It has the
appearance of being easy, though not genteel, when others are the
toilers, and in the red dust, torn by the polished steel teeth from out
the heart of the dull log, do you not "inhale the balmy smells of nard
and cassia which the musky wings of the zephyrs scatter through the
cedared groves of the Hesperides?" Is not that fragrance sufficient
compensation for your toil, with the clean red planks profit over and
above legitimate earnings? Yet that long saw tugs at our very
heart-strings, and you know that to get a real, not merely sentimental,
liking for the craft of the sawyer, you must take to it very young,
before the possibilities of other occupations and pastimes have distorted
your genius. This worthy lesson comes from the gentle art of
Beachcombing.
Again, a German barque, driven out of its course, found unexpectedly a
detached portion of the Great Barrier Reef 200 miles away to the south.
When the south-easters came, they pounded away so vigorously with the
heavy runs of the sea that in a brief space nothing was left of the big
ship save some distorted fragments of iron jammed in among the
nigger-heads of coral and the crevices of the rocks.
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