Yes, we must first learn the futility of life before we can live. The war teaches this lesson well, but won't it be great when everybody is singing over his golden shuttle and laughing? Won't it be great when the chastened New Race springs up, like green shoots at the passing of winter? Won't it be great when the world has grown serene and wise enough to sit down beside a blazing bark fire, with the shadows of pine trees about, or near the dim breakers, and consider it profitable to talk about the stars? ... There are times when one feels he must be alone--when he wants to be connected with nothing--when he wants to go to a distant and high altitude, and there boil his pot of alchemy--there, where the air is dust free, and the incense of one's devotion goes straight up. He must listen and listen, until he believes that he hears the stars humming in their courses; then the sun drawing like a magnet, then a crescendo of song up to a deafening roar,--that all things, all stars, are headed towards one point of balance among that whole mass of sapphires we see above. Man, but the joy of telling tales, of recording the warmth of human hearts, of loving men and their ways--to fill out a morning with that golden shuttle! One has but to sit and the sun on the walls and the shadows in the corners, or if at night, the flame on the stones of the hearth turn to words!... The old sea is full of that. The heart within her breast sounds the footfalls of quest; the ecstasy of life tears in her storm and in still hours she sits in her glitter.... Some day we shall be together on the blessed Pacific coast. We shall have bookshelves and packages of dates, bottles of cream and combs of honey. We shall work with that rugged lunge of mountains in our products; and that endless and insistent _wroom, wroom, wroom_ of the ocean in all. Listen, here is a day as we shall have it: