50 The Life Worth Living 



But when I look on a little check sent in 

 for a year's struggle, not large enough to pay 

 for the labour expended, when I look on a 

 dead field parching in the August sun, gaze 

 on the ruins of a storm-wrecked barn, see 

 men dumping ton on ton of spoiled hay, or 

 gaze on the carcass of a horse as they drag 

 him away for burial, and think of what this 

 means to a man whose bread depends on 

 it, the pity and the pathos of it all over- 

 whelms me. Back of the serene beauty of 

 Nature I see her tragic cruelty. Man must 

 obey her laws or die. Alas, how few of us 

 know her laws! 



Yet there is something supremely fasci- 

 nating in this fight with sun and storm, earth 

 and air, their mysterious moods and myriads 

 of swarming lives. Man has not been bap- 

 tized into the life of our planet until he has 

 felt the challenge and tested the sinews of 

 his soul in this combat. 



There is something still more stirring, too, 



