uable,
though old age means a ribby scare-crow in a hawker's cart, stumbling a
step to every blow, stumbling dizzily on through merciless servitude and
slow disintegration to the end--the end, the apportionment of its parts
(of its subtle flesh, its pink and springy bone, its juices and ferments,
and all the sensateness that informed it) to the chicken farm, the
hide-house, the glue-rendering works, and the bone-meal fertiliser
factory. To the last stumble of its stumbling end this dray horse must
abide by the mandates of the lesser truth that is the truth of life and
that makes life possible to persist.

This dray horse, like all other horses, like all other animals, including
man, is life-blinded and sense-struck. It will live, no matter what the
price. The game of life is good, though all of life may be hurt, and
though all lives lose the game in the end. This is the order of truth
that obtains, not for the universe, but for the live things in it if they
for a little space will endure ere they pass. This order of truth, no
matter how erroneous it may be, is the sane and normal order of truth,
the rational order &f truth that life must believe in order to live.

To man, alone among the animals, has been given the awful privilege of
reason. Man, with his brain, can penetrate the intoxicating show of
things and look upon the universe brazen with indifference toward him and
his dreams. He can do this, but it is not well for him to do it. To
live, and live abundantly, to sting with life, to be alive (which is to
be what he is), it is good that man be life-blinded and sense-struck.
What is good is true. And this is the order of truth, lesser though it
be, that man must know and guide his actions by with unswerving certitude
that it is absolute truth and that in the universe no other order of
truth can obtain. It is good that man should accept at face value the
cheats of sense and snares of flesh and through the fogs of sentiency
pursue the lures and lies of passion. It is good that he shall see
neither shadows nor futilities, nor be appalled by his lusts and
rapacities.

And man does this. Countless men have glimpsed that other and truer
order of truth and recoiled from it. Countless men have passed through
the long sickness and lived to tell of it and deliberately to forget it
to the end of their days. They lived. They realised life, for life is
what they were. They did right.

And now comes John Barle