As he looked under
the gnarled boughs of the orchard, he seemed to see his whole life
stretching before him--seventy years--all just the same except that
with each he appeared a little older, a little humbler, a little less
expectant that some miracle might happen and change the future. At the
end of that long vista, he saw himself young and strong, and filled with
a great hope for something--he hardly knew what--that would make things
different. He had gone on, still hoping, year by year, and now at
the end, he was an old, bent, crippled man, and the miracle had never
happened. Nothing had ever made things different, and the great hope had
died in him at last as the twenty seeds of which old Adam had spoken had
died in the earth. He remembered all the things he had wanted that he
had never had--all the other things he had not wanted that had made up
his life. Never had a hope of his been fulfilled, never had an event
fallen out as he had planned it, never had a prayer brought him the
blessing for which he had prayed. Nothing in all his seventy years had
been just what he had wanted--not just what he would have chosen if the
choice had been granted him--yet the sight of the birds in the apple
trees stirred something in his heart to-day that was less an individual
note of rejoicing than a share in the undivided movement of life which
was pulsing around him.
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