, if he is not wise
enough to pick himself up and walk on with the renewed ability of
stepping over future stones, he remains on his nose far longer than
is either necessary or advisable.

These various stones in the way do more towards keeping a nervous
system in a chronic state of irritation than is imagined. They are
what might perhaps be called the outside elements of life. These
once normally faced, cease to exist as impediments, dwindle away,
and finally disappear altogether.

Thus we are enabled to get nearer the kernel, and have a growing
realization of life itself.

Civilization may give a man new freedom, a freedom beyond any power
of description or conception, except to those who achieve it, or it
may so bind him body and soul that in moments when he recognizes his
nervous contractions he would willingly sell his hope of immortality
to be a wild horse or tiger for the rest of his days.

These stones in the way are the result of a perversion of
civilization, and the cause of much contraction and unnecessary
suffering.

There is the physical stone. If the health of the body were attended
to as a matter of course, as its cleanliness is attended to by those
of us who are more civilized, how much easier life might be! Indeed,
the various trippings on, and endeavors to encircle, this physical
stone, raise many phantom stones, and the severity of the fall is
just as great when one trips over a stone that is not there. Don
Quixote was quite exhausted when he had been fighting the windmills.
One recognizes over and over the truth spoken by the little girl
who, when reprimanded by her father for being fretful, said: "It
isn't me, papa, it's that banana."

There is also the over-serious stone; and this, so far from being
stepped over or any effort made to encircle it, is often raised to
the undue dignity of a throne, and not rested upon. It seems to
produce an inability for any sort of recreation, and a scorn of the
necessity or the pleasure of being amused. Every one will admit that
recreation is one swing of life's pendulum; and in proportion to the
swing in that direction will be the strength of the swing in the
other direction, and vice versa.

One kind of stone which is not the least among the self-made
impediments is the microscopic faculty which most of us possess for
increasing small, inoffensive pebbles to good-sized rocks. A quiet
insistence on seeing these pebbles in their natural size would
reduce