"Ay, that must he, else life will use him, breaking him." "Why, that's just it! That's what will happen to me! I'm a man--they think I'm not; there, that's the pith of it!" He was easier now and in the way of words that would express his feelings. He went on: "Look, Japhra, it's like this--" and told how he was growing up idler, how Aunt Maggie answered all his protestations for work for his hands to do by bidding him only wait--and he ended as he had begun: "A man must do something with his life!" He stopped,--aware, and somehow, as he looked through the dusk at Japhra, a little ashamed, that his feelings had run his voice to a note of petulance. He stopped, but a space of silence came where he had looked for answer. Evening by now was full about the camp. Night that evening heralded pressed on her feet, and was already to be seen against the light in the windows of the van where Ima had lit the lamp. From the pool was the intermittent whirring of a warbler; somewhere a distant cuckoo called its engaging note that drowsy birds should not make bedtime yet. In the pines a song-thrush had its psalm to make; at intervals it paused and the air took a night-jar's whirr and catch and whirr again. Old Pilgrim cropped the grass. II Percival said: "What are you thinking of, Japhra?" "Of life." "What of life?" "How hot it runs." "Meaning me--I'm in a vile temper, I daresay you think." "How hot it runs, master--how cold it comes and how little the profit of it." Percival said heavily: "What is the use of it, then?" Japhra bent forward to him and Percival saw the little man's tight-lipped, firm-lined countenance with the tranquil strength of mind that abode in the steady aspect of the bright eyes, deep beneath their strong brows. "The use?" Japhra said. "Nay, that is the wrong way of estimate. For thee in thy mood, for all men when life presses them, inquire rather what is the hurt of it. How shall so small a thing as life, a thing so profitless, that soon becomes so cold, returneth to earth and is nothing remembered nor required--how shall so small a thing offend thee and make shipwreck of thy content? Thus shouldst thou judge of it." "Some men are not soon forgotten, Japhra." "Ay, master, and what men? They that have seen how small a thing is life and have recked nothing of it." "How have they done great things, then?--fought battles, written books?" "Why, master, how wrote Bunyan in chains or Milton in blindness?" "They didn't mind." "Even so. Profitless they knew life to be, and cared not how it tasked them." "But, Japhra, that's--that's all upside down. Are there two things in a man, then--life and--?"