I was at the village market one muddy March day, when Cupid and the old mare, neither wearing blinders, brought this chariot to the curb. Mr. White, descending to the street, reached up for Mrs. White, who, giving him both her hands, put out a dainty foot to the carriage-step and there poised, dismayed at the March mud. Instantly Mr. White, disengaging one hand, lifted a folded blanket from the seat, shot it grandly out across the mud, and with a bow as gallant as Sir Walter’s own, handed the dear old shoes unblemished to the shop. Eighteen or eighty, it is just the same. Boston or Chicago or Hingham, it is just the same. White or red or yellow or black, it is just the same. The radium of romance is mixed with the slag of all our souls. Here is my colored neighbor down toward the village. “Hello!” I called to him over the telephone, “aren’t you going to do that job for me?” This neighbor is a most useful colored citizen, with a complete line of avocations, cleaning cesspools nocturnally and on Saturday afternoons being one of these sporadic and subsidiary callings. “Hello!” he answered; “I most assuredly am! And exceedingly sorry I am, too, for this delay.” (He had been coming for one year and six months now.) “But my business grows enormously. It is really more than I can administer. The fact is, professor, I must increase my equipment. I can’t dip any longer. I am rapidly approaching the proportions of a pump.” “I am rapidly approaching the proportions of a pump.” Divine! I like the sound. For it is the true measure of life as set over against that which life may merely appear to be. To trudge along through life beside your humble cart of the long-handled dipper, and to know that your dipper is approaching the proportions of a pump is to know that you are greater than you know. I saw yesterday in the Sunday newspaper the lovely face of a girl, who, “rumor has it,” ran the legend, “will be the next Queen of England.” She, too, like my colored neighbor, like us all, is approaching the proportions of a pump. We are all the stuff that pumps and dreams are made of, and great art, and great literature. I spoke of Joel Moore here in the next house to me. For twenty-six years he was chained to a milk-route, covering Lovell’s Corner, East Weymouth, and our back wood-road; but he always drove it in a trotting sulky. From behind the bushes I have seen him calming the leg-weary team as it labored up the humps in the road, his feet braced, his arms extended to the slack lines, his eyes fixed on the Judge’s Stand ahead, while he maneuvered against Ed Geers and Ben Hur and all the Weymouths for the pole. He came home in that lumbering, rattling milk-cart as if it wore winged wheels, and were being drawn by the steeds of Aurora around the half-mile track at the great Brockton Fair.