One day in March, when the land was swept with cold winds and beaten with rain, Christopher came out of the little wooden building, where he worked, and stood bareheaded a moment in the driving rain. First he looked towards the house and then turning sharply towards the left made his way once more to the edge of the last of the experimental tracks that threaded that distant corner of the park like the lines of a spider's web. He stood looking down at the firm grey surface from which the pouring rain ran off to the side channels as cleanly as from polished marble. He walked a few yards down its elastic, easy-treading surface, ruminating over the "weight and edge" tests that had been applied, and on the durability trials from the little machine that had run for so many long days and nights over a similar surface within the wooden shanty. It was morning now. His men, whose numbers had increased each month, had gone to breakfast, and he was alone with his finished work. The strain and absorption of the long months was over. He had at last conquered the material difficulties that had been ranged against him. The dream of the boy had become a tangible reality, ready by reason of its material existence to claim its own place in the physical world. This unnamed substance whose composition had awaited in Nature's laboratory the intelligent mingling of a master hand, would add to the store of the world's riches and the world's ease, and was his gift to his generation. As he stood looking down at the completed roadway, the Roadmaker suddenly remembered his own slight years and the inconceivable fraction of time he had laboured for so wide a result, and there swept up to him across the level way a new knowledge of his relationship to all the past--that he was but the servant of those who had preceded him and had but brought into the light of day a simple secret matured long ago in the patient earth. It is in this spirit of true humility and in the recognition of their actual place in the world that all Great Discoverers find their highest joy. It is the joy of service that is theirs, the loftiest ambition that can fire the heart of man, making him accept with thankfulness his part as a tool to the great artifices and filling him with love and reverence for the work he has been used to complete. As Christopher stood bareheaded in the rain that windy March morning, his heart swept clear for the time of all personal pride or self-gratification, he offered himself in unconscious surrender again to the Power that had used him, craving only to be used, divining clearly that achievement is but the starting post to new endeavour. At last he turned away, locked up the hut and went down towards the house, and at the entrance of the little plantation between park and garden he met Patricia.