ches pitched down to earth; weakened at the angle,
loosened from their laterals, the big roof spans lurched heavily
downward. A thrill seemed to run through the whole structure; the
roof, strained now to an impossible angle, hung breathless above the
abyss. Then slowly, almost in majesty, but with a sound like the
crashing fall of a giant tree, the great arch tottered and fell.

On the tracks beneath the shed the cars which there had been no time to
remove continued to burn cheerfully, in no wise dismayed by this
terrible descent. And far out in the yards, blocked by a mass of
salvaged rolling stock, stood a panting Mogul locomotive which had
traveled the last fifty miles in something less than fifty minutes, and
behind it lay the special train of the New York City Fire Department.

Were it not for the preponderance of the trivial in the affairs of
life, all women and nearly all men would believe in Fate. This is
borne out by the evidence of great men, who are fatalists one and
all--or who were so until these modern, ultrapsychologic days in which
overthinking is held to be so dangerously near a vice. Those persons
now whose ears are close laid to the breathing of the world all believe
in Fate. Not negatively, not foolishly, not in the manner which sets
forth that what will be, will be, and any opposing effort is therefore
futile; but in the way of the true philosopher, of the man who can look
upon the ruin or the loss of all that he held dear, and realize that
what is to him a tragedy must, in some light cruelly hidden from him,
be conserving some higher, some more inscrutable end.

This is the better fatalism; and the closer one approaches the
primitive realities, the nearer this kind of fatalism he comes.
Looking on the naked face of life or the crude fact of death, it is
obvious to all save the most frivolous that these things were meant to
be so. As the Aryan saying has it, looking forward there are a dozen
ways, looking backward on the way each man has traveled, there is but
one. Crude tragedy carries with it its own conviction of
predestination. It would be absurd to suggest that Togral Beg killed
thirteen million people by accident or by an extraordinary succession
of chances. Admit there is such an element as chance, and between it
and Fate is room for a thousand doubts. It is natural enough for men
who deal with the tiny, circling ball of a roulette wheel or with the
turn of playing cards to deny