From that day began a life of furious and unremitting toil. Days and weeks passed unremarked in those Homeric labours; Arthur worked in blinding sweat, with aching muscles; rose early in the biting cold, plied the axe from morn to eve, and no sooner ate his rough evening meal than he was fast asleep. A hundred times it seemed as if no human organism could sustain the immense fatigue which he endured. As the snow melted, his task became the heavier. There were tree-stumps to be blasted, and the fumes of the blast left him with a splitting headache. There was the bog to be drained, and he worked for hours to his knees in water. There were trees to fell, to cut up into lengths for building, and the rest to be burned. Yet amid it all he was conscious of a growing sanity of mind and body. His hands, at first torn and wounded by his toil, hardened to their task; his shoulders broadened, his muscles grew supple, and on his cheek was the glow of health. A curt word of praise from Jim seemed the superlative of approbation; to hear him say, "Well, I guess you ain't no quitter," warmed him like a draught of wine. And the mental transformation was not less definite than the physical. The immediacy of his work, the constant need of patience, caution, and alertness, the mere brute vigour of his life, drove from his mind a hundred haunting ghosts. He had no time to debate on thin-spun theories of the universe and life, and even social problems sunk into insignificance. To see that a tree fell rightly, to disengage a fertile soil from the neglect of ages, to drain the bog--these were his problems, and he found them sufficiently absorbing. He had got back to the primeval; work and sleep and work again, all slowly issuing in a visible success--was not this the oldest and the one divine task of man, pursued through countless centuries, and furnishing the one solid base on which all human domination rested?