But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them:

   Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
   Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,

   "From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,
   Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.“

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

He flew out of his chair with deadly, inconceivable terror clutching at his heart. The shape, whose left hand rested on the table, was rising to a standing posture behind his seat, its right hand crooked above his scalp. There was black and tattered drapery about it; the coarse hair covered it as in the drawing. The lower jaw was thin—what can I call it ?—shallow, like a beast’s ; teeth showed behind the black lips ; there was no nose ; the eyes, of a fiery yellow, against which the pupils showed black and intense, and the exulting hate and thirst to destroy life which shone there, were the most horrifying feature in the whole vision.

For many Summers he would come Home, one Evening after Another, with his Collar melted, and tell his Wife that the Giants made the Colts look like a lot of Colonial Dames playing Bean Bag in a Weedy Lot back of an Orphan Asylum, and they ought to put a Trained Nurse on Third, and the Dummy at Right needed an Automobile, and the New Man couldn’t jump out of a Boat and hit the Water, and the Short-Stop wouldn’t be able to pick up a Ball if it was handed to him on a Platter with Water Cress around it, and the Easy One to Third that ought to have been Sponge Cake was fielded like a One-Legged man with St. Vitus dance trying to do the Nashville Salute.

When you are drowsy in a morning, and find a reluctance to getting out of your bed, make this reflection with yourself: ‘I must rise to discharge the duties incumbent on me as a man.’

‘And shall I do with reluctance what I was born to do, and what I came into the world to do?’ What! was I formed for no other purpose than to lie sunk in down, and indulge myself in a warm bed? —’But a warm bed is comfortable and pleasant,’ you will say. —Were you born then only to please yourself; and not for action, and the exertion of your faculties?

Do you not see the very shrubs, the sparrows, the ants, the spiders, and the bees, all busied, and in their several stations cooperating to adorn the system of the universe? And do you alone refuse to discharge the duties of man, instead of performing with alacrity the part allotted you by nature?