CHAPTER III



Although the world and life have in a sense become commonplace to
our experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment
slumbers within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our
surroundings to rekindle our astonishment. No length of habit can
blunt our first surprise. Of the world I have but little to say in
this connection; a few strokes shall suffice. We inhabit a dead
ember swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning as it
swims, and lighted up from several million miles away by a more
horrible hell-fire than was ever conceived by the theological
imagination. Yet the dead ember is a green, commodious dwelling-
place; and the reverberation of this hell-fire ripens flower and
fruit and mildly warms us on summer eves upon the lawn. Far off on
all hands other dead embers, other flaming suns, wheel and race in
the apparent void; the nearest is out of call, the farthest so far
that the heart sickens in the effort to conceive the distance.
Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though they bestride but the
truncheon of a boom, are safe and near at home compared with
mankind on its bullet. Even to us who have known no other, it
seems a strange, if not an appalling, place of residence.

But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of
wonders that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to
himself. He inhabits a body which he is continually outliving,
discarding and renewing. Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy,
restore his spirits and the freshness of his countenance. Hair
grows on him like grass; his eyes, his brain, his sinews, thirst