it or not, so long as he had the wild and congenial environs to admire
and embrace. What was city life in comparison with this?

At last the day arrived when he realized that he must develop wings, so
he wrapped himself up in a cocoon; and while the metamorphosis was in
process of development he had ample time to study Hamlet's soliloquy. It
would mean a divorce from everything he held dear; a parting with his
very soul. It would mean the most sorrowful widowhood that could be
imposed on man. It would be equivalent to leaving this earth and taking
up his abode in Mars. He must sacrifice his love for the creek and the
trail. He must renounce his freedom and go into social slavery. It was
the emerging from the woods into the prairie; the coming from darkness
into the light; a resurrection from the dead. In future he must tread
the smooth cement walk between cultivated lawns and plants, instead of
climbing the rude, uneven trail obstructed by fallen trees and
surrounded with vegetation in its wildest and most primeval forms. He
would walk the polished mahogany floor with patent boots, instead of
the terrestrial one of his dug-out with obsolete overshoes.

But it must be. For years he had been preparing and planning. The object
of his past had been a preparation for a better future; and why not?
Others enjoyed the good things of this life, and why not he? Had he not
paid the price. Others reaped where they had not sown; he had sown, yes,
sown in persecution, now he would reap in envious joy. He had lived the
first half of his life in squalor and darkness, that the latter half
might be clean and cheerful. When he had set out in his young days to
live his pre-arranged history it was with an ambition to be wealthy, no
matter by what means it should be acquired, so long as it was honest.
Now he was wealthy. He had been poor; now he was rich, and money would
put the world at his feet, which henceforth had been over his head. He