2
Two-Legs explored the new force.
The world round about him went its course. Each year brought new incidents, new discoveries, new wealth and new happiness. Two-Legs paid no heed. He sat with his radium and would not let it go until he knew it through and through.
There were clever people who knew he must succeed some time and who waited eagerly and gladly for him to make mankind the master of a new power, mightier, perhaps, than any of those which he had yet conquered.
There were fools who said that it was all very well with Steam and Electricity and the rest. They could understand that. But this new thing here was quite senseless and absurd. Besides, one must not tempt God. There were mysteries in nature which mankind should never seek to explore. There was a limit to what was allowed to men; and the man who overstepped that limit was either a fool or a presumptuous person who ought to be locked up or punished.
Two-Legs listened just as little to them now as he had done in the old days.
Their folly was the same now as then. What they saw before their eyes and felt with their hands they believed in. The new thing which was in its first stages, they mocked at and condemned.
But, sometimes, a man would come to Two-Legs with his little son, so that the boy might see the wisest man in the world. Then, if he had the luck to find words that could divert Two-Legs’ attention from his work, Two-Legs would look up and fix his steady glance on the boy, lay his hand on the boy’s head and say:
“Do not grow up to be a fool, my lad. The fool is he who judges what he does not understand.”
Bristol: Burleigh Ltd., at the Burleigh Press.
