e one occult purpose.... No,
everything had a reason.... The sheltering trees, the ocean from whose
womb came the great clouds that nurtured the green grass: the winds that
were like gigantic brooms. The wise and the good labored, and never
shirked.... Each man must give according to his station, the strong man
of strength, the wise one of wisdom; the one who knew beauty must give
it somehow, not huddle it like a miser's hoard.... All men must work;
that was as natural an instinct as the law that men must eat: and work
did not mean grinding, but justifying one's existence fully.... None may
hold back, for that is ignoble, and all that is ignoble dies, dies and
is used again.... The murderer's dead body may nurture a green bay-tree,
such beautiful economy nature has.... And it seemed to him that the
souls of dark men were used, too, but used as negations, and that was
death.... Perhaps they provided the sinister thunderstorms, the terrible
typhoon, the cold polar breezes, the storms off the Horn.... They might
be the counterpoint of nature's harmony.... But this was going past
knowledge, and past knowledge of heart and head one must not go.... But
of one thing he was certain; all that is ignoble dies....

He had always known from the time he was a young boy that man must do
something.... It was not sufficient to make a little money and sit down
and spend it, as a dog finds a bone and gnaws it, or buries it, in a
solitary place.... For a long time he had thought it sufficient to do
the little commerce of the world.... But that was not sufficient.... In
Buenos Aires he had felt ridiculous, as a giant might feel ridiculous
carrying little stones for the making of a grocer's house.... Ashamed, a
little resentful! He was like a dumb paralytic with flaming words in his
heart and brain, and he could not write them, not even speak them
aloud....

But all his life this had worried him, the getting of work to do. And
when he came to America with Granya he had come with great plans. Ships
and ship-building were the only things he knew, and he had thought with
others that the great clipper days might be revived. Iron steamships
were grasping the swift commerce of the world, but there were errands
great wooden ships under skysails might yet be supreme in, the grain
trade of San Francisco, for instance. And it might be possible, so he
had dreamed, that once more the great pre-war clippers should be the
pride of the new idealistic com