"Splashed with blood of the poor"--so he saw the world at that moment, a red grotesque, a grim crimson horror. And he saw his father, too, clothed in the same blood-red livery of crime. IX THE CONTEST The troubles of the young are apt to move the ridicule of the mature, who have long since discovered that even tragedies can be outlived, disasters forgotten, and the worst defeats repaired. That there is a strange and stubborn resilience in life, which enables us to survive a thousand shocks, is indeed a wonderful quality which is needed to explain the persistence of the race. But the final view of life is never the immediate view, and, whatever we may think now of ancient sorrows, unless the memory is quite dulled we know well that they were once real and terrible enough. The child's terror of the dark, his bitter tears over slight or injustice, his first agony of homesickness, his rage against acts of cruelty or tyranny, the wounds inflicted on his tenderness or pride--these things may appear to us now absurd or insignificant episodes in the process by which we adjusted ourselves to the social scheme; but it may be doubted if any tears were bitterer than these, any later sorrow comparable with these young sorrows that left us dumb with fury and astonishment. The years bring healing and forgetfulness--or perhaps it were truer to say, a tougher skin, a less sensitive organism; but, if we care to examine our hearts, most of us would find that the scars of these earliest wounds run deep and are ineffaceable. How well does the writer recollect a certain mournful morning when he stood at bay in the corner of a large school playground, tormented by the jeers and blows of a jovial crowd of young bullies, who found occasion for fresh mirth in every fresh impotent spasm of rage and grief. Since that day he has wept over open graves, said farewell to so many of those he loved that the unseen world seems less uninhabited than the seen, been betrayed by friends he trusted, been humiliated in a thousand ways by the cruelty or stupidity of men, but he has known no sorrow quite as keen as that sorrow, and no betrayal that seemed quite so cruel as the act by which his parents gave him to the wolves in that brutal playground. He can jest about the story now, but in his own private heart that fatal morning still looms tragic, and there are times when he still wakes out of painful dreams with the old horrible sense of forsakenness that he felt then.