ke to. Instead of that there was a temper of
helpfulness beyond the counting.

It is easy to glorify this as something characteristically American, or
especially Californian. Californian education has, of course, made the
thought of all possible recuperations easy. In an exhausted country,
with no marginal resources, the outlook on the future would be much
darker. But I like to think that what I write of is a normal and
universal trait of human nature. In our drawing-rooms and offices we
wonder how people ever do go through battles, sieges and shipwrecks.
We quiver and sicken in imagination, and think those heroes superhuman.
Physical pain whether suffered alone or in company, is always more or
less unnerving and intolerable. But mental pathos and anguish, I
fancy, are usually effects of distance. At the place of action, where
all are concerned together, healthy animal insensibility and heartiness
take their place. At San Francisco the need will continue to be awful,
and there will doubtless be a crop of nervous wrecks before the weeks
and months are over, but meanwhile the commonest men, simply because
they _are_ men, will go on, singly and collectively, showing this
admirable fortitude of temper.

[1] At the time of the San Francisco earthquake the author was at
Leland Stanford University nearby. He succeeded in getting into San
Francisco on the morning of the earthquake, and spent the remainder of
the day in the city. These observations appeared in the _Youth's
Companion_ for June 7, 1906.

X

THE ENERGIES OF MEN[1]

Everyone knows what it is to start a piece of work, either intellectual
or muscular, feeling stale--or _oold_, as an Adirondack guide once put
it to me. And everybody knows what it is to "warm up" to his job. The
process of warming up gets particularly striking in the phenomenon
known as "second wind." On usual occasions we make a practice of
stopping an occupation as soon as we meet the first effective layer (so
to call it) of fatigue. We have then walked, played, or worked
"enough," so we desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious
obstruction on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an
unusual necessity forces us to press onward a surprising thing occurs.
The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually
or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have
evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by t