to the
sustaining of position--getting and spending. Yet he could see no end.
He was caught in the rich man's treadmill, only less horrible than
that of the poor man with its cold and hunger.

Afterwards, when he had gone, I fell into a survey of certain other
men of my acquaintance. Some few of them are rich also, and they heap
up for themselves a pile of material things until they stifle in the
midst. They run swiftly and bitterly from one appointment to another
in order that they may add a motor to their stable. If they lie awake
at night, they plan a new confusion for the morrow. They are getting
and spending always. They have been told many times that some day they
will die and leave their wealth, yet they labor ceaselessly to
increase their pile. It is as if one should sweat and groan to load a
cart, knowing that soon it goes off on another road. And yet not one
of these persons will conceive that I mean him. He will say that
necessity keeps him at it. Or he will cite his avocations to prove he
is not included. But he plays golf fretfully with his eye always on
the score. He drives his motor furiously to hold a schedule. Yet in
his youth many of these prosperous fellows learned to play upon a
fiddle, and they dreamed on college window-seats. They had time for
friendliness before they became so busy holding this great world by
its squirming tail.

Or perhaps they are not so _very_ wealthy. If so, they work the
harder. To support their wives and children? By no means. To support
the pretense that they are really wealthy, to support a neighbor's
competition. It is this competition of house and goods that keeps
their noses on the stone. Expenditure always runs close upon their
income, and their days are a race to keep ahead.

I was thinking rather mournfully of the hard and unnecessary condition
of these persons, when I fell asleep. And by chance, these unlucky
persons, my boots and my cobbler, even the oboe mender, all of them
somehow got mixed in my dream.

It seems that there was a cobbler once, long ago, who kept a shop
quite out of the common run and marvelous in its way. It stood in a
shadowy city over whose dark streets the buildings toppled, until
spiders spun their webs across from roof to roof. And to this cobbler
the god Mercury himself journeyed to have wings sewed to his flying
shoes. High patronage. And Atalanta, too, came and held out her swift
foot for the fitting of a running sandal. But perhaps