that his listeners accepted the announcement as good news, and gained fresh hope.
In this Philosophy of Work is there no place for romance? Shall there be no thrilling adventure, nothing but dull duty and drudgery? Shall we have only dead monotony—no color, light, or shadow? Shall Carlyle's "splendors high as Heaven" and "terrors deep as Hell" no longer give a zest to life? Stevenson's "Lantern Bearers" has an answer for this natural and ever recurrent question. In a little village in England, along the sands by the sea, some schoolboys were accustomed to spend their autumn holidays. At the end of the season, when the September nights were black, the boys would purchase tin bull's-eye lanterns. These they wore buckled to their waists and concealed under topcoats. In the cold and darkness of the night, in the wind and under the rain, they would gather in a hollow of the lonely sand drifts, and, disclosing their lanterns, would engage in inconsequential talk. In his words: "The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; the slide shut, the topcoat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know that you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge. . . . Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud; there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he
