One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."

Now heroism, which is performed under circumstances such as these, is
heroism still. But I want to lay down the principle that such heroism is
of a type inferior to that performed under the drab, uninspiring,
familiar circumstances of daily life. The soldier who goes marching into
battle with the flag before his eyes and wild music in his ears, is a
brave man--but the sailor who leaps into the foaming sea, the miner who
descends into the flaming pit, the locomotive engineer who dies at his
post of duty, without so much as a single human voice, perhaps, to give
him cheer, is a braver man. I always recall in this connection, as a
type and symbol of what we may term the heroism of common life, a story
which I read some years ago in the newspapers. It concerned two
laborers, William Phelps and James Stansbury, who were one day cleaning
out the inside of a large boiler at the Cerealine mills in Indianapolis.
By the error of another workman, live steam was turned into the boiler
before the cleaners had left it. Instantly, by a common impulse, the two
men jumped for the single ladder which led to safety. Phelps got there
first, but no sooner had his foot touched the rounds than he stepped
aside, seized his companion and boosted him up. "You first, Jim," was
his gasping cry, "you first." Pushed and thrust by his friend, Stansbury
escaped, but Phelps was rescued only to die two hours later in dreadful
agony. And when told, just before he died, that Jim was all right, he
said, "That's good--nobody'll miss me, but Jim had the wife and the
kids." It was a wise reporter who put the story on the wire, for he
closed it with the words, "No soldier in the siege of Pekin or the
battle of Santiago ever proved himself a greater hero."

Stories of this kind might be multiplied indefinitely, but I can sum up
all that I would say upon this point by describing a strange little
building which I chanced to discover in an out-of-the-way corner of
London some years ago. For many weeks I had been looking upon cathedrals
and public buildings and city squares, where monuments to soldiers were
as common as daisies in a summer field. Suddenly, on a certain morning,
I came upon a little plot of grass and trees, near the great postoffice
in St. Botolph's, Aldergate, which is called the "Postman's Park," and
at one end of it saw the little open gallery, erected in 1887 by the