In a merry company, they present the appearance of a Red
Indian whitewashed, and look on at the strange ways of their
neighbours without betraying even the faintest spark of sympathy or
intelligence. These are children of a larger growth, and have not yet
acquired sense enough to laugh. Like the savage, they are afraid of
compromising their dignity, or, to use their own words, of making
fools of themselves. For our part, we never see a man afraid of making
a fool of himself at the right season, without setting him down as a
fool ready made.
A woman has no natural grace more bewitching than a sweet laugh. It is
like the sound of flutes on the water. It leaps from her heart in a
clear, sparkling rill; and the heart that hears it feels as if bathed
in the cool, exhilarating spring. Have you ever pursued an unseen
fugitive through the trees, led on by her fairy laugh; now here, now
there--now lost, now found? We have. And we are pursuing that
wandering voice to this day. Sometimes it comes to us in the midst of
care, or sorrow, or irksome business; and then we turn away, and
listen, and hear it ringing through the room like a silver bell, with
power to scare away the ill spirits of the mind. How much we owe to
that sweet laugh! It turns the prose of our life into poetry; it
flings showers of sunshine over the darksome wood in which we are
travelling; it touches with light even our sleep, which is no more the
image of death, but gemmed with dreams that are the shadows of
immortality.
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