e choose
rather to be a blacksmith, or a watchmaker, or a bookbinder, than a
clerk. Production, making, is a higher thing in the scale of reality,
than any mere transmission, such as buying and selling. It is, besides,
easier to do honest work than to buy and sell honestly. The more honor,
of course, to those who are honest under the greater difficulty! But
the man who knows how needful the prayer, "Lead us not into
temptation," knows that he must not be tempted into temptation even by
the glory of duty under difficulty. In humility we must choose the
easiest, as we must hold our faces unflinchingly to the hardest, even
to the seeming impossible, when it is given us to do.

I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two years
after marriage--time long enough to have made common people as common
to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these are not common to
each other yet, and never will be. They will never complain of being
_desillusionnes_, for they have never been illuded. They look up each
to the other still, because they were right in looking up each to the
other from the first. Each was, and therefore each is and will be, real.

".... The man is honest."
"Therefore he will be, Timon."

It was a lovely morning in summer. The sun was but a little way above
the horizon, and the dew-drops seemed to have come scattering from him
as he shook his locks when he rose. The foolish larks were up, of
course, for they fancied, come what might of winter and rough weather,
the universe founded in eternal joy, and themselves endowed with the
best of all rights to be glad, for there was the gladness inside, and
struggling to get outside of them. And out it was coming in a divine
profusion! How many baskets would not have been wanted to gather up the
lordly waste of those scattered songs! in all the trees, in all the
flowers, in every grass-blade, and every weed, the sun was warming and
coaxing and soothing life into higher life. And in those two on the
path through the fields from Testbridge, the same sun, light from the
father of lights, was nourishing highest life of all--that for the sake
of which the Lord came, that he might set it growing in hearts of whose
existence it was the very root.

Joseph and Mary were taking their walk together before the day's work
should begin. Those who have a good conscience, and are not at odds
with their work, can take their pleasure any time--as well before