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What have you done?
The voice of your brother's blood cries out from the ground. Now you are cursed. You won't be as succssful a farmer as you would have been. And you'll be a fugative and a vagabond.
My punishment is more than I can bear. You have driven off the face of the earth. I will be hidden from your face. Does God know and see everything? I will be a fugitive and a vagobond, and whoever finds me will kill me. God said to Cain, "Whoever kills you will suffer a seven-fold vengeance. God put a mark on Cain, so that whoever found him wouldn't kill him.
Cain went where God isn't present: Does God know everything?
And Lamech took him two wives. Lamech is the first of a long line of biblical men with more than one wife. What the Bible says about polygamy 4: I have killed a man. If Cain will be avenged sevenfold, then I'll be avenged fold. Adam and Eve have another boy: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.
Quoted by President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast , implying that the answer is, "Yes, we are our brother's keeper," although Cain probably meant something more like, "I don't know, it's not my turn to watch him. As a punishment for killing Abel, God says Cain will be "a fugitive and a vagabond. This is not the activity one would expect from a fugitive and a vagabond.
Cain is worried after killing Abel and says, "Every one who finds me shall slay me. God is worried too. Every honest man should have his livelihood. You, sir, as I take it, are a mere strolling gentleman. I proceeded to inform the company, that, when Nature gave me a propensity to their way of life, she had not left me altogether destitute of qualifications for it; though I could not deny that my talent was less respectable, and might be less profitable, than the meanest of theirs. My design, in short, was to imitate the storytellers of whom Oriental travellers have told us, and become an itinerant novelist, reciting my own extemporaneous fictions to such audiences as I could collect.
The fortune-teller, with a sly wink to the company, proposed to take me as an apprentice to one or other of his professions, either of which, undoubtedly, would have given full scope to whatever inventive talent I might possess. Dreading a rejection, I solicited the interest of the merry damsel. Mirth, admit me of thy crew! True, a shadow sometimes flits across his brow, but the sunshine is sure to follow in a moment.
He is never guilty of a sad thought, but a merry one is twin born with it. We will take him with us; and you shall see that he will set us all a-laughing before we reach the camp-meeting at Stamford. Her voice silenced the scruples of the rest, and gained me admittance into the league; according to the terms of which, without a community of goods or profits, we were to lend each other all the aid, and avert all the harm, that might be in our power. This affair settled, a marvellous jollity entered into the whole tribe of us, manifesting itself characteristically in each individual. The old showman, sitting down to his barrel-organ, stirred up the souls of the pygmy people with one of the quickest tunes in the music-book; tailors, blacksmiths, gentlemen, and ladies, all seemed to share in the spirit of the occasion; and the Merry-Andrew played his part more facetiously than ever, nodding and winking particularly at me.
The young foreigner flourished his fiddle-bow with a master's hand, and gave an inspiring echo to the showman's melody. The bookish man and the merry damsel started up simultaneously to dance; the former enacting the double shuffle in a style which everybody must have witnessed, ere Election week was blotted out of time; while the girl, setting her arms akimbo with both hands at her slim waist, displayed such light rapidity of foot, and harmony of varying attitude and motion, that I could not conceive how she ever was to stop; imagining, at the moment, that Nature had made her, as the old showman had made his puppets, for no earthly purpose but to dance jigs.
The Indian bellowed forth a succession of most hideous outcries, somewhat affrighting us, till we interpreted them as the warsong, with which, in imitation of his ancestors, he was prefacing the assault on Stamford. The conjurer, meanwhile, sat demurely in a corner, extracting a sly enjoyment from the whole scene, and, like the facetious Merry Andrew, directing his queer glance particularly at me. As for myself, with great exhilaration of fancy, I began to arrange and color the incidents of a tale, wherewith I proposed to amuse an audience that very evening; for I saw that my associates were a little ashamed of me, and that no time was to be lost in obtaining a public acknowledgment of my abilities.
