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Trumantia Resource Directory 18
Page 04
The fresh-water mussels and snails and the crayfish burrow deep into the mud and silt at the bottom of ponds and streams where they lie motionless during the winter. The land snails, in late autumn, crawl beneath logs, and, burrowing deep into the soft mould, they withdraw far into their shells. Then each one forms with a mucous secretion two thin transparent membranes, one across the opening of the shell and one a little farther within, thus making the interior of the shell perfectly air-tight. There for five or six months he sleeps, free from the pangs of hunger and the blasts of winter, and when the balmy breezes of spring blow up from the south he breaks down and devours the protecting membrane and goes forth with his home on his back to seek fresh leaves for food and to find for himself a mate.
The truth is that national life has to go on, and that very elaborate arrangements are made by statesmen and politicians for its administration. But it is in reality very unimportant. The wisest statesman in the world cannot affect it very much; he can only take advantage of the trend of public opinion. If he outruns it, he is instantly stranded; and perhaps the most he can do is to foresee how people will be thinking some six weeks ahead. But meanwhile the writer is speaking from the soul and to the soul; he is suggesting, inspiring, stimulating; he is presenting thoughts in so beautiful a form that they become desirable and adorable; and what the average man believes to-day is what the idealist has believed half a century before. He must take his chance of fame; and his best hope is to eschew rhetoric, which implies the consciousness of opponents and auditors, and just present his dreams and visions as serenely and beautifully as he can. The statesman has to argue, to strive, to compromise, to convert if he can, to coerce if he cannot. It is a dusty encounter, and he must sacrifice grace and perhaps truth in the onset. He may gain his point, achieve the practicable and the second best; but he is an opportunist and a schemer, and he cannot make life into what he wills, but only into what he can manage. Of course the writer in a way risks more; he may reject the homely, useful task, and yet not have the strength to fit wings to his visions; he may live fruitlessly and die unpraised, with the thought that he has lost two birds in the hand for one which is not even in the bush. He may turn out a mere Don Quixote, helmeted with a barber's basin and tilting against windmills; but he could not choose otherwise, and he has paid a heavier price for his failure than many a man has paid for his success.
When we started taking her down with ropes--our ropes were all rotted by that time, and had no strength whatever--the canoe was tossed about in a merciless manner. I recommended my men as they ran along to beware of the ropes catching on the cutting edges of the high rocks. No sooner had the canoe started down the swift current than one of the ropes at once caught on a rock and snapped. The men who held the other rope were unable to hold it, and let it go. I saw the canoe give three or four leaps in the centre of the channel and then disappear altogether. That was a sad moment for me. But as my eye roamed along the foaming waters, what was my surprise when I saw the canoe shoot out of the water in a vertical position at the end of the rapid and waterfall! That was the greatest piece of luck I had on that journey. By being flung out of the water with such force she naturally emptied herself of all the water she contained, and I next saw her floating, going round and round the whirlpool at the bottom of the rapid.
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