s to get that
bird. This done, I could consider the rest. To admit any other thought
militated in some way against the singleness and compactness of my
being. Wise or unwise, what had I to do with far-off matters of that
sort? My business was to succeed in a certain task, not to be sage and
so forth. I actually felt a kind of shame to be debating any other than
the all-important question, Can I get my right foot over here beside the
left? Nor was it till certain faces pictured themselves to my mind, that
the heart took part with reason, and the tangential left foot returned,
rounding itself once more into the proper orbit of my life. I had been
standing there perhaps a minute.

It was an invaluable experience. It carried me farther into the heart of
the boy-world than I had gone for twenty-five years and more. And as the
boy-world is the big world, the life of too many being but another and
less attractive phase of boyhood, it supplied a gloss to the book of
daily observation, which I could on no account part with. The
inconceivable indifference of most men to considerations of speculative
truth became conceivable. The way in which the axioms of sages slip off
from multitudes, as mere vague "glittering generalities," good enough
for cherishers of the "intuitions" to lisp of by moonlight, but sheer
fiddle-dee-dee to firmly built men,--the commentary of the able lawyer
upon Emerson's lecture, "I don't understand it, but my girls do!"--all
this appears in a new light. Are not most men working along some cliff,
financial or other, after a bird? And do they not honestly regard it as
mere nonsense to be thinking about being sage and so forth, when the
real question is how to get the right foot across here beside the left?

I had gone back to my perch, where a rueful, puerile remorse tugged now
and then at my elbow, and said, "But that bird! You haven't given up
that bird?" when the Professor appeared on the apex of the island above,
shouting, "Here's a"--hawk, I thought he said, and caught up my gun. But
what? Fox? Yes,--"blue fox."

Now, then, up the cliff! Creep, crawl, wriggle, slide, clamber,
scramble, clutch, climb, here jumping--actually jumping, I!--over a
crevice, then drawing myself round an insuperable jut by two honest
sturdy weeds--many thanks to them!--which had the consideration to be
there and to plant themselves firmly in the rock; at last I reached the
height, puffing like a high-pressure steam-engine.

"