Accordingly--for it must be understood that our pilgrimage was to be performed on foot--we sallied joyously out of the wagon, each of us, even the old gentleman in his white-top boots, giving a great skip as we came down the ladder. Above our heads there was such a glory of sunshine and splendor of clouds, and such brightness of verdure below, that, as I modestly remarked at the time, Nature seemed to have washed her face, and put on the best of her jewelry and a fresh green gown, in honor of our confederation.
Casting our eyes northward, we beheld a horseman approaching leisurely, and splashing through the little puddles on the Stamford road. Onward he came, sticking up in his saddle with rigid perpendicularity, a tall, thin figure in rusty black, whom the showman and the conjurer shortly recognized to be, what his aspect sufficiently indicated, a travelling preacher of great fame among the Methodists. What puzzled us was the fact, that his face appeared turned from, instead of to, the camp-meeting at Stamford. However, as this new votary of the wandering life drew near the little green space, where the guidepost and our wagon were situated, my six fellow-vagabonds and myself rushed forward and surrounded him, crying out with united voices, The missionary looked down, in surprise, at as singular a knot of people as could have been selected from all his heterogeneous auditors.
Indeed, considering that we might all be classified under the general head of Vagabond, there was great diversity of character among the grave old showman, the sly, prophetic beggar, the fiddling foreigner and his merry damsel, the smart bibliopolist, the sombre Indian, and myself, the itinerant novelist, a slender youth of eighteen. I even fancied that a smile was endeavoring to disturb the iron gravity of the preacher's mouth. So saying, the Methodist minister switched his steed, and rode westward. Our union being thus nullified, by the removal of its object, we were sundered at once to the four winds of heaven.
The fortune-teller, giving a nod to all, and a peculiar wink to me, departed on his northern tour, chuckling within himself as he took the Stamford road. The old showman and his literary coadjutor were already tackling their horses to the wagon, with a design to peregrinate southwest along the seacoast. The foreigner and the merry damsel took their laughing leave, and pursued the eastern road, which I had that day trodden; as they passed away, the young man played a lively strain, and the girl's happy spirit broke into a dance; and thus, dissolving, as it were, into sunbeams and gay music, that pleasant pair departed from my view.
Finally, with a pensive shadow thrown across my mind, yet emulous of the light philosophy of my late companions, I joined myself to the Penobscot Indian, and set forth towards the distant city. The Seven Vagabonds From Twice Told Tales Rambling on foot in the spring of my life and the summer of the year, I came one afternoon to a point which gave me the choice of three directions. However, as this new votary of the wandering life drew near the little green space, where the guidepost and our wagon were situated, my six fellow-vagabonds and myself rushed forward and surrounded him, crying out with united voices,-- "What news, what news from the camp-meeting at Stamford?
The House of Seven Gables. The Artist of the Beautiful. The Devil in Manuscript. The Egotism; or Bosom Serpent. Endicott and the Red Cross. The Great Stone Face. The Hollow of the Three Hills.
Although Hawthorne respected the motives of his Uncle Robert, he often longed to be free of his tyranny and his values. For such a dreamy boy, an uncle who. The Seven Vagabonds. From Twice Told Tales. Rambling on foot in the spring of my life and the summer of the year, I came one afternoon to a point which gave.
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The New Adam and Eve. The Old Apple Dealer.
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He seemed pretty nearly of the old showman's age, but much smaller, leaner, and more withered than he, and less respectably clad in a patched suit of gray; withal, he had a thin, shrewd countenance, and a pair of diminutive gray eyes, which peeped rather too keenly out of their puckered sockets. Cain have a son another blue cigar! The showman now proposed that, when the shower was over, they should pursue the road to Stamford together, it being sometimes the policy of these people to form a sort of league and confederacy. And then what an inexhaustible field of enjoyment, both as enabling him to discern so much folly and achieve such quantities of minor mischief, was opened to his sneering spirit by his pretensions to prophetic knowledge. You may find it for free on the web. However, the showman stepped forward, and gave admittance to a figure which made me imagine; either that our wagon had rolled back two hundred years into past ages, or that the forest and its old inhabitants had sprung up around us by enchantment.