lympians would talk
over our heads--during meals, for instance--of this or the other social
or political inanity, under the delusion that these pale phantasms of
reality were among the importances of life. We _illuminati_, eating
silently, our heads full of plans and conspiracies, could have told them
what real life was. We had just left it outside, and were all on fire to
get back to it. Of course we didn't waste the revelation on them: the
futility of imparting our ideas had long been demonstrated. One in
thought and purpose, linked by the necessity of combating one hostile
fate, a power antagonistic ever--a power we lived to evade--we had no
confidants save ourselves. This strange anaemic order of beings was
further removed from us, in fact, than the kindly beasts who shared our
natural existence in the sun. The estrangement was fortified by an
abiding sense of injustice, arising from the refusal of the Olympians
ever to defend, to retract, to admit themselves in the wrong, or to
accept similar concessions on our part. For instance, when I flung the
cat out of an upper window (though I did it from no ill-feeling, and it
didn't hurt the cat), I was ready, after a moment's reflection, to own I
was wrong, as a gentleman should. But was the matter allowed to end
there? I trow not. Again, when Harold was locked up in his room all day,
for assault and battery upon a neighbour's pig--an action he would have
scorned: being indeed on the friendliest terms with the porker in
question--there was no handsome expression of regret on the discovery of
the real culprit. What Harold had felt was not so much the
imprisonment--indeed, he had very soon escaped by the window, with
assistance from his allies, and had only gone back in time for his
release--as the Olympian habit. A word would have set all right; but of
course that word was never spoken.

Well! The Olympians are all past and gone. Somehow the sun does not seem
to shine so brightly as it used; the trackless meadows of old time have
shrunk and dwindled away to a few poor acres. A saddening doubt, a dull
suspicion, creeps over me. _Et in Arcadia ego_--I certainly did once
inhabit Arcady. Can it be that I also have become an Olympian?

[Illustration]

A HOLIDAY

THE masterful wind was up and out, shouting and chasing, the lord of the
morning. Poplars swayed and tossed with a roaring swish; dead leaves
sprang aloft, and whirled into space; and all the clear-swept hea