“What does he wear those whiskers for?”--“How can a man with hair like that on his face expect to get clients or anything else?” Nevertheless, public opinion--which is usually wrong about everything, including its own exaggerated esteem for itself--was wrong in this case. As soon as a comet ceases to be a visitor and settles down into a fixed inhabitant with a regular orbit it ceases to attract attention, becomes obscure, acquires the dangerous habit of obscurity. George Helm, only twenty-four years old and without money, friends or influence, might have been driven back to the farm but for that beard. Successful men feed their egotism with such shallow and silly old proverbial stuff as, “You can’t keep a good man down,” and “A husky hog will get its nose to the trough.” But they reckon ill who leave circumstance out of account in human affairs. And circumstance does not mean opportunity seen and seized, but opportunity that takes man by the nape of the neck and forcibly thrusts him into responsibility and painfully compels him to acquire the education that finally leads to success. Those who arrive forget that they were not always wise and able; they forget how hardly they got wisdom and capacity, how fiercely their native human inertia and stupidity fought against learning. If some catastrophe--which God forbid!--should wipe out at a stroke all our leaders--all the geniuses who give us employment, run our affairs, write our books and newspapers, make our laws, blow the whistles for us to begin and to stop work, tell us when to go forth and when to come in out of the rain--if some cataclysm should orphan us entirely of these our wondrous wise guardians, don’t you suspect that circumstance would almost overnight create a new set for us, quite as good, perhaps better? The human race is a vast reservoir of raw material for any and all human purposes. Let those who find cheer in feeling lonely in their unique, inborn, inevitable greatness enjoy themselves to their fill. It is their privilege. But it is also the privilege of plain men and twinkling stars to laugh at them.