And there were his competitors the world over. To-day
he was a length ahead of them, but by to-morrow he might be left behind.
Wait? Rest? No!
It was autumn now, and sleepless nights drove him to a doctor, who
prescribed cold baths, perfect quiet, sleeping draughts, iron and
arsenic. Ah, yes. Peer could swallow all the prescriptions--the one
thing he could not do was rest or sleep.
He would sit late into the night, prostrate with exhaustion, watching
the dying embers of the forge, the steel, the tools. And innumerable
sparks would begin to fly before his eyes, and masses of molten iron to
creep about like living things over walls and floor.--And over by the
forge was something more defined, a misty shape, that grew in size and
clearness and stood at last a bearded, naked demigod, with fire in one
hand and sledgehammer in the other.
"What? Who is that?"
"Man, do you not know me?"
"Who are you, I ask?"
"I have a thing to tell you: it is vain for you to seek for any other
faith than faith in the evolution of the universe. It will do no good to
pray. You may dream yourself away from the steel and the fire, but you
must offer yourself up to them at last. You are bound fast to these
things. Outside them your soul is nothing. God? happiness? yourself?
eternal life for you? All these are nothing. The will of the world rolls
on towards its eternal goal, and the individual is but fuel for the
fire."
Peer would spring up, believing for a moment that someone was really
there.
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