Man the slug! A million million years from now this slug might have a brain and be trying to telegraph to Mars! Wouldn’t he look odd in a limousine, in which he would proudly ride until rheumatism confined him to his chair at the age of fifty and indigestion made him growl at his slug attendant. Poor thing! God help him then. Better were it had he remained a slug wriggling along through slime, with man’s foot forever threatening to end his stupid life!
Then Joshua saw another one—a snail with a wonderful shell upon his back. He blinked his gray-blue eyes and smiled. Why, here was progress—a closed car, by George! His speed was no greater—it required as long for him to travel from leaf to leaf as it did his more unfortunate brother; but surely the shell spelled progress.
Long and tremulously he laughed at his whimsicality. Was he going crazy? No, no! He was right, eternally right. In the end, what would it matter if he became a great astronomer and won fame and favor? Fame was a hollow thing. Men would forget him two days after he had died. Millions could not keep him any warmer than he had been last night in the sand-house. He could eat only so much, and after he had eaten what recked it whether he had partaken of caviar on toast or cornbread? Did he wish to travel? Before him stretched lines of steel. In ports lay vessels riding at anchor, awaiting his coming as a stoker or a roustabout or a stowaway. Did he crave knowledge, news, entertainment? Great libraries were open to him in every consequential town. Did he need new clothes? There were institutions galore to supply them for a little trifling toil. Did he crave friendship? His world was filled with men who would not hold themselves aloof were he to make advances.
Then why not become a tramp? Why not be original—unique? Save Beaver Clegg, among all the men and women he had known there was not one original mind—not one fearless heart—not one soul that was not clutched and clamped by the prosaic, by the ever-haunting fear that its possessor was not thinking and acting and living just as other men and women were. Why, they actually abhorred the original! Deliberately they stultified such original thoughts as now and then beseechingly presented themselves. Sheep, all of them—bleating, crowding sheep, shouldering one another aside in an effort to gain the protection of the middle of the flock, where no one might single them out and accuse them of being anything but sheep! Could he, Joshua Cole, a man now, hope to become the bellwether of this wriggling, woolly mass? No, because he would not stoop to setting a pace that their newspaper, moving-picture minds would follow. Pitiable worms slathering in the slime of up-to-dateness! Afraid of their own minds, afraid of their neighbors’ minds, afraid of life itself!
He would become a tramp—a unique tramp—king of the tramps! At least he would be an object of wonder, though an outcast. Better a kingpin among tramps than a huddling lamb in a flock of trembling sheep, all just like him!
Joshua maneuvered a stick until the slug was upon it, and as on that other spring day repeated the experiment that had been the actual beginning of his vagabondage.
“How now, old-timer?” he croakingly chuckled. “You’re on an island of wood, and the earth is twenty times your length below you. What will you do? You’ve reached a momentous period in your career. Blind, brainless, inefficient, pitiably helpless, yet Nature has provided you with the means of overcoming a catastrophe like this. And does that mean that there is hope for the race of man?”
Then as the pitiable creature completed its travels over the stick and began lowering itself to the ground, Joshua put down the stick and burst into a fit of nervous weeping, the result of strain and hunger.
Like a repentant blasphemer Joshua Cole threw himself on the grass, sobbing piteously.
“O God!” he prayed passionately, “at last I have learned life’s greatest lesson! Mankind is in the hollow of Thy hand. Not a sparrow falls unheeded. Not a worm is cloven in vain. Somewhere there is a goal worth striving for, and toward it man is always floundering. In him lies the means of his own salvation. Some day in the unseen future he will learn his own humanity; for within him Thou hast planted the power to return to the image of God in which he was created. I will keep on traveling West—and—and find another telescope—and Madge.”