THREE:She was passing through the disused graveyard of the Cathedral where the clipped hedge of hornbeam bounded the asphalt path. The browned leaves still clung to the trees, and she suddenly remembered how she had passed down this path with Charles, and had said how distasteful it was to work for a cad. Her own words to hang on the air, even as the leaves still clung to the hedge, and she tried in vain to remember the mood in which those words were{196} green as the hornbeam leaves had then been, instead of being brown and lifeless. Lifeless they were, there was no vitality in them. They but clung to her memory, as the brown leaves to the hedge. She was scarcely ashamed of them: she only wondered at them, just as, in parenthesis of her thought, she wondered at the clothed twigs, when all the other trees had shed their foliage. They were not evergreen: they were just dead."The coolie-trade," said he, "does not exist any more. It was very much like the slave-trade, of which you have read; in fact, it was nothing more than the slave-trade with the form changed a little. In the African slave-trade the slaves were bought as one might buy sheep and cattle. In the coolie-traffic the men were hired for a term of years at certain stipulated[Pg 394] wages, and were to be returned to their homes at the end of that term, provided all their debts had been discharged. The plan was all right on its face, but it was not carried out. When the period for which he was engaged was up, the coolie was always made to be in debt to his employer; and, no matter how hard he might work, he was not allowed to free himself. He was a slave to his master just as much as was the negro from Africa, and not one coolie in a thousand ever saw his native land again.
How awesome would it be to design, while still a student, the product that would set your entire future up?