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 labours--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 he stood there drearily, he became reproach incarnate.
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