After trudging through mud and slush for a
long time, they conceived the idea of laying a plank walk through the
worst sections. And so they laid two six-inch planks side by side. The
scheme helped wonderfully, except on short winter days when the men had
to go to work in the darkness of early morning and return in the
darkness of evening. It often was so dark that they would step off the
planks, and once off they were about as muddy as if there had been no
walk at all. Finally someone suggested the idea that if a lantern were
hung up at each end of the walk it would then be easy to fix the eye
upon the lantern and keep on the walk. The suggestion was acted upon,
and thereafter the light of the lantern did hold them to the plank.
Jacob Riis argued that the lantern of an ideal held aloft would
similarly hold young men in life's path of righteousness.
A similar story is told of a farmer who experienced great difficulty in
keeping a particular hen inside the run which he had built outside the
hen house. He had put up a wire fence high enough, as he thought, to
keep in the most ambitious chicken. In fact, he argued that no hen could
fly over it. One hen persisted in getting out regularly, though the
farmer could never discover how she did it. Finally he decided to lay
for her (she laid for him regularly).
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