“I am thinking that I ought to strike out and do something better than I am doing,--be something more than a cog in a great machine. I am tired of that. In the office over there”--making a motion with his hand in the direction of the commercial part of the city--“are men who would faint, I am sure, or weep like children, if they should lose their situations, such cowards have they become by long dependence on the weekly salary. Some have been there years, and have given their manhood as well as their time in exchange for the money they pocket every Saturday. They act like slaves in the presence of their employer. If he had bought them at the auction block they could not be more cringing to him. When he is in sight self-respect withers and they are mere worms, crawling in spirit at his feet. I don’t want to become like that, and yet I am sure to if I remain. That sort of thing is contagious. No man can stand forever against it. I know just enough of the degrading feeling to be willing to make a sacrifice to avoid familiarity with it. In reality the wage-earner and the man who hires him engage in a form of coöperation, each to be respected by the other; but the relation is universally misunderstood. The employer develops into an autocrat and the employee into a serf, and so both are injured. To be an employee too long is to become a dependent, helpless, pitiable being, a degenerate man. I am sure of it. Believing that, I feel I must escape from such direful consequences. “Yet it takes courage to voluntarily give up what they call a good salary, and go into the wilderness, so to speak, and take the risks that all that implies. A ship sails from New York for San Francisco day after to-morrow. I have been thinking I would resign my situation and take passage on her. The territories are big and full of opportunities. I thought to go to one of them and carve out life for myself on broader lines, if possible. I have a little money, and I can still put forth effort. As I have no family to consult--not a relative in the world--and being on the fence, as it were, in the matter of deciding, I have a fancy for leaving it to you and will do what you say. Tell me, shall I go or stay?” She looked at him with something like admiration shining in her eyes. “Go,” she said, unhesitatingly. “Go, and be an individual, a fully developed unit, a man, not a mere cog in somebody else’s wheel. Cogs have their uses, but they have also their limitations, and they are so plentiful. You can be a whole machine, if you try. Yes, go and be a figure in the world, on your own account, not simply a cipher, useful only as auxiliary to the figures.” “Good!” he said, with forced emphasis, making a brave effort to appear delighted, but in his heart wishing he could hide somewhere and take it out in a hearty schoolboy blubber. “Day after to-morrow at this time I shall be aboard my ship.”