Having started so late, it grew nearly dark after tea and the distant landscapes were not so easy to descry. We came presently, in the mist, to a place called Carmarthen, I think, where were great black stacks and flaming forges and lights burning wistfully in the dark; and then to another similar place, Swansea, and finally to a third, Cardiff--great centers of manufacture, I should judge, for there were flaming lights from forges (great, golden gleams from open furnaces) and dark blue smoke, visible even at this hour, from tall stacks overhead, and gleaming electric lights like bright, lucent diamonds. I never see this sort of place but I think of Pittsburgh and Youngstown and the coke ovens of western Pennsylvania along the line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. I shall never forget the first time I saw Pittsburgh and Youngstown and saw how coke was fired. It was on my way to New York. I had never seen any mountains before and suddenly, after the low, flat plains of Indiana and Ohio, with their pretty little wooden villages so suggestive of the new life of the New World, we rushed into Youngstown and then the mountains of western Pennsylvania (the Alleghanies). It was somewhat like this night coming from Fishguard, only it was not so rainy. The hills rose tall and green; the forge stacks of Pittsburgh flamed with a red gleam, mile after mile, until I thought it was the most wonderful sight I had ever seen. And then came the coke ovens, beyond Pittsburgh mile after mile of them, glowing ruddily down in the low valleys between the tall hills, where our train was following a stream-bed. It seemed a great, sad, heroic thing then, to me,--plain day labor. Those common, ignorant men, working before flaming forges, stripped to the waist in some instances, fascinated my imagination. I have always marveled at the inequalities of nature--the way it will give one man a low brow and a narrow mind, a narrow round of thought, and make a slave or horse of him, and another a light, nimble mind, a quick wit and air and make a gentleman of him. No human being can solve either the question of ability or utility. Is your gentleman useful? Yes and no, perhaps. Is your laborer useful? Yes and no, perhaps. I should say obviously yes. But see the differences in the reward of labor--physical labor. One eats his hard-earned crust in the sweat of his face; the other picks at his surfeit of courses and wonders why this or that doesn’t taste better. I did not make my mind. I did not make my art. I cannot choose my taste except by predestined instinct, and yet here I am sitting in a comfortable English home, as I write, commiserating the poor working man. I indict nature here and now, as I always do and always shall do, as being aimless, pointless, unfair, unjust. I see in the whole thing no scheme but an accidental one--no justice save accidental justice. Now and then, in a way, some justice is done, but it is accidental; no individual man seems to will it. He can’t.