Now and then silhouettes appeared upon the
window-blinds, especially on the upper floors, for it was the
dressing hour and the cares of the day were being thrown aside
with the workaday garments. In one house, standing far back from
the road, the drawing-room curtains had not been drawn. As I
passed, I saw a man tossing up a delighted child in his arms, and
the mother standing by. _Ay de mi!_ A commonplace of ten
thousand homes, when the man returns from his toil. Yet it moved
me. To earn one's bread; to perpetuate one's species; to create
duties and responsibilities; to meet them like a brave man; to
put the new generation upon the right path; to look back upon it
all and say, "I have fulfilled my functions," and pass forth
quietly into the eternal laboratory--is not that Life in its
truth and its essence? And the reward? The commonplace. The
welcome of wife and children--and the tossing of a crowing babe
in one's arms. And I had missed it all, lived outside it all. I
had spoken blasphemously in my besotted ignorance of these sacred
common things, and verily I had my recompense in a desolate home
and a life of about as much use to humanity as that of St.
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