beneath him. First of
all, he has gone to work in a most plebeian, almost slave-like fashion,
turning wheels and making lights and dragging silly little trolley cars
about a straggling town. Also, he hobnobs continually with a sprawling,
brawling, bad-breathed smelter, as no respectable Titan should do. And
on top of it all--and this was the straw that broke the back of my
sentimental camel--he allows them to maintain a park on the cliffs above
him, where the merest white-skinned, counter-jumping pigmy may come of a
Sunday for his glass of pop and a careless squint at the toiling Titan.
Puny Philistines eating peanuts and watching Samson at his Gaza stunt! I
like it not. Rather would I see the Muse Clio pealing potatoes or
Persephone busy with a banana cart! Encleadus wriggling under a mountain
is well enough; but Enceladus composedly turning a crank for little
men--he seemed too heavy for that light work.

Leaning on the frame observation platform, I closed my eyes, and in the
dull roar that seemed the voices of countless ages, the park and the
smelter and the silly bustling trolley cars and the ginger-ale and the
peanuts and my physical self--all but my own soul--were swallowed up. I
saw my Titan brother as he was made--four hundred yards of writhing,
liquid sinew, strenuously idle, magnificently worthless, flinging
meaningless thunders over the vast arid plain, splendidly empty under
sun and stars! I saw him as La Verendrye must have seen him--busy only
at the divine business of being a giant. And for a moment behind shut
eyes, it seemed very inconsequential to me that cranks should be turned
and that trolley cars should run up and down precisely in the same
place, never getting anywhere, and that there should be anything in all
that tract but an austere black eagle or two, and my own soul, and my
Titan brother.

When I looked again, I could half imagine the old turbulent fellow
winking slyly at me and saying in that undertone you hear when you
forget the thunders for a moment: "Don't you worry about me, little man.
It's all a joke, and I don't mind. Only to-morrow and then another
to-morrow, and there won't be any smelters or trolley cars or ginger-ale
or peanuts or sentimentalizing outers like yourself. But I'll be here
howling under sun and stars."

Whereupon I posed the toiling philosopher before the camera, pressed
the bulb, and descended from the summit of the cliff (as well as from my
point of view) to the