l in
a swirl of snowdrifts.

I do not claim that it was very scientific to feel in this way, but I
have always had, ever since I can remember, a moderate or decent human
interest in the universe as a universe, and I had always felt as if
the earth had made, for all practical purposes, a sort of contract
with the human race, and when it acted like this--cooled itself off
all of a sudden, in the middle of a hot summer, and all to show off a
comparatively unknown and unimportant mountain hid on an island far
out at sea--I could not conceal from myself (in my present and usual
capacity as a kind of agent or sponsor for humanity) that there was
something distinctly jarring about it and disrespectful. I felt as if
we had been trifled with. It was not a feeling I had very long--this
injured feeling toward the universe in behalf of the man in it, but I
could not help it at first. There grew an anger within me and then out
of the anger a great delight. It seemed to me I saw my soul standing
afar off down there, on its cold and emptied-looking earth.

Then slowly I saw it was the same soul I had always had. I was
standing as I had always stood on an earth before, be it a bare or
flowering one. I saw myself standing before all that was. Then I
defied the heaven over my head and the ground under my feet not to
keep me strong and glad before God. I saw that it mattered not to me,
of an earth, how bare it was, or could be, or could be made to be; if
the soul of a man could be kept burning on it, victory and gladness
would be alive upon it. I fell to thinking of the man. I took an
inventory down in my being of all that the man was, of the might of
the spirit that was in him. Would it be anything new to the man to be
maltreated, a little, neglected--almost outwitted by a universe? Had
he not already, thousands of times in the history of this planet,
flung his spirit upon the cold, and upon empty space--and made homes
out of it? He had snuggled in icebergs. He had entered the place of
the mighty heat and made the coolness of shadow out of it.

It was nothing new. The planet had always been a little queer. It was
when it commenced. The only difference would seem to be that, instead
of having the earth at first the way it is going to be by and by
apparently--an earth with a little rim of humanity around it, great
nations toeing the equator to live--everything was turned around. All
the young nations might have been seen any day crowded