That a day like this should sound another minor note is almost a thing to cry out against, yet it is on such days that they rise and swell in a perfect diapason of misery. When the sun withdraws itself from the human consciousness things come up, I suppose, from underneath. In the gaiety of yesterday perhaps I should not have seen the coolie with the charcoal; he would have passed naturally among the leaf-shadows, a thing to be taken for granted. To-day he hurts. His bag of charcoal is deplorably heavy; he bends forward under it so far that he has to lift his head to see beyond him, and every muscle strains and glistens to carry it. His gait under his load is slow and uncertain and tentative, and I know it has brought him to the wrong house; we are supplied for months with charcoal. He has stopped to ask, and I find that he has come quite a mile out of his way to this mistake. With patience and submission when I explained, he shifted his load and turned from me toward the deferred relief, the further limit. The human beast of burden is surely the summing-up of pathos--free and enviable are all others compared with him. So heavy a toil fills one with righteous anger against the inventor, so primitive a task humiliates one for the race. Niggardly, niggardly is the heritage of Adam’s sons. I must see that man straighten his back.... There is no harm done; you cannot have too much charcoal. One questions, on such a day, whether it is quite worth while, this attempt by the assistance of nature to live a little longer. I myself am almost convinced that persons afflicted with the gift of sympathy would be wise to perish easily and soon, and should be willing to do so, instead of throwing themselves in the lap of the mother of us all beseeching a few more years and promising to be very, very good and try to deserve them. Why protract, at the expense of upsetting all your habits and customs, an acute sense of undeserved superiority to coolies and postmen; why by taking infinite pains and indefinite air prolong existence based on such a distressing perception, when by going on with almost any good prescription you are pretty certain reasonably soon to take your comfortable place in the only democracy which, so far as we know, is a practical working success? For there is neither class nor competition nor capital, nor any kind of advantage in the grave whither thou goest, but one indisputable dead level of condition and experience, with peace and freedom from the curse of evolution; not even the fittest survive.