"Or a steam-roller driver, in the years gone by."
"And what, I wonder, to-morrow?"
The doctor was looking thoughtfully over the wide fields, red with sunset.
"To-morrow? Ah, who knows?" He pointed to a pile of cumulus clouds, marching magnificently in the southern sky, bright as Heaven, and changeable as circumstance.
"A boy's dreams," he said. "A little while here and a little while there, always changing but always tinged with a certain fleeting magnificence."
"And never realised?"
"Oh, I don't know. I don't know. We most of us march and march to our cloud mountain-tops, and, maybe, some of us at the day's end find a little low-browed hill somewhere where our everlasting Alps had seemed to stand."
"Surely you are a pessimist."
"Not at all. If we had not marched for the clouds, maybe we should never have achieved the little hill."