For this young sequoia was sick. Its soggy utricles made no response to the new winds of spring-tide, and were as insensible to sunlight and to the rays of a cloudless sky. The fine weather which made the giant so brave and fresh in foliage had no effect on this. Its slow, sad invalid existence made it more and more like a tree whose cadence was closing with its pale, fagged flagging tissue. To an external observer its sickness was as though the coat of mail which linked in and protected its life had parted, and let all its fibres grow odd and wrong. The course of development had been broken, and the shattered rhythm had thrown out even the smallest cells. Their disordered whole was sad and sick with incurable disease, a premature old age with its petulant inconsequence: and if this sickness might be called premature age, age might be called a slow sickness. Plants and creatures have their illnesses, things their malformations, planets no doubt their disasters: and since the fates of puissant things are those of futile things may we presume that there are mishaps also for the ordered whole? The analogies between stars and the microscopic dust of chemical particles impress themselves more and more upon our notice. Interstellar space seems proportionately no richer in movement or in matter than atomic space, and fancy, running beyond our physical powers of apprehension from one to other, falls ever into the same nescience. We can guess at a common rhythm behind the march of events and the linked procession of acts: so that our superstitions may be only distorted glimpses of design half-understood, scattered observations which our unequal spirits cannot join together. Our superstitions take precise shape more especially when we are in bodily pain and perturbed in spirit. Our imagination then sublimates the shadows of our fate, flickering over them like a marsh-light in the darkness of our half-knowledge; and achieves only to make their obscurity more obscure. The young sequoia tree because of its sickness could do no more than just carry on its stunted life. The breath entered faintly into its labouring lungs: its whole life was limited by its deficient sap, and by the futile ineffective busyness of its stomata. Yet it accepted the ill-health as a normal state. The idea of a more fortunate life could not come to it, as it might to men. It had never known any other condition than this painful breathing-in of the life-currents, this poverty of exhalation, and so could not desire a better: whereas human beings in pain feel it all the more since their spirits can disengage themselves from the trammels of the flesh and conjure up visions of a happier fate. In such a way we make worse our torments each time we long to be delivered from them.