The Luggage of Life

THESE leaves are of Australian growth. It is both unnecessary and impossible to disguise it. The breath of the bush is on them. There were, however, so many who found them good, either for food or for medicine, in these Britains of the South, that it was suggested that the plant might survive the ordeal of transplantation to a northern clime. England is a land of noble hospitalities. And, after all, men are built pretty much the same way all the world over. A thing that is true under these soft southern skies is no less true where northern constellations burn. A word that wakens thought beneath the shadow of the wattle may lead a man to rub his eyes under a spreading English oak. A message that brings back the smile of courage to the bronzed face of a disheartened squatter may relieve a bruised spirit in London's central roar. And so I venture ! I only hope that I may take the sob from one throat, or make one song more blithe.

FRANK W. BOREHAM.

Vll p. 3LIFE is largely a matter of luggage. So soon as a child can toddle he displays an insatiable passion for carrying things. He is never so happy as when he is loaded. His face beams with delight when his back is burdened to the point of breaking. A few months later he cries for a wooden horse and cart, that he may further gratify his inordinate longing for luggage. And, if these appetites be not humoured, he will exhaust his unconsecrated energics in pushing the chairs, tugging at tables, and carrying the cat. The instinct is there. You can no more deny him his load than you can deny him his lunch. The craving for both is born in him. In his autobiography, Thomas Guthrie tells how the blood of the Scottish lads in his native village was stirred as the echoes of Waterloo reached that remote hamlet. 'Many a time,' he says, 'did we boys tramp a mile or two out of town to meet troops marching to the war, and proud we were to be allowed to carry a soldier's musket, which the poor fellows, burdened with all the heavy accoutrements of those days, and wearied with a twelve-hour march on a hot sum-p. 4mer's day, were glad enough to resign to us.' Here is the same subtle law in operation, Man often loves without knowing that he loves ; and, little as he suspects it, he is deeply in love with his load. He groans beneath it, as a man grumbles at the wife of his bosom, but, if it were taken from him, he would be almost as disconsolate as if she were taken from him.

p. 4When we were boys at school we learned ludicrous lessons about the weight of the air. How we laughed as we listened to the doctrines of Torricelli, and heard that every square inch of surface has to sustain a weight of fifteen pounds ! How we roared in our rollicking scepticism when our school masters assured us that we were each of us being subjected to a fearful atmospheric pressure of no less than fourteen tons ! But Mr. H. G. Wells has drawn for us a picture of men unladen. His heroes — Mr. Cavor and Mr. Bedford — have found their way to the moon. The fourteen tons of air are no longer on their shoulders. The atmospheric pressure is removed; they have lost their load, and they nearly lose their lives in consequence. They cannot control themselves. They can scarcely keep their feet on the soil. The slightest spring of the foot, and they bound like a ball into mid-air. If they attempt to leap over an obstructing boulder, they soar into space like larks, and land on a distant cliff or alight on an p. 5extinct volcano. Life becomes weird, ungovernable, terrible. They are lost without their load. Which things are symbolic. It is part of the pathos of mortality that we only discover how dearly we love things after we have lost them. We behold with surprise our affections, like torn and bleeding tendrils, hanging desolate, lamenting mutely the commonplace object about which they had entwined themselves. So is it with the lading and luggage of life. We never wake up to the delicious luxury of being heavily burdened until our shoulders miss the load that galled them. If we grasped the deepest philosophy of life a little more clearly we might perhaps fall in love with our luggage. The baby instinct is perfectly true. Our load is as essential to us as our lunch. Very few people have been actually crushed in this old world of many burdens. And those who have were not the most miserable of men. It will not be at all astonishing if the naturalists of to-morrow assure us that the animal world knows no transport comparable to the fierce and delirious ecstasy of the worm beneath the heel. It would only be a natural, and perfectly logical, advance upon our knowledge of Livingstone's sensations beneath the paw of the lion. At any rate, it is clear that man owes as much to his luggage as a ship owes to her keel. It seems absurd to build her delicately, and p. 6then burden her dreadfully. But the sailor loves the heavy keel and the full freight. It is the light keel and the empty hold that have most reason to dread the storm. Blessed be ballast ! is a beatitude of the forecastle.

p. 6Such is the law of life's luggage. But the New Testament gives us a still loftier and lovelier word : 'Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.' And these laws — the law of nature and the law of Christ — are not conflicting, but concordant. The one is the bud, the other is the blossom. …