lling the children the mysteries of his
daily task--and watching for his own among them._

"All restlessness, all misery, all crime, is the result of the betrayal
of one's inner life. One's work is not being done. You would not see the
hordes rushing to pluck fruits from a wheel, nor this national madness
for buying cheap and selling dear--if as a race we were lifted into our
own work.

"The value of each man is that he has no duplicate. The development of
his particular effectiveness on the constructive side is the one
important thing for him to begin. A man is at his best when he is at his
work; his soul breathes then, if it breathes at all. Of course, the
lower the evolution of a man, the harder it is to find a task for him to
distinguish; but here is the opportunity for all of us to be more eager
and tender.

"When I wrote to Washington asking how to plant asparagus, and found the
answer; when I asked about field-stones and had the output of the
Smithsonian Institute turned over to me, my throat choked; something
sang all around; the years I had hated put on strange brightenings. I
had written Home for guidance. Our national Father had answered. Full,
eager and honest, the answer came--the work of specialists which had
moved on silently for years. I saw the brotherhood of the race in
that--for that can only come to be in a Fatherland.

"Give a man his work and you may watch at your leisure, the clean-up of
his morals and manners. Those who are best loved by the angels, receive
not thrones, but a task. I would rather have the curse of Cain, than the
temperament to choose a work because it is easy.

"Real work becomes easy only when the man has perfected his instrument,
the body and brain. Because this instrument is temporal, it has a height
and limitation to reach. There is a year in which the sutures close.
That man is a master, who has fulfilled his possibilities--whether
tile-trencher, stone-mason, writer, or a carpenter hammering his periods
with nails. Real manhood makes lowly gifts significant; the work of such
a man softens and finishes him, renders him plastic to finer forces.

"No good work is easy. The apprenticeship, the refinement of body and
brain, is a novitiate for the higher life, for the purer
receptivity--and this is a time of strain and fatigue, with breaks here
and there in the cohering line.

"... The best period of a man's life; days of safety and content; long
hours in the pure trance o