Circumstance is man's master--and when Circumstance
commands, he must obey; he may argue the matter--that is his privilege,
just as it is the honorable privilege of a falling body to argue with
the attraction of gravitation--but it won't do any good, he must OBEY.
I wandered for ten years, under the guidance and dictatorship of
Circumstance, and finally arrived in a city of Iowa, where I worked
several months. Among the books that interested me in those days was one
about the Amazon. The traveler told an alluring tale of his long voyage
up the great river from Para to the sources of the Madeira, through the
heart of an enchanted land, a land wastefully rich in tropical wonders,
a romantic land where all the birds and flowers and animals were of
the museum varieties, and where the alligator and the crocodile and the
monkey seemed as much at home as if they were in the Zoo. Also, he
told an astonishing tale about COCA, a vegetable product of miraculous
powers, asserting that it was so nourishing and so strength-giving that
the native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up hill
and down all day on a pinch of powdered coca and require no other
sustenance.

I was fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon. Also with a longing to
open up a trade in coca with all the world. During months I dreamed
that dream, and tried to contrive ways to get to Para and spring that
splendid enterprise upon an unsuspecting planet. But all in vain. A
person may PLAN as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is
likely to come of it until the magician CIRCUMSTANCE steps in and takes
the matter off his hands. At last Circumstance came to my help. It was
in this way. Circumstance, to help or hurt another man, made him lose
a fifty-dollar bill in the street; and to help or hurt me, made me find
it. I advertised the find, and left for the Amazon the same day. This
was another turning-point, another link.

Could Circumstance have ordered another dweller in that town to go to
the Amazon and open up a world-trade in coca on a fifty-dollar basis
and been obeyed? No, I was the only one. There were other fools
there--shoals and shoals of them--but they were not of my kind. I was
the only one of my kind.

Circumstance is powerful, but it cannot work alone; it has to have a
partner. Its partner is man's TEMPERAMENT--his natural disposition.
His temperament is not his invention, it is BORN in him, and he has no
authority over it, ne