many puzzling problems with solutions that were right and entirely
satisfactory until the next graduating class discovered them to be all
wrong and no solution at all? Great religious leaders who were
supernaturally called, divinely commissioned, and armed with holy
authority to point out the true and only way of life until some other
with the same call, commission, and authority, pointed out a wholly
different true and only way? Great statesmen upon whose knowledge and
leadership the salvation of the nation depended, until the next
election discovered them to be foolish puppets of a dishonest and
corrupt party and put new leaders in their places to save the nation
with a new brand of political salvation, the chief value of which was
its newness? No indeed! Such as these were not the intellectual giants
of the man's Yesterdays. The heights of knowledge in those days were
held by others than these.

One of the very highest peaks in the whole mountain range of learning,
in the Yesterdays, was held by the hired man. Again, at chore time,
the boy followed this wise one about the stables and the barn,
watching, from a safe position near the door, while the horses were
groomed and bedded down for the night. Again the pungent odors from
the stalls, the scent of the straw and the hay in the loft, the smell
of harness leather damp with sweat was in his nostrils and in his
ears, the soft swish of switching tails, the thud of stamping hoofs,
the contented munching of grain, the rustle of hay, with now and then
a low whinny or an angry squeal. And fearlessly to and fro in this
strange world moved the hired man. In and out among the horses he
passed, perfectly at home in the stalls, seeming to share the most
intimate secrets of the horse life.

Everything that there was to know about a horse, confidently thought