es for the
stirrup-cup. And, withal, in every single case, how absolutely alone
the young voyager really is, and must be! For our scientists have not
as yet discovered any means of precipitating the experience gleaned in
one generation (or a thousand) into the hearts and minds of another
generation. Circumstances differ vastly, of course; but the central
facts are the same in every case; the traveller must always be alone.
The adventure upon which he sets out, be he prince or pauper,
university graduate or 'inmate' of St. Peter's, is one which cannot be
delegated by him, or taken from him, for it is his own life; his and
his alone, to make or to mar, to perfect or to botch, to cherish or to
waste, to convert into a fruitful garden, or to relinquish, when his
time comes, a sour and derelict plot of barrenness.

And this tremendous undertaking, with all its infinite potentialities
of good and evil, joy and agony, pride and despair, is in every
country approached by somebody, by some one of our own kind, every
single morning, and has been down through the ages since time began,
and will be while time lasts. And there are folk who call modern life
prosaic, dull, devoid of romance. Romance! Why, in the older lands
there is hardly a foot of road space that has not been trodden at one
time or another by youth or maid, in the crucial moment of setting out
upon this amazing adventure. There are men and women who drum their
fingers on a window-pane after breakfast of a morning, and yawn out
their disgust at the empty dullness of life, the vacant boredom of
another day. And within a mile of them, as like as not, some one is
setting forth--lips compressed, brow knit--upon the great adventure.
And, too, some one else is face to face with the other great
adventure--the laying down of life. Somewhere close to us every single
morning brings one or other, or both of these two incomparably
romantic happenings.

Truly, to confess ennui, or make complaint of the dullness of life, is
to confess to a sort of creeping paralysis of the mind. To be weary is
comprehensible enough. Yes, God knows I can understand the existence
of weariness or exhaustion. To be bored even is natural enough, if one
is bored by, say, forced inaction, or obligatory action of a futile,
meaningless kind. But negative boredom; to be uninterested, not
because adverse circumstances confine you to this or that barren and
uncongenial milieu, but because you see nothing of