in the silence of the receding world, he heard the great wave breaking on a farther shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning.
(2995)
Solar Energy—See Energy; Utilization.
SOLDIER, A TRUE
In the midst of a hot engagement, Napoleon
asked one of his aides about the battle.
"Sire," said he, "this battle is lost, but,"
pointing with his sword to the sun still an
hour high, "there is still time enough to win
another."
(2996)
Soldier's Dying Sentiments—See Essentials.
SOLIDARITY
Smith's family in Brooklyn went on short
allowance, the oldest son was taken out of
college, the two daughters gave up their
music-teacher, there was no summer vacation.
They explained that Smith had lost
thirty-six thousand dollars on R. & P. stock.
Smith knew that he had lost this money because
he was ten minutes late in getting a
receipt from the directors.
On a certain day there were twenty-four directors in the head office. They waited vainly for the twenty-fifth. Their half-hour delay was costly to Smith and many others.
Mr. Brown, the twenty-fifth director, was late because his clerk had not brought a certain mail package due on the one-o'clock express. The clerk came at last with the package; the one-o'clock express had arrived late.
Fifty more plans went wrong because the express was late. Men rang up the general manager's office to complain of the annoyance. The manager sent for the conductor. The conductor explained that the fault was a "hot box." Inquiry at Rochester traced the hot-box to the inspector and oiler. He had come late to his work and was only in time to go over half the wheels of the express. The oiler, being questioned, admitted that he was late owing to a sick baby, for whom he had been obliged to go for a doctor. So, in a way, an oiler's sick baby, two hundred miles away, upset Smith and his family, delayed boards of directors, changed Wall Street fortunes. Victor Hugo said that at Waterloo "the universe changed front." But it changes front every time we act. If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it.
(2997)
The people of the world have a community
of interests. Sickness in the
slums of a great city, for instance,
breeds disease in the whole community:
A man in the city of Chicago was asked
why he did not do more to better the condition
of the working people in the poorer
sections of the city. "What are they to
me?" he heartlessly answered. A few weeks
later his daughter died of typhoid-fever
brought to her in clothing made in the
sweat-shops which her father thought it was
not his business to try to do away with.
(Text.)
(2998)
See Sensitiveness.
SOLIDITY OF OLD TRUTHS
The fine-grained old truths of religion
have been deposited by the world's best life.
Its age is theirs; but, altho so many epochs
and races went to make them, we use them
now without a thought of their age or of
the gravity of getting them well-grown;
like the beautiful ivory mammoth tusk,
sticking six or seven feet out of the frozen
ground in Alaska, which the Indians have
used for generations as a hitching-post.
Tribes come and go, and generations succeed
each other; but we all hitch up to the
solid truths which offer their convenience,
embedded in the past. (Text.)—John
Weiss.
(2999)
SOLITUDE, LESSON OF
My safety (from madness) lay, as I
found, in compressing my thoughts to the
smallest compass of mental existence, and no
sooner did worldly visions or memories intrude
themselves, as they necessarily would,
than I immediately and resolutely shut them
out as one draws the blind to exclude the
light. But this exclusion of the world
created a dark background which served
only to intensify the light that shone upon
me from realms unseen of mortal eyes.
Lonely I was, yet I was never alone. (Text.)—Mrs.
Maybrick, "My Fifteen Lost Years."
(3000)
SOLITUDE, TRAINING IN
A writer tells of a little bird which would
not learn to sing the song its master would
have it sing while its cage was full of light.
It listened and learned a snatch of this, a
trill of that, a polyglot of all the songs of
the grove, but never a separate and entire
melody of its own. Then the master covered
its cage and made it dark; and then it lis-
