grains in my hand represent? Do they not in their little compass contain
the potentialities, the past and the future, of human life itself?

Another train booms across the iron bridge in the hollow. In a few hours
now the carriages will be crowded with men hastening home from their
toil in the City. The narrow streak of sunshine which day by day falls
for a little while upon the office floor, yellowed by the dingy pane, is
all, perhaps, to remind them of the sun and sky, of the forces of
nature; and that little is unnoticed. The pressure of business is so
severe in these later days that in the hurry and excitement it is not
wonderful many should forget that the world is not comprised in the
court of a City thoroughfare.

Rapt and absorbed in discount and dollars, in bills and merchandise, the
over-strung mind deems itself all--the body is forgotten, the physical
body, which is subject to growth and change, just as the plants and the
very grass of the field. But there is a subtle connection between the
physical man and the great nature which comes pressing up so closely to
the metropolis. He still depends in the nineteenth century, as in the
dim ages before the Pyramids, upon this tiny yellow grain here, rubbed
out from the ear of wheat. The clever mechanism of the locomotive which
bears him to and fro, week after week and month after month, from home
to office and from office home, has not rendered him in the least degree
independent of this.

But it is no wonder that these things are forgotten in the daily
struggle of London. And if the merchant spares an abstracted glance from
the morning or evening newspaper out upon the fields from the carriage
window, the furrows of the field can have but little meaning. Each
looks to him exactly alike. To the farmers and the labourer such and