any thought that was worth thinking; but he grew certain on these
mornings that the 'common sense' which he had always heard exalted as
man's supremest faculty was, in all probability, the smallest and
least-considered item in the equipment of an ant of average
intelligence. And with this, as an almost necessary corollary, came a
firm belief that the whole fabric of life in which he moved was sunken,
past all thinking, in the grossest absurdity; that he and all his
friends and acquaintances and fellow-workers were interested in matters
in which men were never meant to be interested, were pursuing aims which
they were never meant to pursue, were, indeed, much like fair stones of
an altar serving as a pigsty wall. Life, it seemed to him, was a great
search for--he knew not what; and in the process of the ages one by one
the true marks upon the ways had been shattered, or buried, or the
meaning of the words had been slowly forgotten; one by one the signs had
been turned awry, the true entrances had been thickly overgrown, the
very way itself had been diverted from the heights to the depths, till
at last the race of pilgrims had become hereditary stone-breakers and
ditch-scourers on a track that led to destruction--if it led anywhere at
all. Darnell's heart thrilled with a strange and trembling joy, with a
sense that was all new, when it came to his mind that this great loss
might not be a hopeless one, that perhaps the difficulties were by no
means insuperable. It might be, he considered, that the stone-breaker
had merely to throw down his hammer and set out, and the way would be
plain before him; and a single step would free the delver in rubbish
from the foul slime of the ditch.

It was, of course, with difficulty and slowly that these things became
clear to him. He was an English City clerk, 'flourishing' towards the
end of the nineteenth century, and the rubbish heap that had been
accumulating for some centuries could not be cleared away in an instant.
Again and again the spirit of nonsense that had been implanted in him as
in his fellows assured him that the true world was the visible and
tangible world, the world in which good and faithful letter-copying was
exchangeable for a certain quantum of bread, beef, and house-room, and
that the man who copied letters well, did not beat his wife, nor lose
money foolishly, was a good man, fulfilling the end for which he had
been made. But in spite of these arguments, in spite