away!"

Broken hearted, I obey. Diamonds, gold dust, petrified ram's horn,
heavenly beetle are all flung on a rubbish heap outside the door.

Mother bewails her lot: "A nice thing, bringing up children to see them
turn out so badly! You'll bring me to my grave. Green stuff I don't
mind: it does for the rabbits. But stones, which ruin your pockets;
poisonous animals, which'll sting your hand: what good are they to you,
silly? There's no doubt about it: some one has thrown a spell over you!"

Yes, my poor mother, you were right, in your simplicity: a spell had
been cast upon me; I admit it today. When it is hard enough to earn
one's bit of bread, does not improving one's mind but render one more
meet for suffering? Of what avail is the torment of learning to the
derelicts of life?

A deal better off am I, at this late hour, dogged by poverty and knowing
that the diamonds of the duck pool were rock crystal, the gold dust
mica, the stone horn an Ammonite and the sky-blue beetle a Hoplia! We
poor men would do better to mistrust the joys of knowledge: let us dig
our furrow in the fields of the commonplace, flee the temptations of the
pond, mind our ducks and leave to others, more favored by fortune, the
job of explaining the world's mechanism, if the spirit moves them.

And yet no! Alone among living creatures, man has the thirst for
knowledge; he alone pries into the mysteries of things. The least among
us will utter his whys and his wherefores, a fine pain unknown to
the brute beast. If these questionings come from us with greater
persistence, with a more imperious authority, if they divert us from
the quest of lucre, life's only object in the eyes of most men, does it
become us to complain? Let us be careful not to do so, for that would be
denying the best of all our gifts.

Let us strive, on the contrary, within the measure of our capacity,
to force a gleam of light from the vast unknown; let us examine and
question and, here and there, wrest a few shreds of truth. We shall sink
under the task; in the present ill ordered state of society, we shall
end, perhaps, in the workhouse. Let us go ahead for all that: our
consolation shall be that we have increased by one atom the general mass
of knowledge, the incomparable treasure of mankind.

As this modest lot has fallen to me, I will return to the pond,
notwithstanding the wise admonitions and the bitter tears which I once
owed to it. I will return to the pond, but no