This is my trade; teach me yours and I will teach you mine.

Are you a carpenter, a mason, a grower of herbs and flowers, a breaker of horses? a wheel-wright, boat-builder, engine-tenter, dockyard-laborer? do you take in washing or sewing, do you rock the youngest in the cradle with your foot while you knit stockings for the elder ones? It is well—Weaning yourself from external results learn the true purposes of things.

Wherever the sea and the land are, is my trade, and it has been known since the eldest Time: the ancient Mysteries and Oracles hinted at it, the venerable sages of India knew it, and men and women who walked this earth before all history; in the remotest stars it is exactly the same as here, and in all the circles of intelligences whether they dwell in fire or water or in the midst of what is solid, or in the thinnest vacuum.

Many an old woman sitting by her cottage door is far more profoundly versed in it than I am. Many a fisherman pouncing on crabs along the shores of the Mediterranean has in it long ago served his apprenticeship. If you think or desire by coming with me to know more or be better than these, you mistake me and what I have to tell you.

Learning and superiority are of no use in the face of all this: they depart much as they came. But to come near to understanding the use of materials is divine, and he that has never despised a weaker or more ignorant than himself is nearest to this.

Many are the roads, but there is one end to which they all lead; there are many profitable trades, but there is one whose profits are past all reckoning.