around the ends
or tips of the earth to keep from falling into the fire that was still
at work on the middle of it, finishing it off and getting it ready to
have things happen on it. Boys might have been seen almost any
afternoon, in those early days, going out to the north pole and
playing duck on the rock to keep from being too warm.

It is a mere matter of opinion or of taste--the way a planet acts at
any given time. Now it is one way and now another, and we do as we
like.

I do not pretend to say in so many words if the sun grew feeble, just
what the man would do, down in his snowdrifts. But I know he would
make some kind of summer out of them. One cannot help feeling that if
the sun went out, it would be because he wanted it to--had arranged
something, if nothing but a good bit of philosophy. It is not likely
that the man has defied the heavens and the earth all these centuries
for nothing. The things they have done against him have been the
making of him. When he found this same sun we are talking about, in
the earliest days of all, was a sun that kept running away from him
and left him in a great darkness half of every day he lived, he knew
what to do. Every time that Heaven has done anything to him, he has
had his answer ready. The man who finds himself on a planet that is
only lighted part of the time, is merely reminded that he must think
of something. He digs light out of the ground and glows up the world
with her own sap. When he finds himself living on an earth that can
only be said to be properly heated a small fraction of the year, he
makes the earth itself to burn itself and keep him warm. Things like
this are small to us. We put coal through a desire and take the breath
out of its dark body, and put it in pipes, and cook our food with
poisons. We take water and burn it into air and we telegraph boilers,
and flash mills around the earth on poles. We move vast machines with
a little throb, like light. We put a street on a wire. Great crowds in
the great cities--whole blocks of them--are handed along day and night
like dots and dashes in telegrams. A man cannot be stopped by a
breath. We save a man up in his own whisper hundreds of years when he
is dead. A human voice that reaches only a few yards makes thousands
of miles of copper talk. Then we make the thousand miles talk without
the copper wire. We stand on the shore and beat the air with a thought
thousands of miles away--make it whisper for us to s