shing rivers of
vitriol, burning up all that is decaying and fleshly, casting away the
refined, exhausted, yet exultant spirit on some lonely point of the
future, where he can see the illimitable ocean of race-possibilities.

"_Oh, noon of life! Delightful garden land! Fair summer Station!_"

So, writing (steadying myself against the Atlantic roll) one fresh
thought in the blank left for it in the long ago, I close the book,
and take up my present life once more.

"The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously." Perhaps one may
judge of a man's power by his reception of that aphorism. For me, at
any rate, there is but unconditional assent. To live dangerously! How
nauseous to me is the maternal anxiety of some of my friends. They
are so anxious for me. It is such a dangerous trade. And so on.

I have been scanning a newspaper left in the mess-room, and it has
provoked me to further thought. I see, in retrospect, those myriads
of nicely dressed, God-fearing suburbans in their upholstered local
trains, each with his face turned towards his daily sheet, each with
his scaly hide of prejudice clamped about his soul, each placidly
settling the world's politics and religion to his own satisfaction,
each taking his daily dram of news from the same still. I look into my
own copy and read on one page of a society bazaar where Lady So-and-So
and the Hon. Alicia So-and-So "presided over a very tasteful stall of
dwarf myrtle-trees," etc.

In another column I am informed that some person or other, of whom I
have never heard, has gone to Wiesbaden. The leading article is
devoted to a eulogium of some football team, the special article asks,
"Can we live on twopence a day?" You cannot imagine how unutterably
turbid all this appears to me, out on the green Atlantic. It is
Sunday, and so we rest; but yesterday afternoon I was out in one of
the lifeboats, line-fishing for cod. The great green rollers came up
from the south, and the boat rode the billows like a cockle-shell. How
I would like to have had some of those city folk with me in that
up-ended lifeboat, their hands red with the cold sea water and scarred
with the line as it ran through their fingers to the pull of a
fourteen-pounder. Dwarf myrtle-trees! Wiesbaden! God! Let them come
below with me, let me take them into our boilers and crush them down
among those furred and salt-scarred tubes, and make them work. They
used to tell me, when I said I loathed football, that I