I could scarcely fail to see that this exemplary citizen felt keenly the value of the dramatist's suggestion, that it is very dangerous for a man to fall out of line with the rest of the community. Social laws exist for the community, not for the individual. At the same time, I was not so firmly convinced as my friend seemed to be that Mr. Starkie's career could be pointed to as a notable instance of the peril of marching out of the way our fathers trod. He had declined to yield to the influences of the magnet that "hung in the hardware shop" of his father, and had so forsaken the two hundred a year and the obscurity of his native town for the million dollars which he had earned by his inventions in Pennsylvania, to say nothing of the fame which accrues to an inventor who knows how to put his inventions on the market; so that there might really be some people ready to assert that Joe Starkie's restlessness suggested that a divergence from the scheme of the Red-man on the warpath, who is careful to step into the footprints of the man who goes before him, may now and again be advisable. I did not say so to my exemplary citizen, however; for the fame of Joe Starkie had not yet reached the place of his nativity, and the exemplary citizen might have asked me what about Joe Starkie's old friends who were now sojourning in various public institutions, and he would not have been satisfied with my replying to the effect that they had stayed at home, and were suffering for it.
In the way our fathers trod"--that seems to be the proud boast of the English country towns, and I am not sure that it is not a worthy one, though its application to certain cases is certainly humorous. I remember revisiting a town where I had once lived, and getting into conversation with an elderly and well-to-do inhabitant. I mentioned having met in London a surgeon who had been born in and lived in the town. He certainly enjoyed the largest practice in London, and, in addition to the K.C.B., bore as many continental orders as permitted of his wearing (which he did) a very dingy dress-coat without its dinginess being perceptible. His reputation had, however, eluded the cognizance of his native town.