great
fields of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present
and alive. I could only think of it as dead and embalmed, labelled and
costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. And yet there it was before
me in the daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clanging fights
and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every
railway bridge and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On
freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines, on
lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand for
courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every day of
the year somewhere, is human nature _in extremis_ for you. And wherever
a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating
and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost
under the length of hours of the strain.

As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the scales
seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than
anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common men began
to fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny hands and
dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take account
of. Every other virtue poses; none is absolutely unconscious and simple,
and unexpectant of decoration or recognition, like this. These are our
soldiers, thought I, these our sustainers, these the very parents of our
life.

Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling of awe and
reverence in looking at the peasant-women, in from the country on their
business at the market for the day. Old hags many of them were, dried
and brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, with thick
wool stockings on their bony shanks, stumping through the glittering
thoroughfares, looking neither to the right nor the left, bent on duty,
envying nothing, humble-hearted, remote;--and yet at bottom, when you
came to think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splendors and
corruptions of that city on their laborious backs. For where would any
of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in the
fields? And so with us: not to our generals and poets, I thought, but to
the Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway, rather, ought the
monuments of gratitude and reverence of a city like Boston to be reared.

* * * * *

If any of you have been readers of Tolsto