guard, come to
demand the watchword, such being the custom. AEQUANIMITAS--EVENNESS OF
MIND, he replied, as he turned his head to the eternal shadow. It is
well that we should love and admire that word, said my friend. But
better still, he added, to have it in us to sacrifice, unknown to
others, unknown even to ourselves, the time fortune accords us wherein
to admire it, in favour of the first little useful, living deed that
the same fortune incessantly offers to every willing heart.

6. "It was doubtless the will of their destiny that men and events
should oppress them whithersoever they went," said an author of the
heroes of his book. Thus it is with the majority of men; Indeed, with
all those who have not yet learned to distinguish between exterior and
moral destiny. They are like a little bewildered stream that I chanced
to espy one evening as I stood on the hillside. I beheld it far down in
the valley, staggering, struggling, climbing, falling: blindly groping
its way to the great lake that slumbered, the other side of the forest,
in the peace of the dawn. Here it was a block of basalt that forced the
streamlet to wind round and about four times; there, the roots of a
hoary tree; further on still, the mere recollection of an obstacle now
gone for ever thrust it back to its source, bubbling in impotent fury,
divided for all time from its goal and its gladness. But, in another
direction, at right angles almost to the distraught, unhappy, useless
stream, a force superior to the force of instinct had traced a long,
greenish canal, calm, peaceful, deliberate; that flowed steadily across
the country, across the crumbling stones, across the obedient forest,
on its clear and unerring, unhurrying way from its distant source on
the horizon to the same tranquil, shining lake. And I had at my feet
before me the image of the two great destinies offered to man.

7. Side by side with those whom men and events oppress, there are
others who have within them some kind of inner force, which has its
will not only with men, but even with the events that surround them. Of
this force they are fully aware, and indeed it is nothing more than a
knowledge of self that has far overstepped the ordinary limits of
consciousness.

Our consciousness is our home, our refuge from the caprice of fate, our
centre of happiness and strength. But these things have been said so
often that we need do no more than refer to them, and indicate them as
our s