looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal
victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke
of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a
warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing,
which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol
redolent with moral memories and sang a very paean of duty, struggle, and
success.

I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they
certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a
peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.

* * * * *

Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives
it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the
eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the
perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective
thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the
excitement of reality; and there _is_ 'importance' in the only real and
positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.

Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the
sphere of the imagination, in an essay which I really think deserves to
become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of
its form.

"Toward the end of September," Stevenson writes, "when school-time was
drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally
from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern.
The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of
Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish
their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them
buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the
rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of
blistered tin. They never burned aright, though they would always burn
our fingers. Their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful,
and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing
more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from
them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not
bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried
them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did
not pretend to be policemen. B