Bear it away to your home and
place it under a powerful lens; is it still the same uninteresting
blade it was a moment ago out in the noisy and crowded thoroughfare?
Why does your gaze become riveted upon what is revealed? Ah! you
discern that such homely things are not at all what you have been wont
to think them. You are astonished to find how each individual trifle
is in itself a wonderful creation, swarming with a hidden and undreamt
of life, feeding a multitude of appetites, satisfying countless
cravings, struggling with a most powerful vitality, and challenging
powers, whose unseen tyranny is unsuspected by more than half the
world.
No wonder, then, that a singled-out human life excites our
astonishment; no wonder that we look upon an isolated fellow-creature
as if he were not one of us, but removed by adventitious circumstances
far above or below the common level of men and women.
It is not always the exaggerating pen of the author that creates
heroes and heroines out of our prosy humanity, and it is an undeniable
and stable fact that truth is far stranger than fiction. It is because
we men and women will conceal the realities of our lives from one
another, and under the banner of an all-enduring pride, struggle for
the privilege of living under a surface of smooth, unruffled evenness,
that humanity has become susceptible of so many false and misleading
interpretations.
CHAPTER II.
As every human life has its crises and turning-points for better or
worse, it will not surprise the reader to learn that there came a day
when Destiny, having nothing else to do, probably, turned her
good-humoured attention towards mine.
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