as a patent puzzle, if you leave
out the way these people bid the wreck up. And there we come to a stone
wall. But whatever it is, Mr. Dodd, it's on the crook."

"And looks like piracy," I added.

"Looks like blind hookey!" cried the captain. "No, don't you deceive
yourself; neither your head nor mine is big enough to put a name on this
business."

CHAPTER XV

THE CARGO OF THE _FLYING SCUD_

In my early days I was a man, the most wedded to his idols of my
generation. I was a dweller under roofs; the gull of that which we call
civilisation; a superstitious votary of the plastic arts; a cit, and a
prop of restaurants. I had a comrade in those days, somewhat of an
outsider, though he moved in the company of artists, and a man famous in
our small world for gallantry, knee-breeches, and dry and pregnant
sayings. He, looking on the long meals and waxing bellies of the French,
whom I confess I somewhat imitated, branded me as "a cultivator of
restaurant fat." And I believe he had his finger on the dangerous spot;
I believe, if things had gone smooth with me, I should be now swollen
like a prize-ox in body, and fallen in mind to a thing perhaps as low as
many types of _bourgeois_--the implicit or exclusive artist. That was a
home word of Pinkerton's, deserving to be writ in letters of gold on the
portico of every school of art: "What I can't see is why you should want
to do nothing else." The dull man is made, not by the nature, but by the
degree of his immersion in a single business. And all the more if that
be sedentary, uneventful, and ingloriously safe. More than one half of
him will then remain unexercised and undeveloped; the rest will be
distended and deformed by over-nutrition, over-cerebration, and the heat
of rooms. And I have often marvelled at the impudence of gentlemen who
describe and pass judgment on the life of man, in almost perfect
ignorance of all its necessary elements and natural careers. Those who
dwell in clubs and studios may paint excellent pictures or write
enchanting novels. There is one thing that they should not do: they
should pass no judgment on man's destiny, for it is a thing with which
they are unacquainted. Their own life is an excrescence of the moment,
doomed, in the vicissitude of history, to pass and disappear. The
eternal life of man, spent under sun and rain and in rude physical
effort, lies upon one side, scarce changed since the beginning.

I would I could have carried