“You need purpose, you see. No amount of work kills if you have the purpose. You needn’t achieve it; they say it’s often as well for you when you don’t; but without it you’re hitting the air. Practically, you must have a little reward, too--just enough to make it worth your while to go on; it’s only once in five centuries that a hero’s born who can see his work apparently swallowed up in the ocean with equanimity. Yes, yes; principle’s the biggest thing--the vision, the ideal; nobody denies that. But, as the world’s arranged, it’s much if you can get forward a step at a time and catch a glimpse of your vision between whiles. If you’d asked us, we should have told you, of course, that we were going to Portsannet. We should have thought you a fool; and yet I doubt if it really occurred to us. I don’t say that I myself didn’t think (if you call it that) of the _Lizzie Martin_. We’ve all thought we’ve been thinking things all our lives, till one day something happens and we think them really and piercingly; but I do say I think we went on mainly because we’d started. It wasn’t what we thought--it was what we didn’t think: we didn’t think of stopping.... They used to call me ambitious when, as a youngster, I sometimes spoke of my grammar-school. Well, every fool’s ambitious, if ambition is only thinking that your grammar-school, whatever it is, would be a nice comfortable thing to have. Ambition--purpose--means a lot more than that to me. It’s a positive, a vital thing--not mere patience and endurance. It’s never to forget that first presumptuous cheer; it’s both to see your goal and never to lose sight of the means to it. You haven’t got to let the work get its grind in.... But we were half way there, you say?--we had a little reward to encourage us? Yes, more than half way. We were past the first lift of the Heights. But what besides? Twice the boat had slid clean off the tail of the carriage, spilling belts and jackets and paraphernalia in the snow; and twice we lashed her on again; and there’s so mighty little carriage to lash a big lifeboat to that we had to tauten up every few minutes, and men were hauling direct on the boat to keep her somewhere near the wheels. And what besides? Till we’d come to the Heights we hadn’t done enough work to keep us warm, and the High Lee men were frenzied, as we’d been in the wood. Nunan was seeing his quarry every hundred yards, and looking for air-holes, as if his horses had been sheep. Willie Harverson had been left half a mile back at a house--ribs crushed the first time the boat shifted. We digged and hauled and righted the boat, and digged again. The horses rolled with their legs among the ropes; ... the load, ... the keel alone weighed half a ton.... Men were sleeping as they went, and shoving as they slept.... I tell you, you don’t know anything about it. It’s the purposeless work that kills, and practically we had no purpose. You can’t have purpose and be frantic.... Wait a bit....