“At the word ‘babies’ poor Ed broke down and wept as only a brave man can weep when facing despair. Then we remembered the old abandoned air shaft, and we went up the slope as fast as we could go until we found it. We called up the shaft to where we could see a speck of light, but there was nobody there to hear us. Then we both sat down and cried in utter despair.
“Yes, we were rescued. Men came to the old shaft next day intending to go down and see if anybody had found safety in the old slope. We were rescued thirty hours after the accident. Our wives and Ed’s children were on hand to receive us. But, dear God, I can never forget the wail of the poor wives whose dear ones lay drowned down in the lower level. Big Bill Beck’s poor old wife had to be carried home when she saw that Bill was not among the rescued.
“Yes, thank you very much for the food and your kindness. No, I’ll never go back to the mines again. It’s a hard life, and the operators have made the world believe that the miners are asking too much for their work and their lives. Say, did you ever notice? Two days after a mine accident the widows and orphans need help! Too much pay? Oh, the shame of it all!”
IN THE LOOKING GLASS
It seems to be a human impossibility for us to see ourselves as others see us. We never know exactly how we appear to our neighbors. Men are like moving pictures—it requires some distance from the picture to see the moving figures to the best advantage. We know that our nearest neighbor knows less of our true character than the people living at a distance. When Henry D. Thoreau built a little log cabin, with his own hands, on the banks of Walden Pond, Massachusetts, his neighbors saw the man at close range, and failed to notice the strength of mind and character. It was the people at a long distance who saw the real Thoreau at fitful glances, and anxiously magnified the man until he became a thing unnatural—a genius.
The too-appreciative public called Thoreau a genius—a man to whom thought came without an effort. He himself didn’t think so. He lamented his own weakness and ignorance of things. It required so much time to learn a simple truth: to cull out the true from the false. Half the thinkers of the world are thinking out a plan to live without menial labor. They are thinking out a plan to fool and deceive the unthinking into buying knowledge and secret keys to science. And the deceived people look at them from a distance and put a false estimate on their ability, and pay them well to be fooled and humbugged.
I have seen sick people ignore their home physician and go a hundred miles to consult a quack; and for a long time imagine that his knowledge of the healing art was almost divine. The quack’s nearest neighbors looked on in disgust, and repeated the immortal words of Shakespeare, “What fools these mortals be!”
But even Shakespeare is seen at a distance in greater lustre than around his own home. There is an old saying that “the king is never great to his own valet.” But often this is because of the mental gulf between the two men. The valet often judges only the physical man, or the moods of the mental man. Men are great only when they go into the silence and apply their entire force of mind to solving the problems of life. The great speech you heard your favorite orator deliver was not gathered spontaneously while standing before you. The speech was but the fruit of many, many hours of struggle and study and worry and of painful effort. Did you but know the late hour when he blew out the lamp and lay his aching, throbbing head on his pillow, and only slept to dream over again his struggles, you would not call him a genius, but a plodding student.
The man who stands looking into the mirror and beholds his own face, without finding weak spots and flaws and lack of character, is too vain to be judge of himself. The serious, sincere man is always finding flaws in himself, and seeking to find a remedy to cure them. The man or woman who “gets stuck” on the face they see in the glass are mental quacks—they are humbugging themselves. They see a genius in the reflection of an asinine mug. They go away from the glass, and a moment later cannot describe the manner of face they carry on their shoulders. If they were ever so good an artist and painter, they could not paint a picture of themselves from memory.