But on another day, receiving with kingly condescension the service of my good subjects’ backs, I remembered the words of another man, long since laid away, who was by birth a nobleman, by nature a philosopher and a gentleman, and who by circumstance yielded up his head upon the block.  “That a man of lead,” he once remarked, “who has no more sense than a log of wood, and is as bad as he is foolish, should have many wise and good men to serve him, only because he has a great heap of that metal; and that if, by some accident or trick of law (which sometimes produces as great changes as chance itself), all this wealth should pass from the master to the meanest varlet of his whole family, he himself would very soon become one of his servants, as if he were a thing that belonged to his wealth, and so was bound to follow its fortune.”

And when I had remembered this much, I unwisely failed to pause and reflect.  So I gathered my belongings together, cinched my hogskin belt tight about me, and went away to my own country.  It was a very foolish thing to do.  I am sure it was.  But when I had recovered my reason, I fell upon my particular gods and berated them mightily, and as penance for their watchlessness placed them away amongst dust and cobwebs.  Oh no, not for long.  They are again enshrined, as bright and polished as of yore, and my destiny is once more in their keeping.

It is given that travail and vicissitude mark time to man’s footsteps as he stumbles onward toward the grave; and it is well.  Without the bitter one may not know the sweet.  The other day—­nay, it was but yesterday—­I fell before the rhythm of fortune.  The inexorable pendulum had swung the counter direction, and there was upon me an urgent need.  The hogskin belt was flat as famine, nor did it longer gird my loins.  From my window I could descry, at no great distance, a very ordinary mortal of a man, working industriously among his cabbages.  I thought:  Here am I, capable of teaching him much concerning the field wherein he labours—­the nitrogenic—­why of the fertilizer, the alchemy of the sun, the microscopic cell-structure of the plant, the cryptic chemistry of root and runner—­but thereat he straightened his work-wearied back and rested.  His eyes wandered over what he had produced in the sweat of his brow, then on to mine.  And as he stood there drearily, he became reproach incarnate.  “Unstable as water,” he said (I am sure he did)—­“unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.  Man, where are your cabbages?”

I shrank back.  Then I waxed rebellious.  I refused to answer the question.  He had no right to ask it, and his presence was an affront upon the landscape.  And a dignity entered into me, and my neck was stiffened, my head poised.  I gathered together certain certificates of goods and chattels, pointed my heel towards him and his cabbages, and journeyed townward.  I was yet a man.  There was naught in those certificates to be ashamed