riends, if you would _make_ a
little less dust, perhaps we should all see our way better. But I am
ready to take the road with you, if you mean it so seriously--only let
us at least consider where we are now, at starting.

Here, on a little spinning, askew-axised thing we call a
planet--(impertinently enough, since we are far more planetary
ourselves). A round, rusty, rough little metallic ball--very hard to
live upon; most of it much too hot or too cold: a couple of narrow
habitable belts about it, which, to wandering spirits, must look like
the places where it has got damp, and green-moldy, with accompanying
small activities of animal life in the midst of the lichen. Explosive
gases, seemingly, inside it, and possibilities of very sudden
dispersion.

63. This is where we are; and roundabout us, there seem to be more of
such balls, variously heated and chilled, ringed and mooned, moved and
comforted; the whole giddy group of us forming an atom in a milky mist,
itself another atom in a shoreless phosphorescent sea of such Volvoces
and Medusae.

Whereupon, I presume, one would first ask, have we any chance of getting
off this ball of ours, and getting on to one of those finer ones? Wise
people say we have, and that it is very wicked to think otherwise. So we
will think no otherwise; but, with their permission, think nothing about
the matter now, since it is certain that the more we make of our little
rusty world, such as it is, the more chance we have of being one day
promoted into a merrier one.

64. And even on this rusty and moldy Earth, there appear to be things
which may be seen with pleasure, and things which might be done with
advantage. The stones of it have strange shapes; the plants and the
beasts of it strange ways. Its air is coinable into wonderful sounds;
its light into manifold colors: the trees of it bring forth pippins, and
the fields cheese (though both of these may be, in a finer sense, "to
come"). There are bright eyes upon it which reflect the light of other
eyes quite singularly; and foolish feelings to be cherished upon it; and
gladdenings of dust by neighbor dust, not easily explained, but
pleasant, and which take time to win. One would like to know something
of all this, I suppose?--to divide one's score of thousand hours as
shrewdly as might be. Ten minutes to every herb of the field is not
much; yet we shall not know them all, so, before the time comes to be
made grass of ourselves! Half a