I don't want you to think that I'm boasting, but I do believe I'm one of the greatest travellers that ever was; and if anybody, living or dead, has ever gone through with more than I have I'd like to hear about it.

Not that I've personally been in all the places or taken part in all the things I tell in this book—I don't mean to say that—but I do ask you to remember how long it is possible for a grain of dust to last, and how many other far-travelled and much-adventured dust grains it must meet and mix with in the course of its life.

The heart of the most enduring grains of dust is a little particle of sand, the very hardest part of the original rock fragment out of which it was made. That's what makes even the finest mud seem gritty when it dries on your feet. And the longer these sand grains last the harder they get, as you may say; for it is the hardest part that remains, of course, as the grain wears down. Moreover, the smaller it gets the less it wears. If it happens to be spending its time on the seashore, for example, the very same kind of waves that buffet it about so, waves that, farther down the beach hurl huge blocks of stone against the cliffs and crack them to pieces, not only do not wear away the sand grains, to speak of, but actually save them from wear. The water between the grains protects them; like little cushions. And the sand in the finer dust grains carried by the wind is protected by the material that gathers on its surface.

Why, if a pebble of the size of a hickory-nut may be ages and ages old—almost in the very form in which you see it,[1] think what the age of this long-enduring part of a grain of dust must be.

Then remember what the ever-changing material on the surface of these immortal grains is made of; the dust particles of plants and animals, of buried CÆsars and still older ancients, such as those early settlers of Chapter II.

Finally, if what we call flesh and blood can think and talk, why not a grain of dust? In fact, what is flesh and blood but dust come back to life? Says the poet—and the poets know:

You see it's as likely a thing as could happen—this whole story.

The Grain of Dust.
(Per H. H.)