Sam Weller (the character in The Pickwick Papers) addressing his son: "When you're a married man, Samuel, you'll understand a good many things as you don't understand now; but whether it's worthwhile goin' through so much to learn so little, as the charity boy said when he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter of taste."
52. Fellow Passengers to the Grave
Luke 21:25-36
Illustration
Charles Dickens
"I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come around, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys...
To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.
Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.
