r enemies.

I have a very simple motive and excuse for telling the little I know of
this true tale. I have met in my wanderings a man brought up in the
lower quarters of a great house, fed mainly on its leavings and burdened
mostly with its labours. I know that his complaints are stilled, and
his status justified, by a story that is told to him. It is about how
his grandfather was a chimpanzee and his father a wild man of the woods,
caught by hunters and tamed into something like intelligence. In the
light of this, he may well be thankful for the almost human life that he
enjoys; and may be content with the hope of leaving behind him a yet
more evolved animal. Strangely enough, the calling of this story by the
sacred name of Progress ceased to satisfy me when I began to suspect
(and to discover) that it is not true. I know by now enough at least of
his origin to know that he was not evolved, but simply disinherited. His
family tree is not a monkey tree, save in the sense that no monkey could
have climbed it; rather it is like that tree torn up by the roots and
named "Dedischado," on the shield of the unknown knight.

II

THE PROVINCE OF BRITAIN

The land on which we live once had the highly poetic privilege of being
the end of the world. Its extremity was _ultima Thule_, the other end of
nowhere. When these islands, lost in a night of northern seas, were lit
up at last by the long searchlights of Rome, it was felt that the
remotest remnant of things had been touched; and more for pride than
possession.

The sentiment was not unsuitable, even in geography. About these realms
upon the edge of everything there was really something that can only be
called edgy. Britain is not so much an island as an archipelago; it is
at least a labyrinth of peninsulas. In few of the kindred countries can
one so easily and so strangely find sea in the fields or fields in the
sea. The great rivers seem not only to meet in the ocean, but barely to
miss each other in the hills: the whole land, though low as a whole,
leans towards the west in shouldering mountains; and a prehistoric
tradition has taught it to look towards the sunset for islands yet
dreamier than its own. The islanders are of a kind with their islands.
Different as are the nations into which they are now divided, the
Scots, the English, the Irish, the Welsh of the western uplands, have
something altogether different from the humdrum docility of the inland
Germans,