Page:Revolution and Other Essays.djvu/80

 as penance for their watchlessness placed them away amongst dust and cobwebs. Oh no, not for long. They are again enshrined, as bright and polished as of yore, and my destiny is once more in their keeping.

It is given that travail and vicissitude mark time to man's footsteps as he stumbles onward toward the grave; and it is well. Without the bitter one may not know the sweet. The other day — nay, it was but yesterday — I fell before the rhythm of fortune. The inexorable pendulum had swung the counter direction, and there was upon me an urgent need. The hogskin belt was flat as famine, nor did it longer gird my loins. From my window I could descry, at no great distance, a very ordinary mortal of a man, working industriously among his cabbages. I thought: Here am I, capable of teaching him much concerning the field wherein he labors, — the nitrogenic-why of the fertilizer, the alchemy of the sun, the microscopic cell- structure of the plant, the cryptic chemistry of root and runner, — but thereat he straightened his work- wearied back and rested. His eyes wandered over what he had produced in the sweat of his brow, then on to mine. And as