“Oh, go and hire a hall!” Philip grumbled good-naturedly. “Your vaporings make my back ache. Give us a rest!” “There it is again,” laughed the play-boy. “Set the clock back six months or so and imagine yourself saying, ‘Go hire a hall,’ and ‘Give us a rest!’ to a group of the New England Trasks.” “Humph! If it comes to that, you’ve changed some, too, in a couple of months,” Philip countered. “Don’t I know it? Attrition--rubbing up against the right sort of thing--will occasionally work the miracle of making something out of nothing. You’ve rubbed off some of your New England virtues on me; I’m coming to be fairly plastered with them. There are even times when I can almost begin to look back with horror upon my young life wasted.” “Keep it up, if you feel like it and it amuses you,” was the grunted comment. “I believe if you were dying, you’d joke about it.” “Life, and death, too, are a joke, Philip, if you can get the right perspective on them. Have you ever, in an idle moment, observed the activities of the humble ant, whose ways we are so solemnly advised to consider for the acquiring of wisdom? Granting that the ant may know well enough what she is about, according to her lights, you must admit that her apparently aimless and futile chasings to and fro--up one side of a blade of grass and down the other, over a pebble and then under it--don’t impress the human beholder as evidences of anything more than mere restlessness, a frantic urge to keep moving. I’ve often wondered if we human ants may not be giving the same impression to any Being intelligent enough to philosophize about us.” “This feverish mineral hunt, you mean?” “Oh, that, and pretty nearly everything else we do. ‘Life’s fitful fever,’ Elizabethan Billy calls it--and he knew. But in one way we have the advantage of the ant; we can realize that our successive blades of grass and pebbles are all different.” “How, different?” “We put the day that is past behind us and step into another which is never the same. Or, if the day is the same, we are not. You’ll never be able to go back to the peace and quiet of a railroad desk, for example.” “Maybe not. And you?” “God knows. As I have said, you’ve rubbed off some of your virtues on me--suffering some little loss of them yourself, I fancy. We’ll see what they will do to me. It will be something interesting to look forward to.” “Umph!” Philip snorted; “you’re getting grubby again--maggoty, I mean. Which proves that it’s time to hit the blankets. If you’ll look after the jacks and hobble them, I’ll gather wood for the fire.” Bromley sat up and finished freeing his mind. “Philip, if anybody had told me a year ago that within a short twelve-month I’d be out here in the Colorado mountains, picking, shovelling, driving jack-asses, cooking at least half of my own meals, and liking it all ... well, ‘liar’ would have been the mildest epithet I should have chucked at him. Comical, isn’t it?” And with that he went to valet the burros.