Children should be taught to know a workman
anywhere. All excellence in human affairs should be judged by the
workmanship and not by the profits.

We are neighbourhoods in name only. How often has our scorn for some
strange little man changed to excited appreciation, when the world came
at last to his shop with its sanctions of money and noisy affairs. He is
nervous and ill at ease. His world has ceased to laugh. He wonders at
that; asks himself if this praise and show is not a new kind of
laughter, for he cannot forget the grinding and the rending of the early
years--when there were days in which he doubted even his work. Perhaps
his has been a divided house all these years; it may be that he has lost
even Her for his work.

The world has left him richer, but he is not changed, and back to the
shop again. A man's work lives with him to the end--and beyond--that is
the eternal reason of its importance.... All quandaries cease; all
doubts sink into the silence; the task assumes once more; his real life
is awake; the heart of reality throbs for him, adjusting the workman to
an identity which cannot grow old.

He may not know this miracle of fine workmanship. This that has come to
him from the years of truth, may not be a possible expression from his
lips, but he knows in his heart one of the highest truths of here below:
That nothing which the world can give is payment for fine workmanship;
that the world is never so vulgar as when it thinks it can pay in money
for a life's task. The workman can only be paid in kind.

It is not the product that men use that holds the immortal result. They
may come to his shop fifty years after he has left it; they may cross
seas and continents to reach this shop, saying: "This is where he did
it. His bench was just there--his house over yonder. Here is where he
stood, and there he hung his coat." But these are only refinements of
irony.... They may say, "This is his grandson." But that will only
handicap or ruin the child, if he find not _his_ work. A thousand lesser
workmen may improve his product, lighten it, accelerate its potency,
adapt it to freight rates--but that is no concern of the dream.

The payment of it all, the glory of it all, is that the real workman
finds himself. His soul has awakened. In the trance of his task, he has
lost the love of self which the world knows, and found the blessedness
of the source of his being. He does not need to state it
philosophically, for