, my friend the cobbler sat at his open window,—a family idyl,—wife and eight children.

"Answer me a question," I prayed him. "If a person came to you and said roughly: Better anything else than sitting here like this till the day of judgment; better the great sorrow than the petty joy; rather the trouble that turns hair grey in one night than happiness in the chimney corner, listening to the coffee-kettle singing if a person came to you and said that, what reply would you give him?"

My friend answered never a word; he merely shut the window and turned his back to it.

As for me, I walked down the Alley, and ​out through the town gates, with their look of mediæval times; and when evening fell and I turned round, the Church tower of my native town gleamed far away in the evening sun.