Page:Frank Owen - Rare Earth, 1931.djvu/102

 "There is nothing," moaned Scobee, "nothing but blackness."

"When God created the earth," mused Hung Long Tom, "he made soft skies, rare perfumes and the green-splashed turbulent sea. All of beauty did he make. Joy, laughter and song. But he did not make any ugly or sordid thing. Unpleasant things are all manmade. War, treachery, hatred. The world at its birth was drenched in beauty and because men can only appreciate that for which they must struggle, they squandered it. They invented wines wherefrom to grow intoxicated, not knowing that there is more real intoxication in the blue wide path of the sky than in a Bacchanalian feast. Broadly speaking most of the troubles of life never exist. Most worries are without foundation. If there is one thing that proves man thinks on a higher plane than the lesser animals it is his capacity for worry. Which is the most perfect existence, that of a wild beast of the forest who lives and sleeps in the open, without care or thought except for the immediate present, or