Take any fact, and reason upon it to the
bitter end, and it will ere long lead to this as the only refuge from
some palpable folly.
But to return to my story. When Ernest got to the top of the street and
looked back, he saw the grimy, sullen walls of his prison filling up the
end of it. He paused for a minute or two. "There," he said to himself,
"I was hemmed in by bolts which I could see and touch; here I am barred
by others which are none the less real--poverty and ignorance of the
world. It was no part of my business to try to break the material bolts
of iron and escape from prison, but now that I am free I must surely seek
to break these others."
He had read somewhere of a prisoner who had made his escape by cutting up
his bedstead with an iron spoon. He admired and marvelled at the man's
mind, but could not even try to imitate him; in the presence of
immaterial barriers, however, he was not so easily daunted, and felt as
though, even if the bed were iron and the spoon a wooden one, he could
find some means of making the wood cut the iron sooner or later.
He turned his back upon Eyre Street Hill and walked down Leather Lane
into Holborn.
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