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The Heart of Monadnock

was not always easy to go on, just feeling the way with his feet, so to speak. "Perge, qua via ducat." But the necessary thing was to go on—go on. The next cairn. It is there. Have a free mind. Find it. Be unprejudiced. Try anything that looks like a cairn on the road of life. Have the main goal clearly in one's vision. The great definite end. Then keep an unprejudiced attitude towards the route itself. Sometimes it is just a question of what Carlyle wrote: "Do the duty that lies nearest thee; the next will already have become clearer." All the Masters had perceived this elemental truth. The only trouble is that it is all so plain,—this law—that one does not always perceive it—like the famous one who could not see the forest for the trees.

The walker stopped at the Sweet Water Spring to drink from its little rocky cup. Who could ever pass it? Then again to the left—a way he was much more apt to take than the more direct path to the right—for few take this one and he loved it. On again