y enough idea in romance.
But a realist who has worked in one, knows that a garden's no paradise.
Genesis got it just wrong. Adam should have been exiled from town as a
punishment, and put to slave in a garden."

"But town isn't paradise either. We've got to start him in paradise."

"Dear me," said the editor. "There's only one place left to put the
fellow, and that's on the wall. 'Adam sat on a wall.' Begin that way."

[Illustration: Cinderella]

"I'm calling him Humpty-Dumpty," the author said. "It makes it less
tragic. It suggests that the fall didn't hurt Man so much after all."

"Which is true," said the editor.

I wish I had known that author. He had a kind heart. He has changed even
the unforgiving cherubim in the Genesis story to those King's men who
try in such a friendly way to restore Humpty-Dumpty. But the story can't
let them. That would leave the hero back on his wall again--like some
Greek philosopher. This other way, we think of him as starting out to
conquer the world.

Humpty-Dumpty is a story for boys. Cinderella for girls. In Cinderella
five able females, two old and three young, contend most resourcefully
to capture one stupid young man. It is a terrible story. The beautiful
surface barely masks the hungry wiles underneath. But it's true. It
depicts the exact situation a marrying girl has to face; and, even while
she's a tot in the nursery, it reminds her to plan.

But these are examples of stories that live, and last for more than one
age. The mortality is heavier in other fields. For instance, philosophy.
Great philosophical works of past eras are still alive in a sense, but
they dwell among us as foreigners do, while Mother Goose has been
naturalized.

Modern philosophies are so different. Not many centuries ago, in those
eras when few changes took place, men thought of the world as something
to study, instead of to mold. It was something to appropriate and
possess, to be sure, but not to transform.

Humpty-Dumpty sat on the wall, then. He hadn't begun his new life.

There were few inventors in those old times, and few of those few were
honored. Edison among the Greeks would have been as lonely as Plato with
us.

Civilization was Thought. It was measured by what men knew and felt of
eternal things. It was wisdom.

Civilization to-day is invention: it is measured by our control over
nature. If you remind a modern that nature is not wholly ductile, he is
profoundly discouraged! "We