Destiny

ted. They were blighting symbols of this soul-breaking existence in a land of abandoned farms where Opportunity never came. They were mutely eloquent of surrender after struggle. They summed up the hazard of life where to abate the fight and rest meant to lose the fight and starve.

His heart told him that no other battle-field was hard enough or desperate enough to spell his defeat. The world was his if he could go out into the world to claim it, but here in this meager land of barrenness his soul would strangle without a fight. The things that had long flamed in his heart had flamed secretly, like a smothered blaze which gnaws the vitals out of a ship whose hatches are battened down. He, too, had kept the hatches of silence battened. But through many wakeful nights the voice that speaks to those whom the gods have chosen cried to him with the certainty of a herald's bugle. "What the greatest have been, you can be! Of the few to whom impossibility is a jest, you are one! Nothing can halt your onward march